Biologist Quotes - Page 3

• Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.

  Alain de Botton

  Lying, Years, Year End

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2009.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• No practical biologist interested in sexual reproduction would be led to work out the detailed consequences experienced by organisms having three or more sexes; yet what else should he do if he wishes to understand why the sexes are, in fact, always two?

  Ronald Fisher

  Sex, Two, Work Out

  "The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection". Book by Ronald Fisher, 1930.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Psychohistory, like psychoanalysis, is a science in which the researcher's feelings are as much or even more a part of his research equipment than his eyes or his hands. Weighing of complex motives can only be accomplished by identification with human actors, the usual suppression of all feeling preached and followed by most "science" simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope. The emotional development of a psychohistorian is therefore as much a topic for discussion as his or her intellectual development.

  Lloyd deMause

  Eye, Emotional, Hands

  "Foundations of Psychohistory". Book by Lloyd deMause, 1982.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Like all biologists I simply acknowledge the gravity of the current situation. There are scenarios under which things work out well and to that extent I'm a cautious optimist.

  Richard Lewontin

  Work Out, Gravity, Currents

  Source: www.abc.net.au

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Darwin seems to lose out with the public primarily when his supporters force him into a mano-a-mano Thunderdome death match against the Almighty. Most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism. Thus, the strident tub-thumping for absolute atheism by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, whom the new issue of Discover Magazine rightly criticizes as "Darwin's Rottweiler," is self-defeating.

  Steve Sailer

  Believe, Self, Issues

  "The Left Doesn't Like Darwin Either". vdare.com, August 7, 2005.

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• Biochemists and biologists who adhere blindly to the Darwinism theory search for results that will be in agreement with their theories and consequently orient their research in a given direction, whether it be in the field of ecology, ethology, sociology, demography (dynamics of populations), genetics (so-called evolutionary genetics), or paleontology. This intrusion of theories has unfortunate results: it deprives observations and experiments of their objectivity, makes them biased, and, moreover, creates false problems.

  Pierre-Paul Grasse

  Knowledge, Objectivity, Agreement

  "Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation" by Pierre-Paul Grasse, Academic Press, (p. 7), 1977.

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am of course getting angry if biologists try to use the general concept 'chance' in order to explain phenomena which are so typical for living organisms as, for instance, those appearing in the biological evolution.

  Wolfgang Paul

  Order, Trying, Typical

  6 Copy quote

• [E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Attitude, Animal, Discipline

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas”, p.64, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• An evolutionary biologist and a fundamentalist may see the same chimpanzee sitting in a cage, but in another important way, they do not. And they may approach the details of their lives in very different ways.

  Peg O'Connor

  Important, Sitting, May

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The attitude of the true scientist towards the real limits of human understanding was unforgettably impressed on me in early youth by the obviously unpremeditated words of a great biologist; Alfred Kuhn finished a lecture to the Austrian Academy of Science with Goethe 's words, "It is the greatest joy of the man of thought to have explored the explorable and then calmly to revere the inexplorable." After the last word he hesitated, raised his hand in repudiation and cried, above the applause, "No, not calmly, gentlemen; not calmly!

  Konrad Lorenz

  Attitude, Real, Men

  "On Aggression". Book by Konrad Lorenz, Ch. XII : On the Virtue of Scientific Humility, 1963.

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• A complete theory of evolution must acknowledge a balance between "external" forces of environment imposing selection for local adaptation and "internal" forces representing constraints of inheritance and development. Vavilov placed too much emphasis on internal constraints and downgraded the power of selection. But Western Darwinians have erred equally in practically ignoring (while acknowledging in theory) the limits placed on selection by structure and development what Vavilov and the older biologists would have called "laws of form.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Law, Theory Of Evolution, Balance

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History”, p.144, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track.

  Ronald Fisher

  Mean, Past, Ideas

  "Natural selection from the genetical standpoint". "Australian Journal of Earth Sciences" Peer-reviewed journal, 1959.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I didn't have toys and bikes; I'd go out and pick up rocks. I was into science and nature. It was my first love. I was going to be a vet and a marine biologist. I went to university and studied biology for two weeks and I just thought: "I've been conned!"

  Ricky Gervais

  Marine, First Love, Two

  "Ghost Town - Ricky Gervais interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• originality" is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: "It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries.

  Randall Jarrell

  Discovery, Done, Technique

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "The End of the Line" (pp. 79 - 80), 1980.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As an evolutionary biologist, I have learned over the years that most people do not want to see themselves as lumbering robots programmed to ensure the survival of their genes. I don't think they will want to see themselves as digital computers either. To be told by someone with impeccable scientific credentials that they are nothing of the kind can only be pleasing.

  John Maynard Smith

  Thinking, Years, People

  14 Copy quote

• All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Essence, Variation, Knows

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, p.476, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is an occupational risk of biologists to claim, towards the end of their careers, that the problems which they have not solved are insoluble.

  John Maynard Smith

  Science, Careers, Risk

  John Maynard Smith (1988). “Games, sex and evolution”, Prentice Hall

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a simple, understood, and explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding before us. Biologists must be encouraged to think about the weaknesses and extrapolations that theoreticians put forward or lay down as established truths. The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and falsity of their beliefs.

  Louis Agassiz

  Simple, Reality, Thinking

  13 Copy quote

• Addressing the conclusions of The God Delusion point by point with the devastating insight of a molecular biologist turned theologian, Alister McGrath dismantles the argument that science should lead to atheism, and demonstrates instead that Dawkins has abandoned his much-cherished rationality to embrace an embittered manifesto of dogmatic atheist fundamentalism.

  Francis Collins

  Atheist, Atheism, Argument

  25 Copy quote

• Most biologists, (says Vogel, 1981) seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region.

  Bill Mollison

  Layers, Fuzzy, Boundaries

  "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual". Book by Bill Mollison, 1988.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Paleontologist Niles Eldredge, a prominent evolutionist, said: 'The doubt that has infiltrated the previous, smugly confident certitude of evolutionary biology’s last twenty years has inflamed passions.' He spoke of the 'lack of total agreement even within the warring camps,' and added, 'things really are in an uproar these days . . . Sometimes it seems as though there are as many variations on each [evolutionary] theme as there are individual biologists.'

  Niles Eldredge

  Passion, Years, Agreement

  10 Copy quote

• Biologists can be divided into two classes: experimentalists who observe things that cannot be explained, and theoreticians who explain things that cannot be observed.

  Aharon Katzir

  Class, Two, Divided

  4 Copy quote

• ... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a precisely opposite situation prevails: biologists have documented a veritable glut of cases for rapid and eminently measurable evolution on timescales of years and decades.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Years, Opposites, Facts

  4 Copy quote

• 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”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The question of historicity and actuality with regard to gods and unicorns is a relatively trifling matter which may be left to antiquarians and biologists, for both the god and the unicorn had a business to perform greater than any mere existence in the flesh could explain or provide a basis for.

  Odell Shepard

  May, Flesh, Matter

  Odell Shepard (1930). “The lore of the unicorn”, Outlet

  12 Copy quote

  Show source