Comparative Biology Quotes

With regard to sleep and waking, we must consider what they are: whether they are peculiar to soul or to body, or common to both; and if common, to what part of soul or body the appertain: further, from what cause it arises that they are atributes of animals, and whether all animals share in them both, or some partake of the one only, others of the other only, or some partake of neither and some of both. ~ Aristotle.

I can think of very few science books I've read that I've called useful. What they've been is wonderful. They've actually made me feel that the world around me is a much fuller, much more wonderful, much more awesome place than I ever realized it was. That has been, for me, the wonder of science. That's why science fiction retains its compelling fascination for people. That's why the move of science fiction into biology is so intriguing. I think that science has got a wonderful story to tell. ~ Simon Jenkins

The non-scientist in the street probably has a clearer notion of physics, chemistry and biology than of statistics, regarding statisticians as numerical philatelists, mere collector of numbers. ~ Stephen Senn

Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sex is ... scratching an itch Everything else is something we project on a very simple act. It's the psychology, not the biology, that's complicated. ~ Joy Browne

[ ... ] we have in our treatise a series of fifty-seven examinations, almost exclusively of injuries of the human body forming a group of observations furnishing us with the earliest known nucleus of fact regarding the anatomy, physiology and pathology of the human body. Crude and elementary as they are, the method by which they were collected was scientific, and these observations, together with the diagnoses and the explanatory commentary in the ancient glosses, form the oldest body of science now extant. ~ James Henry Breasted

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

Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality. ~ Thomas R. Cech

Is biology destiny? And the answer is yes, sometimes it is. Women who have the fewest choices of all exercise their right to abortion the most. ~ Sallie Tisdale

I found it again at last! Page 156 - 157 of *My Soul to Keep* by Melanie Wells.

Dr. Dylan Foster is thinking to herself while searching through literature on snake lore, "Then there was all the mystical stuff. Once again, the dearth of comparative religion in my theology training nearly skunked me. Four years of sod-busing in seminary had taught me exactly nothing more than what I already knew--in grander proportions, of course, and to near-microscopic levels of minutia. In the end, I got out of there with a solid hermeneutical method, an encyclopedic understanding of dispensational theology, and the ability to conjugate verbs and deconstruct participles in Greek and Hebrew--all notable skills--but without even passable knowledge of anything outside one extremely narrow strip of theological territory."

"When it was all said and done, I'd spent four years and trainload of money to get indoctrinated, not educated. Lousy planning, if you ask me. ~ Melanie Wells

For all the accomplishments of molecular biology, we still can't tell a live cat from a dead cat. ~ Lynn Margulis

It was badly received by the generation to which it was first addressed, and the outpouring of angry nonsense to which it gave rise is sad to think upon. But the present generation will probably behave just as badly if another Darwin should arise, and inflict upon them that which the generality of mankind most hate - the necessity of revising their convictions. Let them, then, be charitable to us ancients; and if they behave no better than the men of my day to some new benefactor, let them recollect that, after all, our wrath did not come to much, and vented itself chiefly in the bad language of sanctimonious scolds. Let them as speedily perform a strategic right-about-face, and follow the truth wherever it leads. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

I submit a body of facts which cannot be invalidated. My opinions may be doubted, denied, or approved, according as they conflict or agree with the opinions of each individual who may read them; but their worth will be best determined by the foundation on which they rest - the incontrovertible facts. ~ William Beaumont

I like to surf. I like to play guitar. I want to do college classes online. I wanted to do marine biology for a long time, but I don't know. ~ Ali Lohan

I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner. ~ Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree. ~ Edward O. Wilson

Biology doesn't matter, the Christians argued, because this body we live in is not ultimately real; history doesn't matter, they said, because God's time is different and superior to man's anyhow; and forget cause and effect, forget what you've been told about the physical world, because there is heaven and there is hell and there is this green earth in between, and you are always alive in one of the three places. ~ Russell Banks

It's a lot like a biology study date,' I told my reflection nonchalantly. 'Only ... Without the biology and studying.'
Biology study date ... ~ Becca Fitzpatrick

The curious fact is that biology tells us nothing about desire. And, when you think about it, culture -- novels, movies, opera, and quite a lot of painting -- is about desire, how we manage desire, how we suffer from it, and how it brings us joy when we get things right. A story without desire -- and that means without the insistence of desire -- will be empty, dry, and more or less aimless. That is one reason we read novels, to see how people fall into awkward moral situations and then try to extricate themselves. This is why there is so much anguish in the world: frustrated desire is every bit as miserable as poverty, because desire is no respecter of one's position in life: everyone goes through it. ~ Peter Watson

We treat human biology as our center point. Everyone already has a head-mounted display. It's your head! ~ Rony Abovitz

