Biology Quotes - Page 17

• 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.

  Steven Pinker

  Cat, Judging, Language

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language”, p.409, Penguin UK

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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 biology, but what is the song?

  James Frey

  Song, Heart, Beats

  James Frey (2004). “A Million Little Pieces”, p.316, Anchor

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• 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.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Years, Doubt

  Richard Dawkins (2009). “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”, p.85, Simon and Schuster

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

  Oliver Sacks

  Life, Anatomy And Physiology, Disease

  "Literature about medicine may be all that can save us" by Andrew Solomon, www.theguardian.com. April 22, 2016.

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• The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.

  Stewart Brand

  Technology, Law, Four

  "The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready?". The TED Interview, www.ted.com. February, 2013.

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• At lunch Francis [Crick] winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.

  James D. Watson

  Distance, Science, Discovery

  James D. Watson, Alexander Gann, Jan Witkowski (2012). “The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix”, p.209, Simon and Schuster

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• The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.

  Michael Pollan

  Food, Animal, Community

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.156, Penguin

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• What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally 'inherit' tradition.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Hero, Long

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

  Scott Westerfeld

  Philosophy, People, Degrees

  Scott Westerfeld (2006). “Peeps”, p.153, Penguin

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• As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones. There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside. The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'.

  Bruce Chatwin

  Fall, Animal, Journey

  Bruce Chatwin (2012). “The Songlines”, p.271, Random House

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• It is ... a sign of the times-though our brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so-that biology is now a science in which theories can be devised: theories which lead to predictions and predictions which sometimes turn out to be correct. These facts confirm me in a belief I hold most passionately-that biology is the heir of all the sciences.

  Peter Medawar

  Brother, Time, Science

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• If the task of scientific methodology is to piece together an account of what scientists actually do, then the testimony of biologists should be heard with specially close attention. Biologists work very close to the frontier between bewilderment and understanding.
  Biology is complex, messy and richly various, like real life; it travels faster nowadays than physics or chemistry (which is just as well, since it has so much farther to go), and it travels nearer to the ground. It should therefore give us a specially direct and immediate insight into science in the making.

  Peter Medawar

  Real, Science, Giving

  Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

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• The question of surrender is political, it is not a question of love. And relationship is not love at all; it means love has ended and relationship has begun. It begins very soon after the honeymoon - mostly in the middle of the honeymoon. It is not easy to live with another person whose life-style is different, whose likings are different, whose education and culture is different, and above all the other happens to be a woman - even their biology is different.

  Rajneesh

  Relationship, Mean, Political

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• There is an authentic biology of hope. Belief and expectation - the key elements of hope - can block pain by releasing the brain's endorphins and enkephalins, mimicking the effects of morphine.

  Jerome Groopman

  Pain, Block, Keys

  Jerome Groopman (2003). “The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness”, p.8, Random House

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• The price of these failures has been a loss of moral consensus, a greater sense of helplessness about the human condition. ... The intellectual solution to the first dilemma can be achieved by a deeper and more courageous examination of human nature that combines the findings of biology with those of the social sciences.

  E. O. Wilson

  Loss, Science, Intellectual

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• Like many great ideas in biology, the idea implicating infectious causation in chronic diseases, though simple, has far-reaching implications. It is so simple and so significant, that one would think it would have been recognized by many and would be the starting point for any discussion on the causes of disease. Not yet.

  Paul W. Ewald

  Simple, Thinking, Ideas

  Paul W. Ewald (2000). “Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancers, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments”, p.56, Simon and Schuster

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• Maybe the best we can hope for is that those we leave behind find comfort in knowing, that we’re born out of love, and not science. That biology explains the how, but love explains the why

  Shane Koyczan

  Knowing, Comfort, Being The Best

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• Biology can be said to define possibilities but not determine them; it is never irrelevant but it is also not determinant.

  Cordelia Fine

  Possibility, Said, Determine

  Cordelia Fine (2005). “Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences”, p.122, Icon Books Ltd

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• Since consciousness is the basis of all reality, any shift in consciousness changes every aspect of our reality. Reality is created by consciousness differentiating into cognition, moods, emotions, perceptions, behavior, speech, social interactions, environment, interaction with the forces of nature, and biology. As consciousness evolves, these different aspects of consciousness also change.

  Deepak Chopra

  Reality, Perception, Speech

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• Heredity is to-day the central problem of biology. This problem may be approached from many sides - that of the breeder, the experimenter, the statistician, the physiologist, the embryologist, the cytologist - but the mechanism of heredity can be studied best by the investigation of the germ cells and their development.

  Edwin Conklin

  Cells, Development, May

  "The Mechanism of Heredity". "Science", Vol. 27, No. 691, January 17, 1908.

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• 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.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Doctrine, Genius, Facts

  Ludwig von Mises (1985). “Theory and History”, p.331, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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• 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.

  Michael Pollan

  Long, Community, Together

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.16, Penguin

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• It's bad biology to rob nonhuman animals of their emotional lives.

  Marc Bekoff

  Animal, Emotional, Emotional Life

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• Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
  Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
  Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
  Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
  and
  History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

  Albert Goldbarth

  Night, Rainbow, Psychology

  Albert Goldbarth (1991). “Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology : Poems”, p.118, University of Georgia Press

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• What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary

  Simon Baron-Cohen

  Play, Differences, Worry

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