#organism

We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; those cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like [Martin J.] Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human. ↗

— Michael Specter

#fungi #microbes #microbiome #microorganisms #viruses

As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension. ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#being #capture #dimension #experience #grasp

It is clear to all that the animal organism is a highly complex system consisting of an almost infinite series of parts connected both with one another and, as a total complex, with the surrounding world, with which it is in a state of equilibrium. ↗

— Ivan Pavlov

#animal #another #both #clear #complex

I've always been more interested in organisms that can move on their own than in stationary plants. But when I canoe or hike along the edge of lakes or oceans and see trees that seem to be growing out of rock faces, I am blown away. How do they do it? ↗

— David Suzuki

#always #am #away #been #blown

It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends. ↗

— Christopher Dawson

#culture #cultures #ends #essentially #her

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#almost #ants #insects #know #make

Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms. ↗

— Asa Gray

#did #found #life #living #manifested

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism. ↗

— Martin Heidegger

#body #essentially #human #human body #organism

It is futile for an artist to try to create an environment because you have an environment around you all the time. Any living organism has an environment. ↗

— Carl Andre

#around #artist #because #create #environment

Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality. ↗

— Thomas R. Cech

#biology #breakthrough #connected #exaggerates #explore