Geneticists

"I don't know exactly what you guys want to do, but let me tell you why you should do it with fruit flies."

"My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world."

"The commonest cause of gastritis – that is to say, an inflamed and irritable stomach – is worry and anxiety. It is particularly common among busmen and travelling salesmen. I had it for about fifteen years until I read Lenin and other writers, who showed me what was wrong with our society and how to cure it. Since then I have needed no magnesia. But these pains may also be due to gastric ulcer or even cancer. So it is better to consult a doctor, even though he will probably recommend magnesia. But the Daily Worker may effect a permanent cure."

"An inordinate fondness for beetles."

"I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: (i) this is worthless nonsense; (ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; (iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; (iv) I always said so."

"An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument."

"No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins."

"[F]our hundred years hence the power question in England may be solved somewhat as follows: The country will be covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors [generators] which in their turn supply current at a very high voltage to great electric mains. At suitable distances, there will be great power stations where during windy weather the surplus power will be used for the electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen. ...In times of calm, the gasses will be recombined in explosion motors working dynamos which produce electrical energy once more, or more probably in oxidation cells."

"is weight for weight the most efficient known method of storing energy, as it gives about three times as much heat per pound as petrol. ...[I]t is very light, and bulk for bulk has only one third of the efficiency of petrol. This will not, however, detract from its use in aeroplanes, where weight is more important than bulk."

"These huge reservoirs of liquified gasses will enable wind energy to be stored, so that it can be expended for industry, transportation, heating and lighting, as desired. The initial costs will be very considerable, but the running expenses less than those of our present system. Among its more obvious advantages will be the fact that energy will be as cheap in one part of the country as another, so that industry will be greatly decentralized; and that no smoke or ash will be produced."

"There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god."

"The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires."

"The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deiciders."

"Science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe. So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science. The future will be no primrose path. It will have its own problems. Some will be the secular problems of the past, giant flowers of evil blossoming at last to their own destruction. Others will be wholly new. Whether in the end man will survive his ascensions of power we cannot tell. But the problem is no new one. It is the old paradox of freedom re-enacted with mankind for actor and the earth for stage...But it is only hopeful if mankind can adjust its morality to its powers."

"The time has gone by when a Huxley could believe that while science might indeed remould traditional mythology, traditional morals were impregnable and sacrosanct to it. We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion. There does not seem to be any particular reason why a religion should not arise with an ethic as fluid as Hindu mythology, but it has not yet arisen. Christianity has probably the most flexible morals of any religion, because Jesus left no code of law behind him like Moses or Muhammad, and his moral precepts are so different from those of ordinary life that no society has ever made any serious attempt to carry them out, such as was possible in the case of Israel and Islam. But every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions. This is no doubt an argument for Christianity as against other religions, but not as against none at all, or as against a religion which will frankly admit that its mythology and morals are provisional. That is the only sort of religion that would satisfy the scientific mind, and it is very doubtful whether it could properly be called a religion at all."

"Now if we want poets to interpret physical science as Milton and Shelley did (Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up-to-date in their chemical knowledge), we must see that our possible poets are instructed, as their masters were, in science and economics."

"You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building; a man is killed, a horse splashes."

"To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd. or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge."

"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."

"In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the word "simplest." It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The layman finds such a law as {\mathrm{\partial }x \over \mathrm{\partial } t} = \Kappa { \, \mathrm{\partial}^2x \over \mathrm{\partial }y^2} much less simple than "it oozes," of which it is the mathematical statement. The physicist reverses this judgment, and his statement is certainly the more fruitful of the two, so far as prediction is concerned. It is, however, a statement about something very unfamiliar to the plain man, namely, the rate of change of a rate of change."

"Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.....I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming."

"I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine."

"We must... carefully distinguish between two quite different doctrines which Darwin popularised, the doctrine of evolution, and that of natural selection. It is quite possible to hold the first and not the second. Similarly with regard to the doctrines of Darwin's great contemporary Marx, it is possible to adopt socialism but not historical materialism."

"I do not propose to argue the case for evolution, which I regard as being quite as well proven as most other historical facts, but to discuss its possible causes, which are certainly debatable."

"Darwin believed that the crossing of two types generally led to a blend, and that consequently bisexual reproduction tended to make a species uniform. He therefore had to postulate some cause constantly at work to keep up the inheritable variation within a species. He very naturally looked to the effects of differences of environment. ...It was shown that Darwin had been wrong in supposing that variations due to environment were inheritable. Selection merely picked out the best available line from a given population, and would not, as Darwin had believed, give rise to an unlimited amount of change."

