597 Quotes About Biology

The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

Any weapon is a biological weapon if it saves your life.

Our breath serves the mind, not the other way around.

We humans don’t suffer from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘animal condition’, but a conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled HUMAN CONDITION.

The playwright George Bernard Shaw also warned of how difficult it is to introduce a new paradigm of thinking — especially one that dares to confront the historically unbearably confronting and off-limits subject of the human condition — when he said that ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’ (Annajanska, 1919).

The journalist Richard Neville was frighteningly accurate when, in summarising the desperate state of our species’ situation, he wrote that ‘We are locked in a race between self destruction and self discovery’. ONLY ‘self discovery’ — this reconciling, ameliorating, psychologically healing understanding of ourselves — can save us from ‘self destruction’.

So…what are we doing in class today?” I ask Adam, hoping that my question might stir him into action. I also ask to satisfy my curiosity. Adam sighs, before copying Jen. “Oh…just the structure of a plasma membrane.” He says in a matter of fact tone. “Nothing too taxing.” My silent reply says everything. Oh boy!

If you have to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be "it's complicated.

Human vice is proof that biological adaption is, speaking literally, a thing of the past. Our minds are adapted to the small foraging bands in which our family spent ninety-nine percent of its existence, not the topsy-turvy contingencies we have created since the agricultural and industrial revolutions.[...]People do not divine what is adaptive for them or their genes; their genes give them thoughts and feelings that were adaptive in the environment in which the genes were selected.