Biology Quotes

[D]umb evolutionary processes have dramatically amplified the intelligence in the human lineage even compared with our close relatives the great apes and our own humanoid ancestors; and there is no reason to suppose Homo sapiens to have reached the apex of cognitive effectiveness attainable in a biological system. ~ Nick Bostrom

{On to contributions to evolutionary biology of 18th century French scientist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon}

He was not an evolutionary biologist, yet he was the father of evolutionism. He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems, problems that before Buffon had not been raised by anybody.... he brought them to the attention of the scientific world.

Except for Aristotle and Darwin, no other student of organisms [whole animals and plants] has had as far-reaching an influence.

He brought the idea of evolution into the realm of science. He developed a concept of the "unity of type", a precursor of comparative anatomy. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the acceptance of a long-time scale for the history of the earth. He was one of the first to imply that you get inheritance from your parents, in a description based on similarities between elephants and mammoths. And yet, he hindered evolution by his frequent endorsement of the immutability of species. He provided a criterion of species, fertility among members of a species, that was thought impregnable. ~ Ernst W. Mayr

These hands are yours. You can use them
for good, or for evil. And no amount of nature, biology, or DNA determines those
decisions for you. ~ Sylvain Reynard

What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology which are likely to have similar universal validity? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything which must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered which boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found which is not based on chemistry at all, but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle which is true of all life? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to becomethe basis for an evolutionary process. ~ Richard Dawkins

In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains. ~ Edward Tatum

Roadblock #5: It's Unpredictable
By and large, human beings don't like surprises. I know that I don't. Okay, maybe I like that rare piece of unexpected good news or a letter from a friend or a thoughtful thank-you. But I'm willing to bet that people in funny hats jumping out of dark closets are responsible for more heart attacks than expressions of unbridled delight. When the doorbell rings late at night, I'm under no illusion that it's the Publisher's Clearing House Prize Patrol!
This, most likely, goes back to our caveman past when a big, exciting surprise was apt to be something like an 800-pound,snarling, saber-toothed tiger about to rip the head from our shoulders. Surprises were usually bad news. (Think about this the next time you're crouching in the dark in somebody's front hall closet with their raincoats and umbrellas.) ~ Paul Powers

Tell me one thing, Father. Suppose I hadn't been your son, suppose you just knew me, knew the same about me you know now, would you have looked forward to seeing me, to having me live under your roof?'

'Naturally, it wouldn't have been the same.'

'No. And if you had just been a fellow human and not my father, then I wouldn't have come to see you. But doesn't that mean it's nothing but a convention that binds us together? We are father and son, and so we have to show affection for each other, and if we don't we feel guilty. But why? Is there any reasonable basis for believing that affection hinges on biology? We don't feel obligated to be fond of a neighbor or a colleague, do we? ~ Kjell Askildsen

The major credit I think Jim and I deserve is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold. ~ Francis Crick

Signal transduction science recognizes that the fate and behavior of an organism is directly linked to its perception of the environment. ~ Bruce H. Lipton

History, Geology, Psychology, Philosophy, Chemistry, Physics, Theology, Mathematics, Technology, Sociology, Biology, and the list goes on and on. If all this body of knowledge exist for human consumption, why would I specialize in only one field? ~ Allan Amanyire

What a tragic irony, that the more we understand of biology, the less we have of it to learn from and enjoy. What will be the legacy of this new century - to cherish and to protect Nature or to see butterflies and zebras and much more vanish into legend like the thylacine, moa and dodo? ~ Sean B. Carroll

Our culture treats people with depression is as if there is something wrong with them; a biological imbalance best treated with medication. But if it's impossible to understand biology outside the context of environment, and there is a frightening increase in male suicide and depression, perhaps we need to take a closer look at the other variable - our environment. ~ Mike Snelle

A century ago, scientists believed there was only one obvious stomping ground for alien biology in our solar system: Mars. Because it was reminiscent of Earth, Mars was assumed to be chock-a-block with animate beings, and its putative inhabitants got a lot of column inches and screen time. ~ Seth Shostak

The genes supply the motivation for warfare, [E. O.] Wilson is saying, in humans as they do in chimps, but people, blessed with the power of language, look for some objective cause of war. A society psychs itself up to go to war by agreeing that their neighbors have wronged them, whether by seizing property or failing to deliver on some promise. Religious leaders confirm that the local deity favors their cause and off go the troops. ~ Nicholas Wade

