#organisms

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

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

— Kevin Kelly

#design #far #made #organisms #their

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

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive. ↗

— James Lovelock

#environment #favors #leave #nature #organisms

The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms. ↗

— Jeremy Rifkin

#consequences #environmental #examined #genetically #hadn

Splitting and gradual divergence of genera is exemplified very well and in a large variety of organisms. ↗

— George G. Simpson

#exemplified #genera #gradual #large #organisms

According to the concept of transformational evolution, first clearly articulated by Lamarck, evolution consists of the gradual transformation of organisms from one condition of existence to another. ↗

— Ernst Mayr

#another #articulated #clearly #concept #condition

Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a Gigantic project. ↗

— Joseph Beuys

#consumption #entire #form #gigantic #included

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

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