Organisms Quotes - Page 25

• If the aging process is controlled in a similar way in worms and humans, then we can use what we learn about worms to speed our study of higher organisms.

  Cynthia Kenyon

  Use, Way, Aging

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• Painting someone's portrait is, of course, an impossible task. What an absurd idea to try and distil a human being, the most complex organism on the planet, into flicks, washes, and blobs of paint on a two-dimensional surface.

  David Cobley

  Ideas, Two, Trying

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• Ants offer special advantages for some important kinds of basic biological research. The colony is a superorganism. It can be analyzed as a coherent unit and compared with the organism in the design of experiments, with the individuals treated as the rough analogues of cells.

  Bert Holldobler

  Cells, Design, Special

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• In the beginning, there were bacteria.... [A] nearly universal assumption is that all subsequent life descended from the original life form through a continuous chain of ancestor-descendant pairs. This assumption looks good because all living organisms share biochemical traits. It is conceivable, of course, that life originated more than once on the early earth but that all except one life form died out early, leaving a single lineage as the ancestor of life as we know it. If this did happen, it was the first important species extinction.

  David M. Raup

  Leaving, Important, Earth

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• Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation - e.g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of nondemonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hyputheses on the basis of a certain body of data.

  Jerry Fodor

  Thinking, Data, Class

  "Wittgenstein, Mind, and Meaning". Book by Meredith Williams, 2002 edition.

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• The biochemistry and biophysics are the notes required for life; they conspire, collectively, to generate the real unit of life, the organism. The intermediate level, the chords and tempos, has to do with how the biochemistry and biophysics are organized, arranged, played out in space and time to produce a creature who grows and divides and is.

  Ursula Goodenough

  Real, Space, Levels

  Ursula Goodenough (2000). “The Sacred Depths of Nature”, p.49, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Sometime in the first billion years, life appeared on the earth's surface. Slowly, the fossil record indicates, living organisms climbed the ladder from simple to more advanced forms.

  Robert Jastrow

  Simple, Years, Records

  Robert Jastrow (1969). “White Dwarfs: Man's Descent from the Stars”

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• The fossil record contains no trace of these preliminary stages in the development of many-celled organisms.

  Robert Jastrow

  Fossils, Records, Development

  Robert Jastrow (1967). “Red Giants and White Dwarfs: The Evolution of Stars, Planets, and Life”

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• The physical life of an individual person is limited, but the life of the masses united as an independent social-political organism is immortal. Only when an individual becomes a member of this community can he acquire the immortal social-political life.

  Kim Jong Il

  Independent, Community, Political

  "Theory of the Immortal Social-Political Body". 1986.

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• When in organism there are cancer cells, they have to be removed, not helped because they're "so young" and "so creative".

  Janusz Korwin-Mikke

  Cancer, Cells, Creative

  Blog post, August 29, 2007.

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• The vulgarization of Darwinism that sees the "struggle for existence" as nothing but the competition for some environmental resource in short supply ignores the large body of evidence about the actual complexity of the relationship between organisms and their resources.

  Richard Lewontin

  Struggle, Competition, Environmental

  "It’s Even Less in Your Genes" by Richard C. Lewontin, www.nybooks.com. May 26, 2011.

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• You can't teach biology with a bottle containing dead animals and organisms.

  Roman Vishniac

  Animal, Bottles, Biology

  "Roman Vishniac, 92, a Biologist And Photographer of Jews, Dies" by Richard F. Shepard, New York Times, January 23, 1990.

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• Education is so much of an organic unity that, if any of the stages or elements of it be defective, the deficiency is felt throughout all the subsequent growth of the organism.

  George Trumbull Ladd

  Education, Unity, Growth

  George Trumbull Ladd (1899). “Essays on the Higher Education”

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• Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.

  H. L. Mencken

  Government, Effort, Resistance

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.204, Knopf

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• ...every machine is the spiritualization of an organism.

  Theo van Doesburg

  Machines

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• We are learning that the earth functions like an invisible organism. We are the various cells of one living being. Those who work to save the earth are its antibodies.

  Jeremy Rifkin

  Cells, Earth, Invisible

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• A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength. .. When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim towards reproduction.

  John Steinbeck

  Inspirational, Endurance, Dying

  John Steinbeck (2009). “The Short Novels of John Steinbeck: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.131, Penguin

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• I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism- in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.

  H. L. Mencken

  Life, Success, Powerful

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• The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability.

  Ernst Mayr

  Believe, Civilization, Issues

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• On Earth, among millions of lineages or organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence ; this makes me believe its utter improbablity.

  Ernst Mayr

  Believe, Events, Earth

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• Economic freedom is in our eyes a good. It is among the highest of temporal goods because it is necessary to the highest life of society through the dignity of man and through the multiplicity of his action, in which multiplicity is life. Through well-divided property alone can the units of society react upon the State. Through it alone can a public opinion flourish. Only where the bulk of the cells are healthy can the whole organism thrive.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Eye, Men, Cells

  Hilaire Belloc (2002). “An Essay on the Restoration of Property”, p.26, IHS Press

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• Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Democracy, Destruction, Humans

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• Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes.

  Antonio Damasio

  Intelligent, Luxury, Outcomes

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• Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.

  Asa Gray

  Animal, Vegetables, Next

  Asa Gray (1880). “Natural Science and Religion”

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• Organisms dont think of CO2 as a poison. Plants and organisms that make shells, coral, think of it as a building block.

  Janine Benyus

  Block, Thinking, Poison

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