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Biology Quotes

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

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

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Camille PagliaSexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

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 ...

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Carl SaganThe Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

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

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Carl SaganThe Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

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

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Carl SaganThe Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

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

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History is biology's dumping ground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Charles DarwinVoyage of the Beagle

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

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

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

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Clarence DarrowAttorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom

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

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

Picture of Daniel Goleman
Daniel GolemanEmotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

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

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

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Donna TarttThe Goldfinch

The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved...

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Quick dinner with ... Ang [Lee] and his wife Jane who's visiting with the children for a while. We t...

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Emma ThompsonThe Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film

Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,And fathers live transmitted in their sons;Each passing y...

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I trained initially as a physical chemist, and then, after becoming interested in biology, I went to...

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The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to ...

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The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a...

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In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both s...

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Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most ce...

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Grant MorrisonSupergods: What Masked Vigilantes

Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ‘conquer’ Earth, to steal their ‘precious’ ...

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God is an energy, rather than an anthropomorphic being, and God's language is biology. Red blood cel...

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We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the pu...

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The Earth Speaks, clearly, distinctly, and, in many of the realms of Nature, loudly, to William Jenn...

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I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other s...

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No existing form of anthropoid ape is even remotely related to the stock which has given rise to man...

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Quite recently the human descent theory has been stigmatized as the 'gorilla theory of human ancestr...

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Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter ...

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If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can...

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Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress ...

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A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individu...

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The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvary...

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Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of...

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When one ponders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three billion years or so, the...

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It necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, and of all creation i...

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Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a s...

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Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the do...

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Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose...

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...if an organised body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and...

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Are we biology or God or something higher? I know my heart beats and I listen to it. The beat is bio...

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Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.

Sex in social mammals is generally carried out in public, before the gazes of other members of the t...

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Jared DiamondWhy Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality

I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projectin...

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I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, ye...

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Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed:It is safe, and you can't get ...

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There are species that retain their characteristics even in conditions that are relatively different...

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Julius EvolaRevolt Against the Modern World

I thought the fart was a human thing. It's something to do with like, arse cheeks, or whatever.

Picture of Karl Pilkington
Karl PilkingtonAn Idiot Abroad: The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in...

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As a young boy, I was obsessed with endangered species and the extinct species that men killed off. ...

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Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatur...

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Lewis ThomasLate Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high ...

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Lewis ThomasThe Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboratio...

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Lewis ThomasThe Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher

Branches or types are characterized by the plan of their structure,Classes, by the manner in which t...

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The biological equipment of a man rigidly restricts the field in which he can serve.

The male frog, in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attrac...

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Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, a...

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Mark KurlanskyCod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes—circumstance...

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Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and establi...

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I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so-called,) ...

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Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together ...

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...because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, ...

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TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves ...

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Matt RidleyGenome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene

Picture of Matt Ridley
Matt RidleyThe Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

The virus altered the the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld su...

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Picture of Michael Pollan
Michael PollanThe Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we’re made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dio...

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Michael PollanThe Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and persona...

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Carl Sagan spoke fluently between biology and geology and astrophysics and physics. If you move flue...

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Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase.

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the st...

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The woman who later became his wife was sleeping in his bed, her face buried in the pillows and her ...

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Picture of Nicole Krauss
Nicole KraussMan Walks Into a Room

I'm doing now with cornets exactly what I used to do with trilobites: measuring, analyzing and catal...

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

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Oliver SacksAn Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

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

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Oliver SacksThe Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

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...

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

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

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

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

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