Quotes About Biology

Biology occupies a position among the sciences at once marginal and central. Marginal because-the living world constituting but a tiny and very "special" part of the universe-it does not seem likely that the study of living beings will ever uncover general laws applicable outside the biosphere. But if the ultimate aim of the whole of science is indeed, as I believe, to clarify man's relationship to the universe, then biology must be accorded a central position . . .

So we've moved from an era when women's biology was women's destiny to today, which is an era in which men's biology is men's destiny.

In the next century, we will be inventing radical new technologies - machine intelligence, perhaps nanotech, great advances in synthetic biology and other things we haven't even thought of yet. And those new powers will unlock wonderful opportunities, but they might also bring with them certain risks. And we have no track record of surviving those risks. So if there are big existential risks, I think they are going to come from our own activities and mostly from our own inventiveness and creativity.

I think that local school districts - not the federal government - should make the decision about how they teach science, biology, economics. I want my kids to be taught about evolution; I want my kids to be taught about other theories.

After an extensive interview he arranged for my weaknesses in foreign languages to be over-looked and so I started a Biology degree at Birmingham in 1967.

Sex Ed - when I finally got to take it - was all about biology and birth control and nothing about anything that actually goes on between people.

We know from biology that new forms of organisms simulate their primitive form as closely as possible at first, even though obliged to exist under changed internal and external conditions.

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.

One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.

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.

Teens are by nature, experimental learners. There is no real understanding of biology without the lab.

If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one.

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.

Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. He meant physics, of course. There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology.

Realizing how often ingenious speculation in the complex biological world has led nowhere and how often the real advances in biology as well as in chemistry, physics and astronomy have kept within the bounds of mechanistic interpretation, we geneticists should rejoice, even with our noses on the grindstone (which means both eyes on the objectives), that we have at command an additional means of testing whatever original ideas pop into our heads.

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.

Geology differs from physics, chemistry, and biology in that the possibilities for experiment are limited.

I have always loved marine biology and that is what I studied in school. I am hoping to build a marine sanctuary that will also be educational, an eco preserve and a school, perhaps in Costa Rica, that is one of my dreams and goals.

The pace of progress in biology creates a foundation that naturally gets picked up by the biotech and pharmaceutical industry to solve rich-world diseases. This is attractive science. It's science that people want to work on.

I wonder how biology can explain the physical pain you feel in your chest when all you want to do is be with someone.

Biology can be divided into the study of proximate causes, the study of the physiological sciences (broadly conceived), and into the study of ultimate (evolutionary) causes, the subject of natural history.

I don't find biology as interesting as politics and humanism. I talk more about existential stuff.

Mental illness is a real thing. It has real material consequences for people who suffer from it and at the time even the most biological finding reflects social context in very important ways, and so I think psychiatry is better off looking both at biology and at social context and really trying to think of the relationship between these and I think doctors and patients are better off that way.

By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.

There is no true understanding of Biology without Chemistry. And there's no true understanding of Chemistry without Physics.

Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens - ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come.

...she could express her soul with that voice, whenver I listened to her I felt my life meant more than mere biology...she could really hear, she understood structure and she could analyze exactly what it was about a piece of music that had to be rendered just so...she was a very emotional person, Annette. She brought that out in other people. After she died I don't think I ever really felt anything again.

Even mistaken hypotheses and theories are of use in leading to discoveries. This remark is true in all the sciences. The alchemists founded chemistry by pursuing chimerical problems and theories which are false. In physical science, which is more advanced than biology, we might still cite men of science who make great discoveries by relying on false theories.

We are now witnessing, after the slow fermentation of fifty years, a concentration of technical power aimed at the essential determinants of heredity, development and disease. This concentration is made possible by the common function of nucleic acids as the molecular midwife of all reproductive particles. Indeed it is the nucleic acids which, in spite of their chemical obscurity, are giving to biology a unity which has so far been lacking, a chemical unity.

I like writing about biology, not doing it.

I don't think in biology it's very controversial at all. Whether certain behavior is culture or is not culture is argued. I think virtually all biologists would agree that some animal behavior is culture. Bird song is a good example.

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.

The school was very supportive. The only class that I had to attend every day was biology when we were doing dissections. I would take an 8 a.m. bio class, dissect my animal, and then run to work.

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

More and more clearly every day, out of biology, anthropology, sociology, history, economic analysis, psychological insight, plain human decency and common sense, the necessary mandate of survival that we shall love all our neighbors as we do ourselves, is being confirmed and reaffirmed.

Whether conservative or liberal, fundamentalist or agnostic, the more students learn of biology, the more they accept evolution.

When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.

I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing. So what I know about writing, I know from my own instincts, and whatever the narrative voice is in my own head.

Biology has tended to be an observational science and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past but I hate to predict the future on that.

If we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in morals or politics?

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

As a student of conservation biology, I believe that characteristics with survival value will ultimately prevail. There is no survival value in pessimism. If you think failure is inevitable, that view will probably become self-fulfilling.

The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.

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.