This week, Georgia's board of education approved a plan that allows teachers to keep using the word Evolution when teaching biology. Though, as a compromise, dinosaurs are now called Jesus Horses. ~ Jimmy Fallon

No civilization can possibly survive to an interstellar spacefaring phase unless it limits its numbers.
Any society with a marked population explosion will be forced to devote all its energies and technological skills to feeding and caring for the population on its home planet. This is a very powerful conclusion and is in no way based on the idiosyncrasies of a particular civilization. On any planet, no matter what its biology or social system, an exponential increase in population will swallow every resource. Conversely, any civilization that engages in serious interstellar exploration and colonization must have exercised zero population growth or something very close to it for many generations. ~ Carl Sagan

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth. ~ K. Eric Drexler

Love, in its purest form, is biology. ~ Ron Currie Jr.

Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium. ~ Camille Paglia

However diligent she may be, however dedicated, no mother can escape the larger influences of culture, biology, fate ... until we can actually live in a society where mothers and children genuinely matter, ours is an essentially powerless responsibility. Mothers carry out most of the work orders, but most of the rules governing our lives are shaped by outside influences. ~ Mary Blakely

What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally 'inherit' tradition. ~ C.S. Lewis

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

Consciousness, for me, is a manifestation of complexity in biology. It's an emergent property. ~ Gregory Stock

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

More about the selection theory: Jerne meant that the Socratic idea of learning was a fitting analogy for 'the logical basis of the selective theories of antibody formation': Can the truth (the capability to synthesize an antibody) be learned? If so, it must be assumed not to pre-exist; to be learned, it must be acquired. We are thus confronted with the difficulty to which Socrates calls attention in Meno [ ... ] namely, that it makes as little sense to search for what one does not know as to search for what one knows; what one knows, one cannot search for, since one knows it already, and what one does not know, one cannot search for, since one does not even know what to search for. Socrates resolves this difficulty by postulating that learning is nothing but recollection. The truth (the capability to synthesize an antibody) cannot be brought in, but was already inherent. ~ Niels Kaj Jerne

Astronomy is so easy to love ... Fairly or not, physics is associated with nuclear bombs and nuclear waste, chemistry with pesticides, biology with Frankenfood and designer-gene superbabies. But astronomers are like responsible ecotourists, squinting at the scenery through high-quality optical devices, taking nothing but images that may be computer-enhanced for public distribution, leaving nothing but a few Land Rover footprints on faraway Martian soil, and OK, OK, maybe the Land Rover, too. ~ Natalie Angier

Despite tantalizing suggestions of fossilized microbes in meteorites, puzzling and possibly biogenic methane gas in the martian atmosphere, and a long-standing controversy over the Viking lander experiments of nearly 40 years ago, there's still no Exhibit A that points unequivocally to biology in our own back yard. ~ Seth Shostak

Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose. ~ Richard Dawkins

This passage, by the way, doesn't just give us the comparative negative of hell, but it translates well into a theology of suffering. With these words of Jesus in mind, I can now know that it is better never to hold my children, it is better never to run my fingers through my wife's hair, it is better not to be able to brush my own teeth, it is better never to be able to drive a car, it is better to be paralyzed and never feel anything from the neck down, and it is better to have stage III anaplastic oligondendroglioma than to find myself outside the kingdom of God.
It is better never to see the sunset or the sunrise, never see the stars in the sky, never to see my daughter in her little dress-up clothes, never to see my son throw a ball - it is better never to have seen those things than to have seen those things and yet end up outside the kingdom of God. How horrible hell must be. ~ Matt Chandler

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

What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Biology has progressed tremendously due to the model that Darwin put forth. But the black boxes Darwin accepted are now being opened, and our view of the world is again being shaken. ~ Michael Behe

If neuroscientific research shows that those mechanisms only contain comparative information about colour differences, and have 'thrown away' more fine-grained information about the absolute colours of single surfaces, then that would support my position, in a way that just introspecting our colour experiences can't. ~ David Papineau

I've been around a long time, and I've been interested in memory for a long time. And one of my earlier interests in molecular biology of memory led me to define the switch that converts short term to long term memory. ~ Eric Kandel

Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.' ~ Lewis Thomas

Humanity shares a common ancestry with all living things on Earth. We often share especially close intimacies with the microbial world. In fact, only a small percentage of the cells in the human body are human at all. Yet, the common biology and biochemistry that unites us also makes us susceptible to contracting and transmitting infectious disease. ~ Brenda Wilmoth Lerner

Physics, Chemistry, and Biology had been replaced by Fundamentals of Industry and Agriculture, because of Chairman Mao's instruction to "combine education with practical experience. ~ Ji-li Jiang

Don't go for good or better; the best is yours; go for it. ~ Israelmore Ayivor