Quotes About Biology

I took biology in high school and didn't like it at all. It was focused on memorization. ... I didn't appreciate that biology also had principles and logic ... [rather than dealing with a] messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense. I wish I had learned sooner that biology could be fun as well.

I think one of the both liberating and terrifying prospects from synthetic biology for example is that you are going to have all of these do it yourself biosynthetic labs where people are going to be playing with the software of life. We are going to have a new generation of artists that are going to be playing with genomes the way that Blake and Byron used to play with poetry. And when genomes are the new canvas for the artist, we might be able to radically upgrade the human species and the software of the biology of the human species.

The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory -is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation - both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.

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.

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.

Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.

As a chemist, I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology: What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution?

Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.

It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology.

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.

I suppose the marine biology was a post-teen thing. I was kind of on my way but I was one of those teenage boys who got to 13, 14 and had no idea what I was going to do. I liked natural history. I liked the outdoors. And I found the sea quite interesting.

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.

I trained initially as a physical chemist, and then, after becoming interested in biology, I went to medical school and learned how to be a physician. So, I'm a physician scientist.

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.

In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.

I see psychoanalysis, art and biology ultimately coming together, just like cognitive psychology and neuroscience have merged.

What disturbs or assures us about race has very little to do with blood or biology. Race is about how you use language, understand your heritage, interpret your history, identify with your kin, figure out what your meaning and worth to a society that places values on you beyond your control. And it's also about what people see you as - or take you to be.

Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology.

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

I loved the idea that biology was logical.

There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occur but once in their detailed glory. And for those kinds of sciences, be it cosmology, or evolutionary biology, or geology, or palaeontology, the experimental methods, simplification, quantification, prediction and repetition of the experimental sciences don't always work. You have to go with the narrative, the descriptive methods of what? Of historians.

Why do any of us act the way we do? Is it our beliefs or our biology that shapes us? Lauren Grodstein considers this eternal question through the story of Andrew Waite, scientist, father, widower, struggling to raise two daughters, living with the ghost of his wife, facing a test of his faith in science. There are no easy answers here, just the honest complexity of human beings trying their best to be good people. The Explanation for Everything is moving, beautiful, and wonderfully funny.

I'll say that this is probably the best time for poetry since the T'ang dynasty. All the rest of the world is going to school on American poetry in the twentieth century, from Ezra Pound to W. S. Merwin, and for very good reason. We have soaked up influence in the last century like a sponge. It's cross-pollination, first law of biology, that the more variety you have the more health you have.

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.

You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology.

Biology is destiny only for girls.

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

It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say. ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious.

I'm not the one going for a biology degree. I'm just a philosophy major who eats people.

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

Computer science is to biology what calculus is to physics. It's the natural mathematical technique that best maps the character of the subject.

In my lab, we're interested in the transition from chemistry to early biology on the early earth.

Everything we do understand about the universe - the periodic table of elements, Einstein's laws, Newton's laws, all of chemistry, all of biology - that's 4 percent of the universe. We got to the moon on the 4 percent we do understand. We landed on Mars on the 4 percent we do understand. So the day we crack the nut of the rest of that 95 percent... Oh my gosh.

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our Earth is not the center of the universe, but merely one of nine planets circling one of billions of stars. From biology we learned that humans were not specially created by God but evolved along with tens of millions of other species.

Altruism has always been one of biology's deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else?

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.

Computer science needs to be part of the core curriculum - like algebra, biology, physics, or chemistry. We need all schools to teach it, not just 10%.

Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology. Intelligent design is not a scientific concept.

Rulers do not like to admit that their power is restricted by any laws other than those of physics and biology. They never ascribe their failures and frustrations to the violation of economic law.

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.

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?

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.

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."

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

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.

I was 12 or 13 years old. So I started to write poetry and fiction, even though I was really into biology because my dad was a science teacher. I kept writing all those years.