Vertebrates Quotes

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Memorial Day, Men, Remembrance

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With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species.

Anthony Storr

Humanity, Rodents, Members

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Ever since then, all descendant vertebrates have had the forward end of the digestive system and the forward end of the respiratory system very much involved with each other. This manifests itself in the human body with a crossing of the two systems in the throat.

George C. Williams

Two, Body, Ends

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God: a gaseous vertebrate.

Aldous Huxley

Religion

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In vertebrate paleontology, increasing knowledge leads to triumphant loss of clarity.

Alfred Romer

Knowledge, Loss, Science

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Researchers found a frog in new guinea that is so tiny, they believe it's the smallest vertebrate on the planet. It has the tiniest backbone of any living creature, except members of Congress.

Jay Leno

Believe, Frogs, Tiny

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It is difficult to imagine anyone having any real hopes for the human race in the face of the fact that the great majority of men still believe that the universe is run by a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and girth, who is nevertheless interested in the minutest details of the private conduct of even the meanest man.

H. L. Mencken

Running, Fear, Real

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We can now determine, easily and relatively cheaply, the detailed chemical architecture of genes ; and we can trace the products of these genes ( enzymes and proteins ) as they influence the course of embryology . In so doing we have made the astounding discovery that all complex animal phyla - arthropods and vertebrates in particular - have retained, despite their half-billion years of evolutionary independence, an extensive set of common genetic blueprints for building bodies.

Stephen Jay Gould

Animal, Discovery, Years

Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Leonardo's Mountain Of Clams”, p.283, Random House

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The earliest signs of living things, announcing as they do a high complexity of organization, entirely exclude the hypothesis of a transmutation from lower to higher grades of being. The first fiat of Creation which went forth, doubtlessly ensured the perfect adaptation of animals to the surrounding media; and thus, whilst the geologist recognizes a beginning, he can see in the innumerable facts of the eye of the earliest crustacean, the same evidences of Omniscience as in the completion of the vertebrate form.

Roderick Murchison

Eye, Science, Animal

Roderick Impey Murchison (1854). “Siluria the History of the Oldest Known Rocks Containing Organic Remains, with a Brief Sketch of the Distribution of Gold Over the Earth by Roderick Impey Murchison”, p.469

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Even something as complex as the eye has appeared several times; for example, in the squid, the vertebrates, and the arthropods. It's bad enough accounting for the origin of such things once, but the thought of producing them several times according to the modern synthetic theory makes my head swim

Frank B. Salisbury

Eye, Squids, Swim

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Structurally we should understand that one cannot think that the human brain is different from the brain of the other vertebrates. It is an important question, because we can investigate what is the difference between the brain of a mouse and ours, and of course the difference is enormous, in size and capacity.

Rodolfo Llinas

Thinking, Differences, Brain

Source: www.cerebromente.org.br

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Birds, it must be admitted, are the most exciting and most deserving of the vertebrates; they are perhaps the best entre into the study of natural history, and a very good wedge into conservation awareness.

Roger Tory Peterson

Bird, Study, Awareness

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[O]ne might ask why, in a galaxy of a few hundred billion stars, the aliens are so intent on coming to Earth at all. It would be as if every vertebrate in North America somehow felt drawn to a particular house in Peoria, Illinois. Are we really that interesting?

Seth Shostak

Stars, Science, America

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The development of the Vertebrate proceeds from an axis upward, in two layers, which coalesce at the edges, and also downward, in two layers, which likewise coalesce at the edges. Thus two main tubes are formed, one above the other. During the formation of these, the embryo separates into strata, so that the two main tubes are composed of subordinate tubes which enclose each other as fundamental organs, and are capable of developing into all the organs.

Karl Ernst von Baer

Two, Axes, Layers

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In time they sank and decayed, and nothing is left of them except an occasional impression in stones, in stones now found in deserts and on high mountain peaks. Birdless forests block the sun in uninhabited lands. Insects swirl in the air. And then, in a majestic, bloodthirsty, and mighty heave, the spinal columns of the vertebrates rise as monstrous lizards and fabulous creatures; dragons flinging their fearful bellows up to a steaming sky... Slowly they become birds, birds as light as undreamt dreams. The searing roars become birdsong, whimpering flutes on warm nights.

Erik Fosnes Hansen

Dream, Block, Night

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With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production.

Jeff Goodell

Fall, Australia, Water

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Our children think our world will end. It's a tragic thing. Adults don't think that. They don't see that we are eating the planet. But we are. If you take all the biomass of vertebrates on the planet, 98% are men and their domestic animals. All the wild animals in the world make up only 2%.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Children, Animal, Men

"Yann Arthus-Bertrand: Looking down on creation". Interview With Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. March 19, 2011.

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An immune system of enormous complexity is present in all vertebrate animals. When we place a population of lymphocytes from such an animal in appropriate tissue culture fluid, and when we add an antigen, the lymphocytes will produce specific antibody molecules, in the absense of any nerve cells. I find it astonishing that the immune system embodies a degree of complexity which suggests some more or less superficial though striking analogies with human language, and that this cognitive system has evolved and functions without assistance of the brain.

Niels Kaj Jerne

Animal, Cells, Brain

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If you confine yourself to this Skinnerian technique, you study nothing but the learning apparatus and you leave out everything that is different in octopi, crustaceans, insects and vertebrates. In other words, you leave out everything that makes a pigeon a pigeon, a rat a rat, a man a man, and, above all, a healthy man healthy and a sick man sick.

Konrad Lorenz

Learning, Health, Science

Richard Isadore Evans, Konrad Lorenz (1975). “Konrad Lorenz: The Man and His Ideas”, Harcourt

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Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.

Stephen Jay Gould

Block, Design, Progress

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Man, whose organization is regarded as the highest, departs from the vertebrate archetype; and it is because the study of anatomy is usually commenced from, and often confined to, his structure, that a knowledge of the archetype has been so long hidden from anatomists.

Charles Lyell

Knowledge, Science, Men

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Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.

Robert Anton Wilson

Believe, Thinking, People

"Prometheus Rising" by Robert Anton Wilson, Ch. 1, (p. 28), 1983.

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MAMMALIA, n.pl. A family of vertebrate animals whose females in a state of nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightened put them out to nurse, or use the bottle.

Ambrose Bierce

Nature, Animal, Nurse

Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.161, University of Georgia Press

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There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

Anthony Burgess

Vocabulary, Earth, Flesh

Anthony Burgess (1964). “Language made plain”

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In the study of this membrane [the retina] I for the first time felt my faith in Darwinism (hypothesis of natural selection) weakened, being amazed and confounded by the supreme constructive ingenuity revealed not only in the retina and in the dioptric apparatus of the vertebrates but even in the meanest insect eye. ... I felt more profoundly than in any other subject of study the shuddering sensation of the unfathomable mystery of life.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

Eye, Science, Research

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1989). “Recollections of My Life”, p.576, MIT Press

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