American Biologist Quotes

Find out what really fascinates you and follow that. Almost anything in nature, if you follow it, you will find a scientific problem. That is a better way to do it than following fads, because what is fashionable today may have been solved or fallen out of fashion once you have become a working scientist.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

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

Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife conservation must be dynamic, changing as conditions change, seeking always to become more effective.

When I made the decision to transition, I honestly had no idea what it would be like for me to live as female. The only thing I knew for sure was that pretending to be male was slowly killing me.

Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or is supported by logically coherent arguments, but because it does fit all the facts of taxonomy, of palaeontology, and of geographical distribution, and because no alternative explanation is credible.

James Dewey Watson

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

Martin A. Schwartz

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

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

Herbert Spencer Jennings

The distance between folk society and literate society is ever decreasing, and Teresa Brewer will yet shake hands with Mrs. Texas Gladden. But until that happens—until my own culture, and Teresa Brewer's, develops a folk tradition of its own—If I want to learn something about real folk music, I'll stick with Mrs. Gladden.

Scientists construct facts by constantly making decisions about what they will consider significant, what experiments they should pursue, and how they will describe their observations.

Theory generally should not be an attempt to say how the world is. Rather, it is an attempt to construct the logical relations that arise from various assumptions about the world.

Richard Lewontin

On balance, the cartesian metaphor of organism as machine has proved to be a good idea. Ideas do not have to be correct in order to be good; its only necessary that, if they do fail, they do so in an interesting way.

The modern research laboratory can be a large and complicated social organism.

J. Michael Bishop

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

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

Thomas Hunt Morgan

While our view of the world is filtered through our senses, evolution has, by and large, molded those senses to perceive the world accurately, for there's a severe penalty to be paid for seeing things wrongly. That holds not only for the external environment, but also for the character of others. Without accurate perceptions, we couldn't find food, avoid predators and other dangers, or form harmonious social groups. And following those perceptions is indeed the pursuit of true beliefs : beliefs based on evidence. Natural selection doesn't mold true beliefs; it molds the sensory and neural apparatus that, in general, promotes the formation of true beliefs.

General systems theory is a series of related definitions, assumptions, and postulates about all levels of systems from atomic particles through atoms, molecules, crystals, viruses, cells, organs, individuals, small groups, societies, planets, solar systems, and galaxies. General behavior systems theory is a subcategory of such theory, dealing with living systems, extending roughly from viruses through societies. A significant fact about living things is that they are open systems, with important inputs and outputs. Laws which apply to them differ from those applying to relatively closed systems.

James Grier Miller

There are already scientists— respected scientists in this country who do experiments on things that most people consider supernatural, such as prayer. When Newton proposed the theory of gravitation it was dismissed as supernaturalism because it was action at a distance. What constitutes supernaturalism in today's science may very well not be supernatural in tomorrow's science.

I am drawn to the wild not because it is wild but because it is sensible, logical, ordered, stable, resilient.

She watched the indigo sky, and the stars coming out tranquil as ever, as if this were any ordinary evening. Only humans knew what an evil time this was.

Joan Slonczewski

We live in evolutionary competition with microbes—bacteria and viruses. There is no guarantee that we will be the survivors.

Joshua Lederberg

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.