#organisms

Each organism, no matter how simple or complex, has around it a sacred bubble of space, a bit of mobile territoriality which only a few other organisms are allowed to penetrate and then only for short periods of time. ↗

— Edward Hall

#around #bit #bubble #complex #each

Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place. ↗

— Phillip E. Johnson

#aspire #beings #biologists #birds #broader

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

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances. ↗

— George C. Williams

#capable #circumstances #darwin #empirical #every

Owing to the difficulty of dealing with substances of high molecular weight we are still a long way from having determined the chemical characteristics and the constitution of proteins, which are regarded as the principal con-stituents of living organisms. ↗

— Karl Landsteiner

#chemical #constitution #dealing #determined #difficulty

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

Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far. ↗

— Kevin Kelly

#design #far #made #organisms #their

The investigation into the possible effects of cosmic rays on living organisms will also offer great interest. ↗

— Victor Francis Hess

#cosmic #cosmic rays #effects #great #interest

Man, like other organisms, is so perfectly coordinated that he may easily forget, whether awake or asleep, that he is a colony of cells in action, and that it is the cells which achieve, through him, what he has the illusion of accomplishing himself. ↗

— Albert Claude

#achieve #action #asleep #awake #cells

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