Recent studies have considered the detection of a spaceship visiting our parish of the galaxy. In my opinion that last thought should bring a blush to every human cheek ... Fecklessness might be the main theme of the aliens' report on the new-found source of radio pollution ... that emanates from beings who have mastered a lot of physics, chemistry and biology and yet let their children starve-while all around their planet the energy of their mother star runs to waste in a desert of space. ~ Nigel Calder

All the more recent work on alkaptonuria has ... strengthened the belief that the homogentisic acid excreted is derived from tyrosine, but why alkaptonuric individuals pass the benzene ring of their tyrosine unbroken and how and where the peculiar chemical change from tyrosine to homogentisic acid is brought about, remain unsolved problems. ~ Archibald E. Garrod

Once they had been equal in their separate freedoms. They had set out to have children as lightly as if they were playing house, and now her necessarily domestic life bored him, and she was bound to it in her body and imagination. This imbalance was fated, built into their biology. ~ Tessa Hadley

From year to year, and from age to age, we see [biologists] at work, adding no doubt much to the unknown, and advancing many important interests, but, at the same time, doing little for the establishment of comprehensive views of nature. Experiments in however narrow a walk, facts of whatever minuteness, make reputations in scientific societies; all beyond is regarded with suspicion and distrust. ~ Robert Chambers

I think that in the 21st century, medical biology will advance at a more rapid pace than before. ~ Shinya Yamanaka

Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity. ~ William Faulkner

For in disease the most voluntary or most special movements, faculties, etc., suffer first and most, that is in an order the exact opposite of evolution. Therefore I call this the principle of Dissolution. ~ John Hughlings Jackson

Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated children never offered excuses - certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology, and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to better discipline the body, ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I have this rather amazing report which, roughly speaking, says I was the worst student the biology master had ever taught. ~ John Gurdon

These coupling certainly do not fit with the mainstream idea that genes, or at least organisms, are hell-bent on reproducing themselves. They do fit, however, with the idea of a social role for sex, and they fit with the idea that sexual reproduction is a spandrel, a by-product of some other phenomenon. If Roughgarden is on to something, she believes it could have cultural as well as scientific implications. The orthodoxy of biology has corroded our culture like battery acid, she says, In general, we play out the roles prescribed for us by that culture - aggressive male and coy female - because deviation from its "norm" results in emotional and physical violence, bigotry, personal guilt, and criminalized behaviors. If biology has been getting it wrong though, the new orthodoxy could trigger an infusion of tolerance; perhaps the anomalous prevalence of sexual reproduction will end up having deeper repercussions outside of science than within it. ~ Michael Brooks

We do science because we want to understand the truth. It is a constant, ongoing pursuit to understand our own biology so that we can make smart choices at an individual and policy level. If the science of breastfeeding is used first and foremost as a tool for breastfeeding promotion, we compromise public trust in science. Biased information about breastfeeding also sets up infant feeding as a debate, which sometimes escalates to mommy war status, and it doesn't need to be either of these. ~ Alice Callahan

I never saw a sky like the sky over Dorrego - so vast, so black, with stars in an infinite array of size and brilliance. Maybe it seemed vast because the Earth didn't get in the way: the countryside around Dorrego is flat, there are no big cities to blot out the stars with their own clouds of gas, their artificial starlight. (Cities have a terrible tendency to try and imitate starlight, you only have to see them from a plane.) …
Before Dorrego, I had always thought of the sky as a black screen on which a handful of scattered stars twinkled vaguely, but were no more enthralling than the ceiling of the Cine Opera. Dorrego revealed the other sky, the boundless dome that sends you rushing to a dictionary for synonyms for 'infinite'; stars that clustered, not into constellations, but into galaxies; stars like swarms of bees which suggested not stillness or permanence but movement, the trail of something, of someone that passed just now, a moment ago, when you weren't looking. A sky that seemed to suddenly reveal the meaning of all things: Man's need to create language to describe it, geography to explain his place within it, biology to remind him that he is a newcomer in this universe, and history, because everything is written in the sky above Dorrego. ~ Marcelo Figueras

Humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it's unlikely that humans' early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating or the willpower to complete a dissertation. ~ Annalee Newitz

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything
evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing
it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing. ~ Michael Crichton

This had not endeared him to exobiologists such as Dr Perera, who took exactly the opposite view. To them, the only purpose of the Universe was the production of intelligence, and they were apt to talk sneeringly about purely astronomical phenomena, 'Mere dead matter' was one of their favourite phrases. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. ~ Kelly McGonigal

Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences. ~ Ernst Boris Chain

Databases, ontologies, and visual representations tie informatic genomes to the specific practices of computers, computational biology, and bioinformatics. ~ Anonymous

And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry. ~ Michael Polanyi

It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious. ~ Jean Piaget

Once I dated a woman I only liked 43%.
So I only listened to 43% of what she said.
Only told the truth 43% of the time.
And only kissed with 43% of my lips.
Some say you can't quantify desire,
attaching a number to passion isn't right,
that the human heart doesn't work like that.
But for me it does-I walk down the street
and numbers appear on the foreheads
of the people I look at. In bars, it's worse.
With each drink, the numbers go up
until every woman in the joint has a blurry
eighty something above her eyebrows,
and the next day I can only remember 17%
of what actually happened. That's the problem
with booze-it screws with your math. ~ Jeffrey McDaniel

The social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

We may find ourselves in a role similar to that of a gardener as we cultivate a space in which healing can naturally unfold.

In terms of neurobiology, this stance encourages us to lean into the reassuring awareness that our systems already contain seeds awaiting our attention.

For some examples, we humans are always seeking the warmest possible attachments we can imagine (Cozolino, Siegel), our brains are continuously yearning for the arrival of a co-organizing other (Badenoch, Cozolino, Schore), emotional regulation flows naturally from being in the presence of someone we trust (Beckes & Coan) and even our nervous systems have a preference for the social engagement circuitry that sustains connection (Porges).

With this kind of support from the biology inherent in both practitioner and patient, our bodies may begin to open into a welcoming state as others come towards us, with a sense of partnership being established rather than someone doing something to us.

However this also means letting go of the potential certainty that comes from feeling we are in charge. ~ Bonnie Badenoch

I will use the truth to shut down the biologically toxic Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea. ~ Steven Magee

For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a 'misfiring of something useful', it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive.

Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d'Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this "scientism" have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other "new atheists" – Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist – religion is the cause of the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and "poisons everything." They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness.

But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that s ~ Karen Armstrong

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes. ~ Richard Feynman

Natural Sciences are all about fascinating causality. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I am absolutely convinced of the lack of true scientific evidence in favour of Darwinian dogma. Nobody in the biological sciences, medicine included, needs Darwinism at all. Darwinism is certainly needed, however, in order to pose as a philosopher, since it is primarily a worldview. And an awful one, as George Bernard Shaw used to say. ~ Raul O. Leguizamon

The world has been changing even faster as people, devices and information are increasingly connected to each other. Computational power is growing and quantum computing is quickly being realised. This will revolutionise artificial intelligence with exponentially faster speeds. It will advance encryption. Quantum computers will change everything, even human biology. There is already one technique to edit DNA precisely, called CRISPR. The basis of this genome-editing technology is a bacterial defence system. It can accurately target and edit stretches of genetic code. The best intention of genetic manipulation is that modifying genes would allow scientists to treat genetic causes of disease by correcting gene mutations. There are, however, less noble possibilities for manipulating DNA. How far we can go with genetic engineering will become an increasingly urgent question. We can't see the possibilities of curing motor neurone diseases - like my ALS - without also glimpsing its dangers.
Intelligence is characterised as the ability to adapt to change. Human intelligence is the result of generations of natural selection of those with the ability to adapt to changed circumstances. We must not fear change. We need to make it work to our advantage.
We all have a role to play in making sure that we, and the next generation, have not just the opportunity but the determination to engage fully with the study of science at an early level, so that we can go on to fulfil our pote ~ Stephen Hawking

conundrums in biology: this is the fact that our genes, which supposedly define us as a species, but also distinguish you or I or anyone else on the planet from each other, make up only 2 per cent of our DNA. The other 98 per cent had been written off as 'junk'; ~ John Parrington

The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance. ~ Lewis Thomas

In my lab, we're interested in the transition from chemistry to early biology on the early earth. ~ Jack W. Szostak

It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects. ~ Colin McGinn

The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory -is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation - both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof. ~ L. Harrison Matthews

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. ~ Ronald A. Fisher

Scientists who study human motivation have lately learned that after basic survival needs have been met, the combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore, and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers - the three things that motivate us most. All three are deeply woven through the fabric of flow. Thus toying with flow involves tinkering with primal biology: addictive neurochemistry, potent psychology, and hardwired evolutionary behaviors. ~ Steven Kotler

