Zoologist Quotes

For those that endure until spring, existence is reduced to its elegant essentials.

I am convinced that of all the people on the two sides of the great curtain, the space pilots are the least likely to hate each other. Like the late Erich von Holst, I believe that the tremendous and otherwise not quite explicable public interest in space flight arises from the subconscious realization that it helps to preserve peace. May it continue to do so!

The natural order of organisms is a divergent inclusive hierarchy and that hierarchy is recognized by taxic homology.

If you believe in science you must have a rather strong faith.

Other things being equal, the investigator is always the best instructor. The highest grade of instruction in any science can only be furnished by one who is thoroughly imbued with the scientific spirit, and who is actually engaged in original work.

Charles Otis Whitman

A true bond of friendship is usually only possible between people of roughly equal status. This equality is demonstrated in many indirect ways, but it is reinforced in face-to-face encounters by a matching of the posture of relaxation or alertness.

What is the use of their unceasing mutations, if they do not change? In sum, the mutations of bacteria and viruses are merely hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no final evolutionary effect.

Pierre-Paul Grassé

They are so plump that you feel inclined to pat them, only they are too small.

Widely dispersed knowledge concerning the important role of basic cooperative processes among living beings may lead to the acceptance of cooperation as a guiding principle both in social theory and as a basis for human behavior. Such a development when it occurs will alter the course of human history.

Perhaps it is not amiss to remark that the biologist may not hope to solve the ultimate problems of life any more than the chemist and physicist may hope to penetrate the final mysteries of existence in the non-living world.

Edmund Beecher Wilson

Morphological information has provided the greatest single source of data in the formulation and development of the theory of evolution and that even now, when the preponderance of work is experimental, the basis for interpretation in many areas of study remains the form and relationships of structures.

Everett C. Olson

Considered from the standpoint of chemistry, living bodies appear to us as laboratories of chemical processes, for they undergo perpetual changes in their material substrate. They draw materials from the outside world and combine them with the mass of their liquid and solid parts.

Friedrich Tiedemann

As an organ is exercised, circulation is more particularly directed to it and is more readily performed in it. Consequently, all its secretions and excretions increase. The more an organ is exercised, the more it is nourished.

Georges Louis Duvernoy

The whole aim of comparative anatomy is to discover what structures are homologous.

The cell, this elementary keystone of living nature, is far from being a peculiar chemical giant molecule or even a living protein and as such is not likely to fall prey to the field of an advanced chemistry. The cell is itself an organism, constituted of many small units of life.

It is strongly suspected that a NEWTON or SHAKESPEARE excels other mortals only by a more ample development of the anterior cerebral lobes, by having an extra inch of brain in the right place.

Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet

It is a gift when someone can challenge you and open your mind to new ideas.

If sex evolved so that your children are not condemned to be just like you, intelligence evolved so that you are not condemned to be just like yourself.

I am not going to speculate about the emotions that might be involved in avian infidelity.