#biology

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

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#evolution #radical-science #science

No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific. ↗

— Henry Gee

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

Some ancient eukaryote swallowed a photosynthesizing bacteria and became a sunlight gathering alga. Millions of years later one of these algae was devoured by a second eukaryote. This new host gutted the alga, casting away its nucleus and its mitochondria, keeping only the chloroplast. That thief of a thief was the ancestor or Plasmodium and Toxoplasma. And this Russian-doll sequence of events explains why you can cure malaria with an antibiotic that kills bacteria: because Plasmodium has a former bacterium inside it doing some vital business. ↗

— Carl Zimmer

#business

What a mistake that had been, to create a construct [AI] that could suffer. He knew that now. Life, pain, death, they were no playthings. Biology was serious business, not for amateurs and foolish gods. ↗

— David Marusek

#biology #death-and-dying #suffering #business

There is nothing so patient, in this world or any other, as a virus searching for a host. ↗

— Mira Grant

#virus #zombie #zombies #biology

For a bookworm like Mother, a Brontë novel sister was better than a biological one. ↗

— Eileen Favorite

#brontës #biology

Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles, while girls adore horses because they are biological and have functions. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#biology