Organisms Quotes - Page 6

• Group selection and individual selection are just two of the selection processes that have played important roles in evolution. There also is selection within individual organisms (intragenomic conflict), and selection among multi-species communities (an idea that now is getting attention in work on the human microbiome). All four of these levels of selection find a place in multi-level selection theory.

  Elliott Sober

  Ideas, Two, Community

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• If the organisms in a species now have trait T, and this trait now helps those organisms to survive and reproduce because the trait has effect E, a natural hypothesis to consider is that T evolved in the lineage leading to those current organisms because T had effect E. This hypothesis is "natural," but it often isn't true!

  Elliott Sober

  Lineage, Helping, Natural

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Trait X is fitter than trait Y in a population of organisms if those organisms have other biological traits T and live in an environment that has properties E. The theory of natural selection is filled with statements of this form.

  Elliott Sober

  Population, Environment, Natural

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Philosophers of biology generally recognize that evolutionary fitness (roughly, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment) is multiply realizable.

  Elliott Sober

  Philosopher, Environment, Biology

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I'll have to look into [Washington] D.C. a bit more. I know it's given over to the administration and the bureaucracy connected to it. It's a super-organism of the American state. But there's also a parallel city in there where normal people live.

  Dylan Moran

  Cities, People, Administration

  Source: brightestyoungthings.com

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• Traditional folk music is about survival of the fittest song just like evolution is about survival of the fittest organism and generally the more times a song has been passed down the generations the more brilliant and concise it becomes as every link in that chain can add something good or remove something unnecessary.

  John Spiers

  Song, Survival, Links

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• We look at science as the ultimate answer for everything yet we are really messy organisms and when the two collide in the upper echelons of medicine you think science will prevail but it's not always that way.

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  Thinking, Two, Medicine

  Source: www.empireonline.com

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• When we experience stress, the nervous system tries to control things. Part of waking up is discovering what we are beyond that controlling organism.

  Tara Brach

  Stress, Trying, Wake Up

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• I stared at the Ohio River every day as a child, a thing that for me is almost more symbol than river. The formation of personality is inextricable from place. It strikes me as an interesting example of dependent co-arising; land shapes the organism, which then reshapes - literally and figuratively - the land. This because of this; not that because not that. Nothing is separate, least of all the literary mind.

  C.E. Morgan

  Children, Ohio, Land

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• You have to be able to grow and move with the organism that is the music industry. You need to maintain flexibility. Ownership of your own stuff is key and then you're able to dictate on a present-terms basis what would be the most effective way to protect yourself and what you've created. You also don't want to lock yourself into a situation where a major label owns part of your touring and merchandise.

  Eddie Vedder

  Moving, Keys, Want

  Source: www.twofeetthick.com

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• Analysis and synthesis are both as necessary to the thinking spirit as inspiration and expiration to the organism.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Inspiration, Thinking, Analysis

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• It is probably fair to estimate the frequency of a majority of mutations, in higher organisms, between one in ten thousand and one in a million per gene per generation.

  Francisco J. Ayala

  Majority, Mutation, Generations

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• There is not a moral to every story in animal behavior. Sometimes a snake is just a snake, and sometimes snake sex is only about sex in snakes, or sex in egg-laying reptiles. Although a biologist's job in part is to interpret what organisms do in a broader context, that context does not, and should not, need to include a lesson for human beings. This is true regardless of whether the lesson is something we would like to teach, which means that using animals as vehicles for nonsexist thinking is just as out of bounds as using them to keep women barefoot and pregnant.

  Marlene Zuk

  Sex, Jobs, Mean

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• Law of the Minimum: "The worst potential competition for any organism can come from its own kind. The species consumes necessities. Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. The least favourable condition controls the rate of growth."

  Frank Herbert

  Law, Competition, Growth

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• We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.

  Alan Watts

  People, Feelings, Suffering

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.8, Souvenir Press

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• A poem is an instant of lucidity in which
  the entire organism participates.

  Charles Simic

  Instant, Lucidity

  Charles Simic (1985). “The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry”

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• A natural hierarchy is simply an order of increasing wholeness, such as: particles to atoms to cells to organisms, or letters to words to sentences to paragraphs. The whole of one level becomes part of the whole of the next. In other words, natural hierarchies are composed of holons.

  Ken Wilber

  Cells, Order, Levels

  Ken Wilber (2007). “A Brief History of Everything”, p.39, Shambhala Publications

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• In a fully functional organism, an emotion has a very short life span. It is like a momentary ripple or wave on the surface of your Being.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Life, Emotion, Wave

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.120, New World Library

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• The logic of the poet - that is, the logic of language or the experience itself - develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.

  Thomas Merton

  Way, Logic, Language

  "The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton". Book by Thomas Merton, 1959.

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• The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.

  Sigmund Freud

  Reality, Long, Ego

  Sigmund Freud (2015). “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, p.4, Courier Corporation

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• When you start a game, you don't think to yourself, "well, OK, I'm going throw a one-hitter today." It just becomes an organism, your outing becomes an organism and it grows.

  R.A. Dickey

  Thinking, Games, Today

  "Master of the Knuckleball". Interview with Jeremy Stahl, www.slate.com. October 29, 2012.

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• Organisms are starting to move in response to climate change all over the place. Bees are disappearing and we don't have many of the native pollinators left to replace them. We're in deep trouble; there's no question about it. But ecologists tend to think of something that's going to be bad in ten years as very fast, and of course, politicians only think of things in a two-, four-, six-year cycle.

  Paul R. Ehrlich

  Moving, Thinking, Years

  Interview with Jesse Finfrock, www.motherjones.com. 2008.

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• To call the State an organism shows a diseased tendency to make a fetish of words.

  Emma Goldman

  States, Tendencies, Shows

  Alphonso Lingis, Emma Goldman (1996). “Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader”, Humanities Press International

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• One challenge of growing up in the twenty-first century will be to acquire a self-definition that can encompass person and planet, socially constructed self and transcendent being, organism and machine.

  Walter Truett Anderson

  Growing Up, Self, Challenges

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• Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

  John Fowles

  Real, Character, Independent

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENTANT'S WOMAN”

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