Quotes About Biology

My fascination is broadly with biology and the fact that our increased understanding of biology allows for breakthroughs in a broad set of diseases.

The second half of the 20th century was a golden age of molecular biology, and it was one of the golden ages of the history of science. Molecular biology was so successful and made such a powerful alliance with the medical scientists that the two together just flourished. And they continue to flourish.

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

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.

Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.

If it is true that an influx of doubt and uncertainty actually marks periods of healthy growth in a science, then evolutionary biology is flourishing today as it seldom has flourished in the past. For biologists collectively are less agreed upon the details of evolutionary mechanics than they were a scant decade ago. Superficially, it seems as if we know less about evolution than we did in 1959, the centennial year of Darwin's on the Origin of Species.

Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology.

Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.

I haven't a clue about the biology or the psychology involved when a person dissolves into tears, but it is quite fascinating to note what turns them on. There are wives who can cascade over a late husband or a burned dinner, and equally pour tears of joy over a new bonnet or a renovated bathroom.... A while ago I took a ship back from Europe. Amid the tumbling confetti ... I found myself misty-eyed watching a young lady waving a tearful farewell to her boyfriend on the dock. I couldn't figure out if I was crying at her plight, or in delight that he wasn't coming along with us.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

If it squirms, it's biology; if it stinks, it's chemistry; if it doesn't work, it's physics; and if you can't understand it, it's mathematics.

I do sense, as compared with let's say the early '50s, there's somewhat more of a careerism. I don't think it's anything special to economics; it's equally true with physics or biology. A graduate education has become a more career-oriented thing, and part of that is because of the need for funding. In fact, that's a much worse problem in the natural sciences than it is in economics. So you can't even do your work in the natural sciences, particularly, and even to some extent in economics, without funding.

On the first page of the Bible there is an instance of how literalism is but an invitation to transcend the image to which literalism points. That first page is not geology, biology or paleontology; it is high religion. For there we are told who we are in terms of our constititutive text. And if we could understand that, we would worrying about whether the antelopes or the cantaloupes came in a certain order.

The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.

The egalitarian doctrine is manifestly contrary to all the facts established by biology and by history. Only fanatical partisans of this theory can contend that what distinguishes the genius from the dullard is entirely the effect of postnatal influences.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope.

The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.

Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era.

This is not to deny that there are versions of theism that do conflict with evolutionary biology. Young Earth Creationism is an example; it claims that God created life on earth within the past 10,000 to 50,000 years. But other types of theism are different.

Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.

Oh I believe in loving cats and dogs and children and parents – sometimes – but I don’t believe in romantic love. Of course, there’s the momentary rush of hormones and chemicals that encourages us to mate, but it’s biology – it’s no more inherently mystical than the nicotine in that cigarette you’re smoking

It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable.

Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.

In fact perhaps the only law in biology is that all flesh is mortal and all species become extinct eventually.

The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess.

Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.

I've always been interested in science - one of my favourite books is James Watson's 'Molecular Biology of the Gene.'

Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed

Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.

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.

In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.

It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.

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.

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.

We can truly see that consciousness is operating creatively even in biology, even in the evolution of species.

Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

My undergraduate degree was in history, and I wish I had been smart enough to really excel at maths, physics, chemistry or biology because... the voyagers and adventurers and real contributors - that's where they come from.

Many quantum physics are realizing or hypothesizing that consciousness is not a byproduct of evolution as has been suggested. Or for that matter, an expression of our brains, although it expresses itself through our brains. But consciousness is the common ground of existence that ultimately differentiates into space, time, energy, information and matter. And the same consciousness is responsible for our thoughts, for our emotions and feelings, for our behaviors, for our personal relationships, for our social interactions, for the environments that we find ourselves in, and for our biology.

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.

I learned about HeLa cells in my first basic biology class, and I just became completely obsessed with them from that point on.

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

Of course language arose in a Darwinian biological world, because that's all there is, but that world relates only superficially to the pop-biology that circulates informally.

The student of biology is often struck with the feeling that historians, when dealing with the rise and fall of nations, do not generally view the phenomena from a sufficiently high biological standpoint. To me, at least, they seem to attach too much importance to individual rulers and soldiers, and to particular wars, policies, religions, and customs; while at the same time they make little attempt to extract the fundamental causes of national success or failure.