Biology Quotes - Page 17

• Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology.

  Jonathan Sacks

  Ideas, Age, Faces

  "The Moral Animal" by Jonathan Sacks, www.nytimes.com. December 23, 2012.

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• I don't pretend there aren't biological differences, but I don't believe the desire for leadership is hardwired biology, not the desire to win or excel. I believe that it's socialization, that we're socializing our daughters to nurture and our boys to lead.

  Sheryl Sandberg

  Daughter, Believe, Winning

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• There's so much I'm interested in that I didn't discover in high school. For 'The Amazing Spider-Man', because Gwen is a scientist, we went to a lab in San Diego, and we were learning about biology. And I'm fascinated! Because I never went to biology class in high school.

  Emma Stone

  School, Men, Class

  "Emma Stone: The Cool Girl". Interview with Amy Spencer, www.glamour.com. March 28, 2011.

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• Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

  Lewis Thomas

  Mean, Persistence, Survival

  Lewis Thomas (1984). “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony”, Bantam

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• To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation.

  Derrick Jensen

  Self, Civilization, Ignorant

  Derrick Jensen (2006). “Endgame”, p.149, Seven Stories Press

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• Oh I believe in loving cats and dogs and children and parents – sometimes – but I don’t believe in romantic love. Of course, there’s the momentary rush of hormones and chemicals that encourages us to mate, but it’s biology – it’s no more inherently mystical than the nicotine in that cigarette you’re smoking

  Amy Jenkins

  Dog, Children, Believe

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Ignorance, Keys, Has Beens

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.134, W. W. Norton & Company

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• If the story had been about anyone else, it would been dismissed as laaf, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate ---sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school.

  Khaled Hosseini

  School, Kids, Son

  Khaled Hosseini (2011). “The Kite Runner: Rejacketed”, p.11, A&C Black

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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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• My first class is biology. I can't find it and get my first demerit for wandering the hall. It is 8:50 in the morning. Only 699 days and 7 class periods until graduation.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Morning, Class, Firsts

  Laurie Halse Anderson (2011). “Speak”, p.6, Macmillan

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  Cities, Expression, Imagination

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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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• The supersession of dualism in biology begins to occur in this science at the moment when the ‘time’ factor is taken into consideration.

  Jean Gebser

  Taken, Moments, Consideration

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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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