Reductionism Biology Quotes

If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria. ~ Andrew H. Knoll

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

Usually that's going into biology in a certain way. There's certain strengths and weaknesses to both of the sexes. And I'm not against employing those nor am I against denying those, what I am looking for is a very large array of options. ~ Mark Morris

I can see no practical application of molecular biology to human affairs ... DNA is a tangled mass of linear molecules in which the informational content is quite inaccessible. ~ Frank Macfarlane Burnet

The belief that life on earth arose spontaneously from nonliving matter, is simply a matter of faith in strict reductionism and is based entirely on ideology. ~ Hubert Yockey

The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it ... If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact. ~ Edward O. Wilson

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 the male homosexual community, we love to label and categorize and organize each other as if we are in a never-ending high school biology class. ~ Blake McIver Ewing

I was in the military, and then I went to university to study biology. ~ Lars Mikkelsen

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient. ~ Charles Darwin

I started taking a basic biology course, and I really loved it. I started asking research questions incessantly. I was drawn very quickly to biology. ~ James Rothman

The battle over the validity of evolution has been publicly posed as a scientific one. However, you will find little sign of it in scientific journals, where such quarrels as exist are over details, not the basic concept ... Evolution has proved so useful as a paradigm for the origin and structure of life that it constitutes the foundation of the sciences of biology and medicine. ~ Victor J. Stenger

Cohen and Boyer achieved a long-sought goal in molecular biology: the invention of a simple and efficient method for selecting specific genes from any imaginable organism and accurately reproducing the genetic material in pure and unlimited quantity. ~ Sally Hughes

Distinguishing between correlation and causation is critical to our understanding of the biology and conservation of monarchs and milkweeds. Turning back to our study of chocolate: countrywide spending on science also correlates with per capita income, the latter of which correlates with chocolate consumption (at least in the Western world). Even so, I would happily participate in a controlled study to determine the influence of chocolate consumption on scientific discoveries. ~ Anurag Agrawal

This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes. In its own way, matter obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of "complexification." ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Novel technologies and ideas that impinge on human biology and their perceived impact on human values have renewed strains in the relationship between science and society. ~ Paul Berg

A recognized fact which goes back to the earliest times is that every living organism is not the sum of a multitude of unitary processes, but is, by virtue of interrelationships and of higher and lower levels of control, an unbroken unity. When research, in the efforts of bringing understanding, as a rule examines isolated processes and studies them, these must of necessity be removed from their context. In general, viewed biologically, this experimental separation involves a sacrifice. In fact, quantitative findings of any material and energy changes preserve their full context only through their being seen and understood as parts of a natural order. ~ Walter Rudolf Hess

Modern corporate governments have silently declared war on their mass populations biology. ~ Steven Magee

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 biblically based worldview is capable of affirming the best insights of secular philosophies without ever falling into reductionism. ~ Nancy Pearcey

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

Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist. ~ Jacob Bronowski

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

Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made in every generation. ~ Ernst W. Mayr

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

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

By now, I hope you recognize this as one more example of the reductionist paradigm at work, even when it's couched in natural and alternative terms. As we saw in chapter ten, one of the major problems with modern medicine is its reliance on isolated, unnatural chemical pharmaceuticals as the primary tool in the war against disease. But the medical profession isn't the only player in the health-care system that has embraced this element of reductionism. The natural health community has also fallen prey to the ideology that chemicals ripped from their natural context are as good as or better than whole foods. Instead of synthesizing the presumed "active ingredients" from medicinal herbs, as done for prescription drugs, supplement manufacturers seek to extract and bottle the active ingredients from foods known or believed to promote good health and healing. And just like prescription drugs, the active agents function imperfectly, incompletely, and unpredictably when divorced from the whole plant food from which they're derived or synthesized. ~ T. Colin Campbell

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

The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology. ~ Paul Davies

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

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

Our increasing ability to alter our biology and open up the processes of life is now fueling a new cultural war. ~ Gregory Stock

[I]t is tempting to look to biology to find or ratify boundaries such as "when life begins." But that only highlights the clash between two incommensurable ways of conceiving life and mind. The intuitive and morally useful concept of an immaterial spirit simply cannot be reconciled with the scientific concept of brain activity emerging gradually in ontogeny and phylogeny. No matter where we try to draw the line between life and nonlife, or between mind and nonmind, ambiguous cases pop up to challenge our moral intuitions. ~ Steven Pinker

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