American Biologist Quotes

Rachel Carson

James Dewey Watson

Stephen Jay Gould

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Norman Borlaug

E. O. Wilson

Donald A. Glaser

There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.

The downside of skepticism: it can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea, a position that is as lacking in critical thinking as the one of the true believer, and that simply does not help either science or the public at large.

Massimo Pigliucci

I don't know exactly what you guys want to do, but let me tell you why you should do it with fruit flies.

Eric F. Wieschaus

Freedom is the range of opportunities available to an individual - the more he has to choose from, the freer his choices. Science creates freedom by widening our range of understanding and therefore the possibilities from which we can choose.

David Baltimore

If the wolf is to survive, the wolf haters must be outnumbered. They must be outshouted, out financed, and out voted. Their narrow and biased attitude must be outweighed by an attitude based on an understanding of natural processes.

Epidemiology is like a bikini: what is revealed is interesting; what is concealed is crucial.

Darwinian social theory gives us a glimpse of an underlying symmetry and logic in social relationships which, when more fully comprehended by ourselves, should revitalize our political understanding and provide the intellectual support for a science and medicine of psychology. In the process it should also give us a deeper understanding of the many roots of our suffering.

Even within the realm of the strictly scientific; we need constant touch with the concrete realities of living nature to prevent our picturing her as exclusively such as we make her in our specialties and in our private dreams.

Ralph Vary Chamberlin

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

I liked to use my face mask more than the diving helmet for most occasions. I was learning to hold my breath longer now and could go down almost as deep without the helmet which limited my movements...

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

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

Education is habit-forming rather than information; illumination rather than indoctrination, inspiration rather than compulsion.

Edwin Grant Conklin

A generalization is a mountain of observations; from the summit the outlook is broad. The great observer climbs to the outlook, while the mere thinker struggles to imagine it.

Charles Sedgwick Minot

One does not really understand a scientific problem unless one knows at least in rough outline how it came to be formulated.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant.

Martin A. Schwartz

Life isn't about the final destination or the accomplishments and accolades; it's about the journey and the opportunities for learning—and how we grow as a result.

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.

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

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

Bernard L. Strehler

The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

The Universe is one indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled it is impossible to consider them as independent elements.

Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature. Matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity.

Stephen Jay Gould

We look to medical research to discover remedial measures to insure better health and more happiness for mankind.

Thomas Hunt Morgan

The universe did not become sterile with the first production of life. It is continuously creative now as in the past.

Herbert Spencer Jennings