When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit. ~ Donald Johanson

But you know that any showing of such an innovation is apt to start gossip. Just why, I don't know. It, though, is a trait of Mankind only. Animals don't 'bloom' out so abruptly. You can hunt through Biology, Zoology or any similar study, and find but slow, -awfully slow, - adaptations toward any form of variation. Hurrying was not known until Man got around. ~ Ernest Vincent Wright

You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology. ~ Deepak Chopra

The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field's real problems. ~ Vladimir L. Voeikov

Guns are great for killing stuff that follows the laws of biology. Do skinless demons that nosh on your life force sound like something you can classify with binomial nomenclature? ~ Paul Krueger

The ocean is a dangerous place, but it's also a place you can still go and have to yourself, a place that's clean and, yes, wild. If you go into the ocean you're making a choice. You need to know you can drown, you can get lost, or you can be eaten by great beasts. ~ David Helvarg

Even though it is common knowledge in our field of Neuroscience, I take immense pleasure every time I realize that our perception of the whole universe emerges from the activity of the little specks of jelly inside our skull. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I loved the idea that biology was logical. ~ Cynthia Kenyon

If you were standing in the path of the beam, you would obviously die pretty quickly. You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics. ~ Randall Munroe

Jack coughed slightly and offered his hand. "Hi, uh. I'm Jack."
Kim took it. "Jack what?"
"Huh?"
"Your last name, silly."
"Jackson."
She blinked at him. "Your name is Jack Jackson?"
He blushed. "No, uh, my first name's Rhett, but I hate it, so…"
He gestured to the chair and she sat. Her dress rode up several inches, exposing pleasing long lines of creamy skin. "Well, Jack, what's your field of study?"
"Biological Engineering, Genetics, and Microbiology. Post-doc. I'm working on a research project at the institute."
"Really? Oh, uh, my apple martini's getting a little low."
"I've got that, one second." He scurried to the bar and bought her a fresh one. She sipped and managed to make it look not only seductive but graceful as well.
"What do you want to do after you're done with the project?" Kim continued.
"Depends on what I find."
She sent him a simmering smile. "What are you looking for?"
Immediately, Jack's eyes lit up and his posture straightened. "I started the project with the intention of learning how to increase the reproduction of certain endangered species. I had interest in the idea of cloning, but it proved too difficult based on the research I compiled, so I went into animal genetics and cellular biology. It turns out the animals with the best potential to combine genes were reptiles because their ability to lay eggs was a smoother transition into combining the cells to create a new species, o ~ Kyoko M.

Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises. ~ Albert Memmi

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever. ~ Richard Dawkins

We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

Some people say that we like wolves because they remind us of our dogs, but it is my assertion that we like our dogs because they actually remind us of our ancestral link with wolves, of the freedom that we still carry dormant, deep in our cells. ~ Teo Alfero

With this, in a powerful sense, our Question has been answered. The world, insofar as we speak of the world of Chemistry, biology, astrophysics, engineering, and everyday life, does embody beautiful ideas. The Core, which governs those domains, is profoundly rooted in concepts of symmetry and geometry, as we have seen. And it works its will, in quantum theory, through music-like rules. Symmetry really does determine structure. A pure and perfect Music of the Spheres really does animate the soul of reality. Plato and Pythagoras: We salute you! ~ Frank Wilczek

Living organisms were not independently created, but have descended and diversified over time from common ancestors. And thus, no other biological theory so elegantly explains this. Evolutionary theory has withstood the test of time - by way of vicarious experimentation, observation, analysis, and relentless criticism, though opposing viewpoints still cling to the concept of "design." As a person of the biological sciences, I cannot subscribe to such misguided notions that suggest static biological states. Clearly, proper examination of the natural world reveal evolutionary trajectories - some random, others nonrandom - and all having observable genetic implications. It is only when we apply evolutionary explanations to living systems that it becomes ever so clear. The world was not specifically designed with us in mind, but rather we long since adapted and conformed to our surroundings, only giving it the illusionary appearance of "design. ~ Tommy Rodriguez

The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion. ~ Gareth J. Nelson

Don't know much about history, don't know much biology, don't know much about a science book, don't know much about the French I took. ~ Sam Cooke

The time has come to link ecology to economic and human development. When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. What is happening to the rain forests of Madagascar and Brazil will affect us all. ~ E. O. Wilson

