Biology Quotes - Page 21

• It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum.

  Craig Venter

  Knowledge, Science, Impact

  "Genome announcement a milestone, but only a beginning". www.cnn.com. June 26, 2000.

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• It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology.

  Niels Kaj Jerne

  Children, Mean, Science

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• Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.

  Erwin Chargaff

  Science, Practice, Molecular Biology

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• We are now witnessing, after the slow fermentation of fifty years, a concentration of technical power aimed at the essential determinants of heredity, development and disease. This concentration is made possible by the common function of nucleic acids as the molecular midwife of all reproductive particles. Indeed it is the nucleic acids which, in spite of their chemical obscurity, are giving to biology a unity which has so far been lacking, a chemical unity.

  C. D. Darlington

  Years, Giving, Unity

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• The theory of natural selection is the centerpiece of The Origin of Species and of evolutionary theory. It is this theory that accounts for the adaptations of organisms, those innumerable features that so wonderfully equip them for survival and reproduction; it is this theory that accounts for the divergence of species from common ancestors and thus for the endless diversity of life. Natural selection is a simple concept, but it is perhaps the most important idea in biology.

  Douglas J. Futuyma

  Simple, Ideas, Diversity

  Douglas J. Futuyma (2009). “Evolution”, Sinauer Associates Incorporated

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• Evolution lies at the heart of biology. It is seamlessly and continuously linked to health research to better understand such conditions as AIDS or bird flu or Parkinson's or cancer or heart disease. Every biomedical experiment, every tiny advance, every major breakthrough ultimately connects to the principles first postulated by Darwin.

  Huntington Willard

  Cancer, Lying, Heart

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• I have been a biologist for a long time, and I hope I never stop getting shivers in my spine when I think about the beauty of how we come to know things in biology. Biologists make predictions, then they go out into the field or the lab to see if their predictions hold up. When hundreds of predictions of this sort are fulfilled, a theory reaches the point where it becomes certain, at least on a broad level. And that is where we are with evolution.

  Darrel R. Falk

  Thinking, Long, Levels

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• The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing.

  Freeman Dyson

  Air, Wind, Atmosphere

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• One thought spectra are marvellous, but it is not possible to make progress there. Just as if you have the wing of a butterfly then certainly it is very regular with the colors and so on, but nobody thought one could get the basis of biology from the coloring of the wing of a butterfly.

  Niels Bohr

  Butterfly, Science, Color

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• When 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

  Believe, Cocky, Divine Right

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• Now we see evolutionary trends in a variety of areas ranging from atomic and molecular physics through fluid mechanics, chemistry and biology to large scale systems of relevance in environmental and economic sciences

  Ilya Prigogine

  Environmental, Trends, Chemistry

  Ilya Prigogine (2003). “Is Future Given?”, p.22, World Scientific

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• In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!

  Steven Pinker

  School, College, Intuition

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• There is economics in biology, nothing is free, everything has to be paid for, there are costs as well as benefits to everything in life, for example, there was never sufficient natural selection pressure to develop better eyes, individuals could earn other things like smiley smiles rather than waste energy & time on better eyes.

  Richard Dawkins

  Eye, Energy, Example

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• Rulers do not like to admit that their power is restricted by any laws other than those of physics and biology. They never ascribe their failures and frustrations to the violation of economic law.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Frustration, Law, Liberty

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• If it were possible to transfer the methods of physical or of biological science directly to the study of man, the transfer would long ago have been made ... We have failed not for lack of hypotheses which equate man with the rest of the universe, but for lack of a hypothesis (short of animism) which provides for the peculiar divergence of man ... Let me now state my belief that the peculiar factor in man which forbids our explaining his actions upon the ordinary plane of biology is a highly specialized and unstable biological complex, and that this factor is none other than language.

  Leonard Bloomfield

  Men, Long Ago, Peculiar

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• The fundamental landscape of biology is undergoing a major upheaval, much as it did in the first decades of the 20th Century. This upheaval will take time to fully reveal its implications.

  Michael R. Rose

  Fundamentals, Upheaval, Landscape

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• This general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories nature presents to us is the inheritance of biology from The Origin of Species. To establish the continuity required by theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypothesis based on hypothesis, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion.

  W. R. Thompson

  Mean, Confusion, Historical

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• In my lab, we're interested in the transition from chemistry to early biology on the early earth.

  Jack W. Szostak

  Transition, Earth, Labs

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• I like to surf. I like to play guitar. I want to do college classes online. I wanted to do marine biology for a long time, but I don't know.

  Ali Lohan

  Marine, College, Guitar

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• On the first page of the Bible there is an instance of how literalism is but an invitation to transcend the image to which literalism points. That first page is not geology, biology or paleontology; it is high religion. For there we are told who we are in terms of our constititutive text. And if we could understand that, we would worrying about whether the antelopes or the cantaloupes came in a certain order.

  Joseph Sittler

  Order, Worry, Firsts

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• I can think of very few science books I've read that I've called useful. What they've been is wonderful. They've actually made me feel that the world around me is a much fuller, much more wonderful, much more awesome place than I ever realized it was. That has been, for me, the wonder of science. That's why science fiction retains its compelling fascination for people. That's why the move of science fiction into biology is so intriguing. I think that science has got a wonderful story to tell.

  Simon Jenkins

  Moving, Book, Thinking

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• Computer science needs to be part of the core curriculum - like algebra, biology, physics, or chemistry. We need all schools to teach it, not just 10%.

  Brad Feld

  School, Curriculum, Needs

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• Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Blood, Brain, Feds

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• I was quite into biology and chemistry at school, and I did well in my maths GCSE – I really liked it and got an A – 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 wouldn’t have a clue.

  Nikki Sanderson

  School, Math, Careers

  "Nikki Sanderson: 'I have body hang-ups - but I work the best of what I've got'". The Daily Mirror Interview, www.mirror.co.uk. August 2, 2008.

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• Usually based on an economic agenda, white working-class voters don't buy into this whole biology-chemistry-abortion-gender agenda as much as they want more take-home pay. They want affordability.

  Kellyanne Conway

  Home, Class, White

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