Developmental Biology Quotes

Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s. ~ John Tyler Bonner

A key issue in developmental biology at that time was the problem of how cells underwent differentiation, with most workers concentrating on explanations in terms of changes in enzyme and gene regulation. ~ Paul Nurse

It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation
which is the most important time in your life. ~ Louis Wolpert

It will be in the convergence of evolutionary biology, developmental biology and cancer biology that the answer to cancer will lie. Nor will this confluence be a one-way street. ~ Paul Davies

The development of an organism ... may be considered as the execution of a 'developmental program' present in the fertilized egg ... A central task of developmental biology is to discover the underlying algorithm from the course of development. ~ Aristid Lindenmayer

It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons. ~ Freeman Dyson

When most of us hear the word cells, we think biology. I think penitentiary. (It's an occupational hazard.) ~ Reginald Dipwipple

Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage. ~ Judith Viorst

Up high, biology vanishes to reveal a world shaped by the starker forces of geology and meteorology, the bare bones of the earth wrapped in sky. ~ Rebecca Solnit

While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research. ~ Francis Crick

Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did,as conquest, as adventure
in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically then men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically. ~ Marge Piercy

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

The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of intelligent input no such systems would develop. So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results from a stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from natural selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The results: 1) Darwinism's prediction is falsified; 2) Design's prediction is confirmed. ~ Michael J. Behe

In short, bioethics investigates ethical issues arising in the life sciences (medicine, health care, genetics, biology, research, etc) by applying the principles and methods of moral philosophy to these problems. ~ Adele Langlois

A strong feeling of adventure is animating those who are working on bacterial viruses, a feeling that they have a small part in the great drive towards a fundamental problem in biology. ~ Max Delbruck

Views of women, on one side, as inwardly directed toward home and family and notions of men, on the other, as outwardly striving toward fame and fortune have resounded throughout literature and in the texts of history, biology, and psychology until they seem uncontestable. Such dichotomous views defy the complexities of individuals and stifle the potential for people to reveal different dimensions of themselves in various settings. ~ Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

There is more to biology than rats, Drosophila, Caenorhabditis, and E. coli. ~ Ernst Mayr

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

Great literature remains great when it says new things to new generations, and the loops of a knot quite nicely parallel the contours and convolutions of Carroll's plot anyway.What's more, he probably would have been delighted at how this whimsical branch of math invaded the real world and became crucial to understanding our biology. ~ Sam Kean

They were and are children of privilege ... the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a "liberal arts education" is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend, or complete - to actually contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay, must trump any discourse, let alone opposition. It occurred to me that I had seen this behavior elsewhere, where it was called developmental difficulty. ~ David Mamet

My own experience of over 60 years in biomedical research amply demonstrated that without the use of animals and of human beings, it would have been impossible to acquire the important knowledge needed to prevent much suffering and premature death not only among humans but also among [other] animals. ~ Albert Sabin

Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water. ~ Steven Johnson

Many scholars working in the humanities have already shown interest in brain research. For years, contemporary theory in the humanities has left the body and biology out of their discussions. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Soul" is a barrier against reduction, against human life reduced to biology and genitals, culture and utility, race and ethnicity. It signals an interiority that permeates all exteriority, an invisibility that everywhere inhabits visibility. "Soul" carries with it resonances of God-created, God-sustained, and God-blessed. It is our most comprehensive term for designating the core being of men and women. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

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

Endings are a part of life, and we are actually wired to execute them. But because of trauma, developmental failures, and other reasons, we shy away from the steps that could open up whole new worlds of development and growth. ~ Henry Cloud

To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation. ~ Derrick Jensen

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

We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism. ~ Terence McKenna

I don't think biology is replacing the feeling experienced through art. Biology is capable of giving additional insights. It's a parallel, not a substitutive process. ~ Eric Kandel

What we're starting to see is a quantum biology, it being applied in biology and cosmology and a host of other sciences, because it does really pertain to how we know. It really helps bring epistemology, which is how do we know what we know, out of the realm of philosophy and brings it into the realm of science. ~ Edgar Mitchell

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment. ~ Isabella Rossellini

Stop talking about "rape" and start talking about "sex", and within a few decades India will attain the true mindset to prevent sexual assaults. ~ Abhijit Naskar

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

Measured with magnetic field meters, the electromagnetic field that the heart produces is some 5,000 times more powerful than that created by the brain. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner

They're ghosts, surely, and Rabbit absolutely believes in them. There are things in the world, strange machinations of physics and chemistry,queer intersections of biology and theology, that Rabbit hasn't the slightest interest in assuming he'll ever understand or be able to solve. They're simply there to be believed in, and Rabbit is a born believer. He wants to believe. He has always thought of life as pregnant with possibility-- a freak twister or wardrobe the only thing separating him from another world-- so ghosts, spirits, aliens and supreme beings coexist within Rabbit with ease. There's a kind of beauty in accepting the possibility, if not the plausibility, of everything imaginable. ~ Kate Racculia

