597 Quotes About Biology

One way of emphasizing the singularity of the recent past is [..] to observe that the total number of humans ever to have lived is estimated at around (a bit less than) 100 billion. One of Walt Whitman's poems has a memorable image—thinking of all past people lined up in orderly columns behind those living—‘row upon row rise the phantoms behind us’. Actually, looking over our shoulder, we would see only around 15 rows.

Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.

All of life is dependent upon other life, and the closer we consider what constitutes living, the harder life becomes to define.

A kind of bias I share says that if a human thinks symmetry is important it may or may not be, but if a bird thinks symmetry is important, it very likely is!

What an unlikely wonder is life, that it holds in itself the whole wildness of death – those bacteria didn’t come into life at the point of death, they were always there and they always wanted to eat you, and your cells always contained in them the enzymes that would assist your rotting. It was only ever your vehemence to survive that prevented all that. Did you know, were you ever able to detect within, the passionate warfare that kept you here?

Reconsider the lobster. Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures. Presumably, this is because lobsters are the only animal most philosophers have killed with their own two hands before eating. It’s unpleasant to throw a struggling creature in a pot of boiling water; one needs to be able to tell oneself that the lobster isn’t really feeling it.

Biology isn't about blunt force.

In brief, if we are biological organisms, not angels, much of what we seek to understand might lie beyond our cognitive limits – maybe a true understanding of anything, as Galileo concluded, and Newton in a certain way demonstrated. That cognitive reach has limits is not only a truism but also a fortunate one; if there were no limits to human intelligence, it would lack internal structure and would therefore have no scope: we could achieve nothing by inquiry.

Bonobos provide the perfect evidence for how our distant ape ancestors became cooperative and loving.