Popular quotes about Biology! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 8
We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things.
Richard LewontinIndeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.
Edward HoaglandA poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood... How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
Richard P. FeynmanMen and women dream the same amount. The main difference in dream content relates to biology and life events. Women dream about their fertility, pregnancy and delivery, and have more dreams about children - owing to their role as primary caregivers. Other differences in dreams have been exaggerated.
Charles McPheeThey (animals) are not just living things; they are beings with lives... that makes all the difference in the world...next time you are outside...notice the first bird you seeโฆyou are beholding a unique individual with personality traits, an emotional profile, and a library of knowledge built on experienceโฆwhat you are witnessing is not just biology, but a biography.
Jonathan BalcombeExtreme heroism springs from something that no scientific theory can fully explain; it's an illogical impulse that flies in the face of biology, psychology, actuarial statistics, and basic common sense.
Christopher McDougallI 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.
Bobby JindalMolecular 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.
Michael DentonWe are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations - a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination.
Terence McKennaYour body, which is very physical, is under the influence of your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your dreams, your fantasies, your desires, your instincts, your drives, your imagination. All these things orchestrate themselves - all these internal activities that are in the invisible domain that we call consciousness actually have very precise physical effects both in our biology, but they also influence our perception of the world.
Deepak ChopraAt the time I finished high school, I was determined to study biology, deeply convinced to eventually be a researcher.
Christiane Nusslein-VolhardThe scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry โ is not even a โsubject " โ but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.
Neil PostmanThe term "informatics" was first defined by Saul Gorn of University of Pennsylvania in 1983 (Gorn, 1983) as computer science plus information science used in conjunction with the name of a discipline such as business administration or biology. It denotes an application of computer science and information science to the management and processing of data, information and knowledge in the named discipline.
Saul GornA crucial difference between lite libertarians and the right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional - a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure.
Ilana MercerThe study of taxonomy in its broadest sense is probably the oldest branch of biology or natural history as well as the basis for all the other branches, since the first step in obtaining any knowledge of things about us is to discriminate between them and to learn to recognize them.
Richard E. BlackwelderBy 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.
Paul BergIt's roughly the case that if systems become too complex to study in sufficient depth, physics hands them over to chemistry, then to biology, then experimental psychology, and finally on to history. Roughly. These are tendencies, and they tend to distinguish roughly between hard and soft sciences.
Noam ChomskyOn bad days, I think I'd like to be a plastic surgeon who goes to Third World countries and operates on children in villages with airlifts, and then I think, 'Yeah, right, I'm going to go back to undergraduate school and take all the biology I missed and then go to medical school.' No. No.
Tama JanowitzThe lack of real contact between mathematics and biology is either a tragedy, a scandal or a challenge, it is hard to decide which.
Gian-Carlo RotaDarwin was a biological evolutionist, because he was first a uniformitarian geologist. Biology is pre-eminent to-day among the natural sciences, because its younger sister, Geology, gave it the means.
Charles LapworthEven 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.
Claude BernardI would like to start by emphasizing the importance of surfaces. It is at a surface where many of our most interesting and useful phenomena occur. We live for example on the surface of a planet. It is at a surface where the catalysis of chemical reactions occur. It is essentially at a surface of a plant that sunlight is converted to a sugar. In electronics, most if not all active circuit elements involve non-equilibrium phenomena occurring at surfaces. Much of biology is concerned with reactions at a surface.
Walter Houser BrattainI was quite into biology and chemistry at school, and I did well in my maths GCSE โ I really liked it and got an A โ so I quite fancied a career in forensics or something like that. But I bet if you put a maths exam paper in front of me now I wouldnโt have a clue.
Nikki SandersonArt 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.
Jeff KoonsLooking to biology to explain the low prevalence of eating disorders among men is like looking to genetics to explain why nonsmokers do not get lung cancer as often as smokers.
Susan BordoAs an adult I discovered that I was a pretty good autodidact, and can teach myself all kind of things. And developed a great interest in a number of different things from how to build a street hot rod from the ground up to quantum mechanics, and those two different kinds of mechanics, and it was really in the sciences, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, I would begin looking at these things looking for ideas, but in fact you don't read it for ideas you read it for curiosity and interest in the subject.
Dean KoontzEvolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. The key to our being here now is time, 4.54 billion (Earth) years of time. Nuclear fission wasn't discovered until long after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace published their original books and papers, for example. Our ability to measure atomic masses wasn't developed until long after their deaths. These features of nature enabled us to reckon the age of the Earth and compare it with speciation rates here.
Bill NyeWhen it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!" "Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
Richard P. FeynmanFood 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.
Michael PollanI think women assess time passage much better than men - because of their biological clocks - and they are much more realistic about measuring out time, whereas men tend to hang onto things. Women acknowledge the biology of their time, and dance through the beat of that drum...whereas men just drum.
Danny BoyleThe most devastating thing though that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation there is no need of a Savior. And I submit that puts Jesus, historical or otherwise, into the ranks of the unemployed. I think that evolution is absolutely the death knell of Christianity.
Frank ZindlerPhysics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.
Willard Van Orman QuineWe study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
Alain de BottonWhen I was very young, biology, the diversity of life, was one of my main interests. I know there's this image people have that I'm this spoiled, cocky punk of an actor. Honestly, that's not who I am. I really care that so many species have been wiped out, like genocide of entire races. I believe in the divine right of all species to survive on this planet. So I decided I want to be active as an environmentalist. I learned. I asked experts. I got active.
Leonardo DiCaprio