597 Quotes About Biology

Insects are major players in nature's recycling effort, and in nature a corpse is simply organic matter to be recycled. Left to its own devices, nature quickly populates a corpse with a diverse community of organisms, all dedicated to reducing the body to its basic components.

In the future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by graduation.

There are a lot of things animals do that we can't," she says, "like flying and camouflage, and we've adapted, through technology ... It's funny when people say something is natural, or not. Compared with what? Compared with when? It's this vanity of humans to think of themselves as special, as being at the height of evolution. We're not. We're obviously still adapting.

The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.

The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on the multiplication of blood cells by division in bird and mammalian embryos and on the division of muscle bundles in frog larvae. Since then I have continued these observations in frog larvae, where it is possible to follow the history of tissues back to segmentation.

The emotional mind likewise transcends the facile and appealing dualism separating its psychological and biological aspects. Physical mechanisms produce one’s experience of the world. Experience, in turn, remodels the neurons whose chemoelectric messages create consciousness. Selecting one strand of that eternal braid and assigning it primacy is the height of capriciousness. (168)

The cause of nutrition and growth resides not in the organism as a whole but in the separate elementary parts—the cells.

There are no mineral monsters.

The science of genetics is in a transition period, becoming an exact science just as the chemistry in the times of Lavoisier, who made the balance an indispensable implement in chemical research.