Biology Quotes

In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.

~ Richard Preston

The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. . . . If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.

~ Edward O. Wilson

We biologists often use the phrase “Mother Nature” to refer to the entire system of Nature that we see around us, but it is not really an entity, and it does not have any real concern for any of its living creatures – it lives on with or without us; it is in our human psychology to impose a human-like identity upon any grand system that we encounter around us – it gives us a sense of closeness to that system and makes us feel an essential part of it. When I say, Mother Nature designed us, or programmed us, I am simply referring to the process of natural selection.

~ Abhijit Naskar

None can reply - all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue, which teaches awful doubt.

~ Charles Darwin

When Mother Nature speaks, even the Gods hold silence.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Biology is run by intricate cellular mechanisms. Cellular mechanisms are run by Nature. Thus, the more we attempt to understand Nature, the more we get closer to our existential properties.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Trees live in symbiosis with hyphae (fungus/mold roots). A tea spoon of dirt contains kilometers of these roots. One species can spread throughout entire forests over centuries. They exchange nutrients with trees, along with information about insects, drought and other dangers. It's like a 'wood wide web'.

~ Peter Wohlleben

As we delight in the strange and exotic beauty of orchid flowers, it is salutary to reflect that we are, in essence, looking at their genitalia.

~ Unknown British Biologist

The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster.

~ James S.a. Corey

Our present intricate humanly consciousness evolved after a long journey of struggle. And the beauty of natural selection is that our struggle against nature made us worthy of being rewarded with the 3 lbs. lump of highly advanced biological computer by our Mother Nature herself.

~ Abhijit Naskar

If God were mortal and had but one life to give, he would have been more careful about how he created the world.

~ A.e. Samaan

Ugly or beautiful, it is the little creatures that make the world go round. We should celebrate and appreciated them in all their wonderful diversity.

~ Dave Goulson

In AP Bio, I learned that the cells in our body are replaced every seven years, which means that one day I'll have a body full of cells that were never sick. But it also means that the parts of me that knew and loved Sadie will disappear. I'll still remember loving her, but it'll be a different me who loved her. And maybe this is how we move on. We grow new cells to replace the grieving ones, diluting our pain until it loses potency.

~ Robyn Schneider

It’s all biology. If it weren’t for two thousand years of the Christian tradition we wouldn’t think of pretending otherwise…Romance is the true opiate of the masses.

~ Amanda Craig

Measured with magnetic field meters, the electromagnetic field that the heart produces is some 5,000 times more powerful than that created by the brain.

~ Stephen Harrod Buhner

They say blood is thicker than water. It's also more treacherous, prone to betrayal, full of shit and quite honestly, I wouldn't put much weight into it at all.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

Neuron is to Consciousness, what D.N.A. is to Life. Thus, Biology of Mind is to the twenty-first century, what Biology of Life was to the twentieth century.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The complex organic device that creates and thereafter drives consciousness, is the human brain. Consciousness evolved hand in hand with the evolution of the human brain throughout a time span of six million years.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The externalization of memory [via the use of external symbolic storage systems] has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think, which is changing the role of biological memory, the way in which the human brain deploys its resources, and the form of modern culture.

~ Merlin Donald

Oh I believe in loving cats and dogs and children and parents – sometimes – but I don’t believe in romantic love. Of course, there’s the momentary rush of hormones and chemicals that encourages us to mate, but it’s biology – it’s no more inherently mystical than the nicotine in that cigarette you’re smoking

~ Amy Jenkins

When I am fully immersed in my work of nourishing humanity, it fills my head with all kinds of feel-good chemicals, such as endorphins, serotonin and dopamine. Problems occur during the brief intervals between the finishing of one work and the beginning of another. During these intervals, my biology starts to get filled with stress hormones cortisol and adrenalin, that worsens my OCD. That is why, I can’t sit still even a day after I finish writing a book. Because if I do, my OCD begins to suffocate me inside my head. Hence, as soon as I deliver a work, I have to start working on my next scientific literature.

