Biology Quotes

Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to...

If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us ...

Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment.

I approach the creation-evolution dispute not as a scientist but as a problem of law, which means am...

Biochemists assume that the three cellular kingdoms evolved from a single common ancestor, because t...

(Evolution) general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which ...

It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and ...

I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. T...

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the ...

A biochemist colleague has kindly provided me with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and enough hydroqu...

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology w...

I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, lik...

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. Duri...

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of re...

... the reason why we find some things intuitively easy to grasp and others hard, is that our brains...

What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of phy...

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities

The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. I...

We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.

That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunch...

The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be...

We wish to discuss a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid. (D.N.A.). This structure ha...

If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is de...

If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is de...

If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is de...

If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is de...

If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is de...

If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is de...

If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is de...

If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is de...

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of th...

When these flies were put together in all-male groups they formed long, moving chains resembling con...

Stephen Hawking said that his quest is simply "trying to understand the mind of God".

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different...

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

People, as curious primates, dote on concrete objects that can be seen and fondled. God dwells among...

This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the a...

Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your...

The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical...

The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny ...

The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.

The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate....

Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspirin...

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

The evolution of life, and the evolutionary origin of mankind, are scientifically established as fir...

Nature's stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be ...

Marian’s eyes absolutely blaze. To meet them is to have a shock of contact as if they were electrica...

Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that ...

Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committin...

To establish evolutionary interrelatedness invariably requires exhibiting similarities between organ...

Even if the intelligent design of some structure has been established, it still is a separate questi...

Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what desig...

Whenever explaining an event, we must choose from three competing modes of explanation. These are re...

The fundamental claim of intelligent design is straightforward and easily intelligible: namely, ther...

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science ...

Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mentio...

It was in the attempt to ascertain the interrelationships between species that experiments n genetic...

In real life there is no such person as the average man. There are only particular men, women and ch...

It has been demonstrated that a species of penicillium produces in culture a very powerful antibacte...

Similarities are read into nature by our nervous system, and so are structurally less fundamental th...

Chloroplasts bear chlorophyll; they give the green world its color, and they carry out the business ...

This had not endeared him to exobiologists such as Dr Perera, who took exactly the opposite view. To...

Some believe what separates men from animals is our ability to reason. Others say it’s language or r...

In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutiona...

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every livin...

As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities ...

I've always been interested in science - one of my favourite books is James Watson's 'Molecular Biol...

DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.

In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. In fact, the need to make up a story, especi...

Not untill all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son. But in ...

And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.

The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety ...

When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There ...

If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but...

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is th...

History is biology's dumping ground

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different di...

We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced t...

A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, o...

It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nat...

I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer's excellent expression of 'the s...

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, en...

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variet...

If about a dozen genera of birds had become extinct or were unknown, who would have ventured to have...

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based ...

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the s...

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of...

In the future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on ...

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, an...

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the ...

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been forme...

None can reply - all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue, which teaches awful ...

Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth's surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one aft...

Each species may have had its origin in a single pair, or individual, where an individual was suffic...

Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one n...

Threats to our standing in the eyes of others are remarkably potent biologically, almost as powerful...

In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the cul...

For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and d...