It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature. ~ Charles Darwin

Culture wars' are really undeclared 'gene wars ~ J. Philippe Rushton

I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will. ~ Richard Dawkins

Dent recognized it; the intermezzo before the last movement of De Bruik's Human Biology. The finale of the symphony was a standard concert opener in the outer worlds. Soon the crackling of superamplified muscle contractions and the rush of adrenaline into the bloodstream announced the shift to the finale, and the crowd cheered wildly; Dent could feel his blood surging through him - ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Why there are multiple Gods and religions ? answer is simple you can't digest God as one universal thing.
You can't understand universe as a whole that is why you created different branches like physics,chemistry,biology,mechanics,astronomy etc
Humans are very weak to understand universe as one thing !!! ~ Rupesh Sreeraman

Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads.

Now, your Honor, you have been a boy; I have been a boy. And we have known other boys. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.

Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows?

...No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is no ~ Clarence Darrow

If you have to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be "it's complicated. ~ Robert M. Sapolsky

Synthetic biology can help address key challenges facing the planet and its population. Research in synthetic biology may lead to new things such as programmed cells that self-assemble at the sites of disease to repair damage. ~ Craig Venter

Opera stars know that biology is destiny. Sometime in their 50s or early 60s, the powerful, flexible and ultimately mysterious instrument that has been the source of their artistry frays, cracks and disappears. ~ Michael A. Walsh

An itinerant selfish gene/ Said 'bodies a- plenty I've seen./ You think you're so clever/ But I'll live for ever./ You're just a survival machine. ~ Richard Dawkins

I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper. ~ Dave Eggers

The brain is biology's greatest challenge. Perhaps in a sense it is the greatest challenge for science as a whole, beyond moon landings, the ultimate particles of the physicist and the depths of astronomical space. ~ Steven Rose

In many ways marine biology is at a pivotal moment, when we are discovering the richness of the ocean at the very time we are grasping how we've managed to deplete it over the last few centuries. Preserving what's left, as well as rebuilding parts of it to a semblance of what it used to be, requires us to relinquish some of the power we have exercised in the past. It requires living with sharks. ~ Juliet Eilperin

Unfortunately, I do not find Tegmark's line of reasoning to be extremely compelling. The leap from the existence of an external reality (independent of humans) to the conclusion that, in Tegmark's words, "You must believe in what I call the mathematical universe hypothesis: that our physical reality is a mathematical structure," involves, in my opinion, a sleight of hand. When Tegmark attempts to characterize what mathematics really is, he says: "To a modern logician, a mathematical structure is precisely this: a set of abstract entities with relations between them." But this modern logician is human! In other words, Tegmark never really proves that our mathematics is not invented by humans; he simply assumes it. Furthermore, as the French neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeaux has pointed out in response to a similar assertion: "To claim physical reality for mathematical objects, on a level of the natural phenomena we study in biology, poses a worrisome epistemological problem it seems to me. How can a physical state, internal to our brain, represent another physical state external to it? ~ Mario Livio

The life sciences contain spiritual values which can never be explained by the materialistic attitude of present day science ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him, and science gives today the only world picture which we can consider as valid. It gives an understanding of the inside of the atom and of the whole universe, or the peculiar properties of the chemical substances and of the manner in which genes duplicate in biology. An educated layman can, of course, not contribute to science, but can enjoy and participate in many scientific discoveries which as constantly made. Such participation was quite common in the 19th century, but has unhappily declined. Literacy in science will enrich a person's life. ~ Hans Bethe

When the knowledge of biological fact is conjoined with imagination, on the other hand, one gets facts stranger than most fiction. When biology and morphology combine perspective with religion, they become a chimera of facts that can change the world view of spirituality.
Cats bring this blending of biology, morphology and imagination to the prospective table of religious discussion especially. This is so because they have differing physiological functionalities that humans do not. These differences may seem trivial to many but one wonders how these variations would work themselves out in a sapient religion or spirituality centred on these quadrupedal predatory and often nocturnal creatures. Imagine not the cat worship that other religions in the past may have done. Instead, imagine what religion would be like if cats experienced it as sapient beings. The religion's context would take place in the physical form of the domestic cat, not the anthropological form. From the perspective of cats, the mirror of divinity reflected back at them would be quite different. ~ Leviak B. Kelly

