#organisms

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

When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#exploring #field #get #into #kinds

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

If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about. ↗

— Thomas R. Cech

#better #ever #gene #good #had

We know from biology that new forms of organisms simulate their primitive form as closely as possible at first, even though obliged to exist under changed internal and external conditions. ↗

— Wilhelm Ostwald

#changed #closely #conditions #even #exist

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

One of the deepest functions of a living organisms is to look ahead... to produce future. ↗

— Francois Jacob

#deepest #functions #future #living #living organisms

It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it. ↗

— Kevin Kelly

#become #every #evident #evolution #evolving

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

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