20th-century Biologist Quotes

It isn't necessary to seek out adventure. Opening to what is around you will produce the most extraordinary experiences.

Edward B. Lewis

To save biodiversity, we must act before the virgin forest disappears, because no effort at ecosystem rehabilitation, however sophisticated, will ever recreate nature in its primeval state.

The study of adaptation is not an optional preoccupation with fascinating fragments of natural history, it is the core of biological study.

Colin Pittendrigh

Biology belongs to one of the surprising sciences, where each rule must always be supplemented with several exceptions (except this rule, of course).

For over two billion years, through the apparent fancy of her endless differentiations and metamorphosis, the Cell, as regards its basic physiological mechanisms, has remained one and the same. It is life itself, and our true and distant ancestor.

Concepts are games we play with our heads; methods are games we play with our hands, which at times are so handy they can be played without a head.

Frank Edwin Egler

Aging and death do seem to be what Nature has planned for us. But what if we have other plans?

Bernard L. Strehler

Evolution cannot be understood except in the frame of ecosystems.

Genetic engineers don't make new genes, they rearrange existing ones.

Evolution, a fact rather than mere hypothesis, is the central unifying concept in biology. By extension it affects almost all other fields of knowledge and thought and must be considered one of the most influential concepts in Western thought.

Douglas J. Futuyma

The fossil record says eloquently that profuse evolution had indeed occurred over millions of years, but the data just aren't sensitive enough to analyze evolutionary kinetics. This is the province of the evolutionary geneticist who works with descent and change in populations of present-day organisms.

Hampton L. Carson (biologist)

Scientific knowledge and understanding is a communal achievement, the sum of a multitude of contributions from many different people. Any individual may feel a certain justifiable pride if he knows that he has added one brick to the structure.

C. H. Waddington

There is no phenomenon in a living system that is not molecular, but there is none that is only molecular, either.

Paul Alfred Weiss

Neutrons paired incestuously with their proton offspring to form creation's first atoms - heavy hydrogen, otherwise known as deuterium.

Jack Cohen (scientist)

To do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts, and to do the science of geographical ecology is to search for patterns of plants and animal life that can be put on a map.

Robert H. MacArthur

Good researchers use research plans merely as starters and are ready to scrap them at once in the light of actual findings.

If I had any advice to [give] you it is just this: love science but do not worship it. Put science in its proper place, ranking it along with philosophy and history, music and religion, literature and art. If I had my life to live again (Darwin says), I would make it a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

Richard M. Eakin

Science is imagination in the service of the verifiable truth and that service is indeed communal. It cannot be rigidly planned. Rather, it requires freedom and courage and the plural contributions of many different kinds of people who must maintain their individuality while giving to the group.

Human power, which mounted slowly indeed through the eons of prehistory and somewhat more rapidly after the advent of the sword and pen, has gathered momentum with logarithmic sweep since the dawn of modern science. Today it seems to be rocketing into outer space with the incredible energy of atomic fission.

H. Bentley Glass

Recall some of the lectures you may have heard recently. Did you always know why the research had been done? Was it clear what problem was being illuminated by the data presented?

John Alexander Moore

It is not extraordinary that young taxonomists are trained like performing monkeys, almost wholly by imitation, and that in only the rarest cases are they given any instruction in taxonomic theory.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

Michael E. Soulé

Science, with technology, is the only way we have to avoid starvation, disease, and premature death. The misapplication of science and technology is due to the fact that the politics are wrong. Now my own view is that the politics are indeed wrong; but politics and science are so closely interrelated that they can hardly be separated.

Maurice Wilkins

Remote and imperturbable, the lives of whales are somehow enough to match any fantasy humanity can create. They are what we have lost, what we yearn for.

[The aard-vark] stands quite alone in the mammalian tree of life, like a single green leaf caught adventitiously in a spider's web.

Ivan T. Sanderson