The fundamental landscape of biology is undergoing a major upheaval, much as it did in the first decades of the 20th Century. This upheaval will take time to fully reveal its implications. ~ Michael R. Rose

What happens to a marriage? A persistent failure of kindness, triggered at first, at least in my case, by the inequities of raising children, the sacrifices that take a woman by surprise and that she expects to be matched by her mate but that biology ensures cannot be. Anything could set me off. Any innocuous habit or slight or oversight. The way your father left the lights of the house blazing, day and night. The way he could become so distracted at work that sometimes when I called, he'd put me on hold and forget me, only remembering again when I'd hung up and called back. The way he wore his pain so privately, whistling around the house after we'd had a spat, pretending nonchalance, protecting you and your sisters from discord, hiding behind his good nature, inadvertently ~ Jan Ellison

Mind control survivors have identified doctors used by the CIA under Project MKULTRA as having used different aliases. I have personally spoken and corresponded with many of these child Cold War survivors. It seems colors were one of the most commonly used themes. Many survivors have identified Josef Mengele as using the aliases Dr. Green, Dr. Black, Dr. Swartz (black in German), Father Joseph, or Vaterchen (daddy) when he did their programming. The experiments and programming he used on us were of such a heinous nature, that they were not unlike some of those performed at Auschwitz.

In 1937, Mengele was appointed research assistant at the Third Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology, and Racial Purity. Mengele provided "experimental materials" to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology from twins including eyes, blood, and other body parts from Auschwitz. Mengele fled Auschwitz in January 1945 before the Russians liberated the camp. French government documents state that the Americans captured Mengele in 1946. According to the French, Mengele "was released without explanation by the Americans on November 19, 1946." The French claimed that American authorities confirmed the Mengele arrest and release on Feb. 29, 1947. ~ Carol Rutz

If you turn to a branch of those sciences that try to give a solution to the questions of life--to physiology, psychology, biology, sociology--there you will find an astounding poverty of thought, a very great lack of clarity, completely unjustified claims to answer questions that lie outside their subject and never-ending contradictions between one thinker and others, and even within himself.

If you turn to a branch of the sciences that is not concerned with solving the questions of life but answers its own scientific, specialized questions, then you are captivated by the power of human intellect but you know in advance that there are no answers to the questions of life.

These sciences directly ignore the questions of life.

They say, "We have no answers to 'What are you?' and 'Why do you live?' and are not concerned with this; but if you need to know the laws of light, of chemical compounds, the laws of the development of organisms, if you need to know the laws of bodies and their forms and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you need to know the laws of your own mind, to all that we have clear, precise, and unquestionable answers. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Astronomy is not the science of all objects with mass and weight and velocity. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Biology is not the science of all objects that consume and excrete and have inherited characteristics. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Linguistics is not the study of all possible symbols or symbol systems. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. ~ Randy Allen Harris

I wanted to be a marine biologist my whole life until I graduated high school. And even now, I'm still like, 'Maybe I'll just quit the biz and go to Santa Cruz and study marine biology and have my own research center in the Bahamas.' Yeah, I'm sure it would be just that smooth. ~ Cobie Smulders

But biology and computer science - life and computation - are related. I am confident that at their interface great discoveries await those who seek them. ~ Leonard Adleman

Well, biology is not only about genes and environment, but also cells and the constraints of their physical structure, which we shall see have little to do with either genes or environment directly. The predictions that arise from these disparate world views are strikingly different. ~ Nick Lane

There are no mineral monsters. ~ Canguilhem

The fate of the physiology of the brain is independent of the truth and falsity of my assertions relative to the laws of the organization of the nervous system, in general, and of the brain in particular, just as the knowledge of the functions of a sense is independent of the knowledge of the structure of its apparatus. ~ Franz Joseph Gall

[Computer science] is not really about computers and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes ... and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. ~ Hal Abelson

To conquer your biology, stop seeing people sexually and start seeing them as family. In our day, we have really a perverted notion where it's like strangers and potential sexual objects. ~ Mark Driscoll

It is often thought that the life of the hunter-gatherer was one of feast and famine. But most available data suggest that they were surprisingly healthy and had a fairly stable diet and lifestyle. Not so the primitive farmers. In years when the crops failed, in settlements where the population density was high and where disease weakened the ability to cope even further, life would have been very hard indeed. The settled population could not migrate to follow the food supply as could hunter-gatherers. They were trapped. ~ Peter Gluckman

In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture. ~ Jerry A. Coyne