British Biologist Quotes

William Bateson
John Maynard Smith
William Benjamin Carpenter
W. D. Hamilton
Francis Maitland Balfour
Ernest Starling
C. H. Waddington

With its hundred billion nerve cells, with their hundred trillion interconnections, the human brain is the most complex phenomenon in the known universe - always, of course, excepting the interaction of some six billion such brains and their owners within the socio-technological culture of our planetary ecosystem!

The nerves have been hitherto considered as chords that have no powers of contraction within themselves, but only serving as a medium, by means of which the influence of the brain may be communicated to the muscles, and the impressions made upon the different parts of the body conveyed to the brain.

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

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

No one who attentively examines the progress of any department of Science, save such as are (like Mathematics or Metaphysics) of a purely abstract character, can fail to perceive how much it is dependent upon the perfection of its instruments.

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

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

What mechanism can it be that results in the production of homologous organs, the same 'patterns', in spite of their not being controlled by the same genes? I asked this question in 1938, and it has not been answered

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
C. H. Waddington
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.

The spirit of speculation is the same as the spirit of science, namely... a desire to know the causes of things.

The term Invertebrata is also a mere collective name; it is employed to designate all animals which do not belong to the phylum Vertebrata. Like the name Metazoa its convenience in promoting terseness of expression is its only justification.

When asked by a group of theologians what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of His creation, Haldane is said to have answered, "An inordinate fondness for beetles."

Wisdom, the highest product of the human mind, comes late; the young are rarely wise and are not expected to be.

In physiology, as in all other sciences, no discovery is useless, no curiosity misplaced or too ambitious, and we may be certain that every advance achieved in the quest of pure knowledge will sooner or later play its part in the service of man.

Ernest Starling
Ernest Starling
The theory of evolution by natural selection is an ecological theory—founded on ecological observation by perhaps the greatest of all ecologists. It has been adopted by and brought up by the science of genetics, and ecologists, being modest people, are apt to forget their distinguished parenthood.

The fundamental problem in the origin of species is not the origin of differences in appearance, since these arise at the level of the geographical race, but the origin of genetic segregation. The test of species-formation is whether, when two forms meet, they interbreed and merge, or whether they keep distinct.

David Lack
David Lack
When it was suggested to Pasteur that many of his great achievements depended on luck, he replied - I'm sure with more than a little irritation - 'In the field of observation in science, fortune only favours the prepared mind.' It is not by chance that it is always the great scientists who have the luck.

A large proportion of mankind, like pigeons and partridges, on reaching maturity, having passed through a period of playfulness or promiscuity, establish what they hope and expect will be a permanent and fertile mating relationship. This we call marriage.

We will be one of the extinguished species. The good news is that life on the planet will recover and peace will return to the environment.

There is the life of the plankton in almost endless variety; there are the many kinds of fish, both surface and bottom living; there are the hosts of different invertebrate creatures on the sea-floor; and there are those almost grotesque forms of pelagic life in the oceans depths. Then there are the squids and cuttlefish, and the porpoises, dolphins and great whales.

Alister Hardy
Alister Hardy
Though we must hold to our faith in the evolution of species, there is little evidence as to how it has come about, and no clear proof that the process is continuing in any considerable degree at the present time.

William Bateson
William Bateson
Thus, horses have very stiff backbones, and a consequence of this is that people can ride them. However, we would not say that the function of a horse's backbone is to enable people to ride horses, because we do not think that horse's backbones evolved as they did so as to enable people, in the future, to ride.

John Maynard Smith
John Maynard Smith
[Why do animals] undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace... The explanation of such facts is obvious. The stage when the tadpole breathes by gills is a repetition of the stage when the ancestors of the frog had not advanced in the scale of development beyond a fish.

Francis Maitland Balfour
Francis Maitland Balfour