#biology

My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology. ↗

— Curtis Sittenfeld

#biology #boarding #boarding school #enough #experience

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#cool #economics #follow #generations #genes

Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.' ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#about #amiable #arrangement #because #biology

Whether it's in an inner-city school or a rural community, I want those students to have a chance to take A.P. biology and A.P. physics and marine biology. ↗

— Arne Duncan

#chance #community #i #inner-city #marine

In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture. ↗

— Jerry A. Coyne

#confessions-of-the-darwinists #conjecture #darwin #darwinism #darwinist-confessions

The phrase 'the fossil record' sounds impressive and authoritative. As used by some persons it becomes, as intended, intimidating, taking on the aura of esoteric truth as expounded by an elite class of specialists. But what is it, really, this fossil record? Only data in search of interpretation. All claims to the contrary that I know, and I know of several, are so much superstition. ↗

— Gareth J. Nelson

#darwin #darwinism #evolution #fossil-record #fossils

Birth after birth the line unchanging runs, And fathers live transmitted in their sons; Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds, The same their manners, and the same their minds:Till, as erelong successive buds decay, And insect-shoals successive pass away, Increasing wants the pregnant parent vex With the fond wish to form a softer sex. .. ↗

— Erasmus Darwin

#brilliant #life #nature-s-grandeur #science #life

The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#life #life

For those scientists who take it seriously, Darwinian evolution has functioned more as a philosophical belief system than as a testable scientific hypothesis. This quasi-religious function of the theory is, I think, what lies behind many of the extreme statements that you have doubtless encountered from some scientists opposing any critical analysis of neo-Darwinism in the classroom. It is also why many scientists make public statements about the theory that they would not defend privately to other scientists like me. ↗

— James A. Shapiro

#darwin #darwinism #evolution #macro-evolution #macroevolution

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#evolution #science #science