20th-century Biologist Quotes

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

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.

If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would probably design something like a classroom.

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

Jack Cohen (scientist)

The only realistic view is that a human life arises gradually, which is not much help in making personal decisions or devising public policy.

George C. Williams

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

We suggest that in the next decades fisheries management will have to emphasize the rebuilding of fish populations embedded within functional food webs, within large 'no-take' marine protected areas.

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

Paul Alfred Weiss

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)

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.

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

Travel is said to be broadening because it makes us realize that our way of doing things is not the only one, that people in other cultures live differently and get by just fine. Insects do that, too, only better.

Evolution cannot be understood except in the frame of ecosystems.

Man is not an organism; he is an intelligence served by organs.

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

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

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

Bernard L. Strehler

Scientists who do deny their politics—who claim to be objective and unemotional about gender while living in a world where even boats and automobiles are identified by sex—are fooling both themselves and the public at large.

Anne Fausto-Sterling

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

Colin Pittendrigh

"Every single new idea in chemistry has come not from the minds of chemists but from nature...

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

Edward B. Lewis

Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.

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

[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

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