~ Abhijit Naskar

To be honest, as a species we may not live long enough to ever understand the true reality of the universe. But as the foundation of consciousness lies within the domain of biology one day we shall know all there is to know about it.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Biomasses are a biological reality that cannot be denied as existing, but even though they exist physically, yet they have not attained the height of Homo sapiens. Humans could be termed as biomasses when they don’t fully put into use their human qualifications. Men and women that don’t bother to think. Men and women that don’t bother to notice things that are out of order. People who are indifferent about the happenings around them. Men and women that don’t respond with solution to the challenges of the era. All of these people are united by one common name BIOMASSES.

~ Sunday Adelaja

The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark power of reality. The gods enjoy eternal youth, and the search for the means of securing it was one of the occupations of the heroes of mythology and the sages, as it was of real adventurers in the middle ages and more recent times. . . . But the fountain of youth has not been found, and can not be found if it is sought in any particular spot on the earth. Yet it is no fable, no dream-picture; it requires no adept to find it: it streams forth inexhaustible in all living nature.

~ Ferdinand Cohn

In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Sex in social mammals is generally carried out in public, before the gazes of other members of the troop.

~ Jared Diamond

Stop talking about “rape” and start talking about “sex”, and within a few decades India will attain the true mindset to prevent sexual assaults.

~ Abhijit Naskar

When these flies were put together in all-male groups they formed long, moving chains resembling conga lines, with each male attempting (unsuccessfully) to mate with the male in front of it.

~ Simon Levay

Biology without selfishness, is nothing but fiction.

~ Abhijit Naskar

I told my three sons stories about germs more than fifty years ago as fanciful bedtime tales.

~ Arthur Kornberg

Human experience is not nest and orderly, ready to be coded into predetermined categories. Real life is messy

~ Jennifer Gold

Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men post more e-mail to Internet discussion groups. To say this is due to patriarchy is to beg the question of the behavior's origin. If men control society, why don't they just shut up and enjoy their supposed prerogatives? The answer is obvious when you consider sexual competition: men can't be quiet because that would give other men a chance to show off verbally. Men often bully women into silence, but this is usually to make room for their own verbal display. If men were dominating public language just to maintain patriarchy, that would qualify as a puzzling example of evolutionary altruism—a costly, risky individual act that helps all of one's sexual competitors (other males) as much as oneself. The ocean of male language that confronts modern women in bookstores, television, newspapers, classrooms, parliaments, and businesses does not necessarily come from a male conspiracy to deny women their voice. It may come from an evolutionary history of sexual selection in which the male motivation to talk was vital to their reproduction.

~ Geoffrey Miller

In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of forty-eight chromosomes only one is different: on this difference we base a complete separation of male and female, pretending as it were that all forty-eight were different.

~ Germaine Greer

...because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process...no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbours. We do not organise societies that way...Perhaps we should try.

~ Matt Ridley

The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement.

~ Robert Trivers

If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is dependent upon the mechanical adjustments of his body, and that inversely his body is subjected with certain limitations to his will, then it only remains for him to make one assumption more, namely, that this mutual interdependence between the spiritual and the material is itself also dependent on law, and he has discovered the bond by which the science of the matter and the science of consciousness are united into a single whole.

~ Samuel Butler

Throughout history we humans have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of our human condition. Neither philosophy, nor psychology nor biology has, until now, been able to provide the truthful explanation.

~ Jeremy Griffith

It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding mirror neurons and their function. They may well be central to social learning, imitation, and the cultural transmission of skills and attitudes—perhaps even of the pressed-together sound clusters we call words. By hyperdeveloping the mirror-neuron system, evolution in effect turned culture into the new genome. Armed with culture, humans could adapt to hostile new environments and figure out how to exploit formerly inaccessible or poisonous food sources in just one or two generations—instead of the hundreds or thousands of generations such adaptations would have taken to accomplish through genetic evolution.Thus culture became a significant new source of evolutionary pressure, which helped select brains that had even better mirror-neuron systems and the imitative learning associated with them. The result was one of the many self-amplifying snowball effects that culminated in Homo sapiens, the ape that looked into its own mind and saw the whole cosmos reflected inside.

~ V.s. Ramachandran

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)

~ Thomas Lewis

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.

~ Charles Darwin