Phylogeny and ontogeny are, therefore, the two coordinated branches of morphology. Phylogeny is the developmental history [Entwickelungsgeschichte] of the abstract, genealogical individual; ontogeny, on the other hand, is the developmental history of the concrete, morphological individual. ~ Ernst Haeckel

Addiction is when natural biological imperatives, like the need for food, sex, relaxation or status, become prioritised to the point of destructiveness. It is exacerbated by a culture that understandably exploits this mechanic as it's a damn good way to sell Mars bars and Toyotas. ~ Russell Brand

As we continue to look for "developmental deficiencies" in our maturation in Christ, how are you doing in the area of contentment? How quick is your impulse to find satisfaction in Christ, to go to the joy of the gospel in times of stress, frustration, disappointment, and trouble? ~ Matt Chandler

Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny - and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do). ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Science is absolutely incomplete unless and until the scientists are Realised Souls. Medicine is incomplete, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, everything is incomplete unless and until you know the Divine laws. ~ Nirmala Srivastava

What is it that drew us to the hollow tonight? What crazy kind of species is it that leaves a warm home on a rainy night to ferry salamanders across a road? It's tempting to call it altruism, but it's not. There is nothing selfless about it. This night heaps rewards on the givers as well as the recipients. We get to be there, to witness this amazing rite, and, for an evening, to enter into relationship with other beings, as different from ourselves as we can imagine.
It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness" - estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night. For a moment as we walked this road, those barriers dissolved and we began to relieve the loneliness and know each other once again. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it. ~ Elizabeth Moon

But why does she want them, really? Because Susan has them? Because the Salem bookstore manager has them? Because she always vaguely assumed she would have them herself? Or does the desire come from some creaturely place, pre-civilized, some biological throb that floods her bloodways with the message Make more of yourself! To repeat, not to improve. ~ Leni Zumas

I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

At school, I'd refuse to take part in biology lessons when animals were being dissected. One time, the teacher announced that we would be gassing worms. So I ran around the room, gathered up all the worms and set them free in the fields. I just loved animals and couldn't bear the thought of them suffering. ~ Imelda May

Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother. ~ Oprah Winfrey

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

To establish evolutionary interrelatedness invariably requires exhibiting similarities between organisms. Within Darwinism, there's only one way to connect such similarities, and that's through descent with modification driven by the Darwinian mechanism. But within a design-theoretic framework, this possibility, though not precluded, is also not the only game in town. It's possible for descent with modification instead to be driven by telic processes inherent in nature (and thus by a form of design). Alternatively, it's possible that the similarities are not due to descent at all but result from a similarity of conception, just as designed objects like your TV, radio, and computer share common components because designers frequently recycle ideas and parts. Teasing apart the effects of intelligent and natural causation is one of the key questions confronting a design-theoretic research program. Unlike Darwinism, therefore, intelligent design has no immediate and easy answer to the question of common descent.

Darwinists necessarily see this as a bad thing and as a regression to ignorance. From the design theorists' perspective, however, frank admissions of ignorance are much to be preferred to overconfident claims to knowledge that in the end cannot be adequately justified. Despite advertisements to the contrary, science is not a juggernaut that relentlessly pushes back the frontiers of knowledge. Rather, science is an interconnected web of theoretical and factual c ~ William A. Dembski

I sighed and closed my eyes, thumping my head against the bookcase. You take biology? Oh yeah, Franny. What a great fucking pick-up line. ~ Tahlie Purvis

This view, as a rounded whole and in all its essential elements, has very recently disappeared from science. It died a royal death with Agassiz.
[It had formerly been held that there were no genetic connections among species.] ~ Asa Gray

When chemists artificially produce an amino acid or a sugar they almost always synthesize only a single product at a time, which they manage by carefully controlling the experimental conditions for the selected reaction, such as temperature and the concentrations of the various ingredients, to optimize the synthesis of their target compound. This is not an easy task and requires careful control of many different conditions inside customized flasks, condensers, separation columns, filtration devices and other elaborate chemical apparatus. Yet every living cell in your body is continually synthesizing thousands of distinct biochemicals within a reaction chamber filled with just a few millionths of a microliter of fluid.*7 How do all those diverse reactions proceed concurrently? And how is all this molecular action orchestrated within a microscopic cell? These questions are the focus of the new science of systems biology; but it is fair to say that the answers remain mysterious! ~ Johnjoe McFadden

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