"While the geneticists were disproving many of Darwin's ideas, the palaeontologists were determining the actual historical facts of evolution. ...they were able to verify the law of succession, first explicitly given by Darwin's colleague Wallace. "Every species has come into existence coincident, both in time and space, with a pre-existing closely allied species.""

"Evolution in... cases has clearly been a very slow and almost (if not quite) continuous process, exactly as Darwin had predicted. We must remember, however, that the organisms studied in this way are far from representative. They are in general the most successful members of animal associations living in very constant marine or lacustrine environments. We have not got similar data for land species... Nor do we possess them for the rarer forms. We shall see... that perhaps dominant species in a uniform environment are the least likely to undergo sudden change to a new type."

"Comparative parasitology supports the evolutionary hypothesis. If two animals have a common ancestor, their parasites are likely to be descended from those of the ancestor. This principle has been applied with considerable effect to the classification of frogs and other groups."

"The change from one stable equilibrium to the other may take place as the result of the isolation of a small unrepresentative group of the population, a temporary change in the environment which alters the relative viability of different types, or in several other ways..."

"Evolution must have involved the simultaneous change in many genes, which doubtless accounts for its slowness. Here matters would have been easier if heritable variations really formed a continuum, as Darwin apparently thought, i.e. if there were no limit to the possible smallness of a variation. But this is clearly not the case when we are considering meristic characters. ...the atomic nature of Mendelian inheritance suggests very strongly that even where variation is apparently continuous this appearance is deceptive."

"If the only available genes produce rather large changes, disadvantageous one at a time, then it seems to me probable that evolution will not occur in a random mating population. In a self-fertilised or highly inbred species it may do so if several mutations useful in conjunction, but separately harmful, occur simultaneously. Such an event is rare, but must happen reasonably often in wheat..."

"Where natural selection slackens, new forms may arise which would not survive under more rigid competition, and many ultimately hardy combinations will thus have a chance of arising. ...Thus the distinction between the principal mammalian orders seems to have arisen during an orgy of variation in the early Eocene which followed the doom of the great reptiles... Since that date mammalian evolution has been a slower affair, largely a progressive improvement of the types originally laid down in the Eocene. Another possible mode of making rapid evolutionary jumps is by hybridisation. ...hybridisation (where the hybrids are fertile) usually causes an epidemic of variation in the second generation which may include new and valuable types which could not have arisen within a species by slower evolution."

"If human evolution is to continue along the same lines as in the past, it will probably involve a still greater prolongation of childhood and retardation of maturity. Some of the characters distinguishing adult man will be lost. It was not an embryologist or palaeontologist who said, "Except ye . . . become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.""

"I have given my reasons for thinking that we can probably explain evolution in terms of the capacity for variation of individual organisms, and the selection exercised on them by their environment. ... The most obvious alternative to this view is to hold that evolution has throughout been guided by divine power. There are two objections to this hypothesis. Most lines of descent end in extinction, and commonly the end is reached by a number of different lines evolving in parallel. This does not suggest the work of an intelligent designer, still less of an all mighty one. But the moral objection is perhaps more serious. A very large number of originally free-living Crustacea, worms, and so on, have evolved into parasites. In doing so they have lost, to a greater or less extent, their legs, eyes, and brains, and have become in many cases the course of considerable and prolonged pain to other animals and to man. If we are going to take an ethical point of view at all (and we must do so when discussing theological questions), we are, I think, bound to place this loss of faculties coupled with increased infliction of suffering in the same class as moral breakdown in a human being, which can often be traced to genetical causes. To put the matter in a more concrete way, Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask whether God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God."

"Wright's theory certainly supports the view taken in this book that the evolution in large random-mating populations, which is recorded by palaeontology, is not representative of evolution in general, and perhaps gives a false impression of the events occurring in less numerous species. It is a striking fact that none of the extinct species, which, from the abundance of their fossil remains, are well known to us, appear to have been in our own ancestral line. Our ancestors were mostly rather rare creatures. " Blessed are the meek : for they shall inherit the earth.""

"Unaided common sense may indicate an equilibrium, but rarely, if ever, tells us whether it is stable. If much of the investigation here summarised has only proved the obvious, the obvious is worth proving when this can be done. And if the relative importance of selection and mutation is obvious, it has certainly not always been recognised as such."

"The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine."

"At Oxford, the young Haldane was frequently asked whether he was related to the "famous John Scott Haldane", his father, and he would answer "That depends on whether you consider identity to be a relationship.""

"J. B. S. Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions made between 3000 B.C and 1400 A.D. It was a Judaic-Christian invention. And it is strange to think that in receiving this malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead—an instrument of resurrection."

"Although Haldane accepted the earlier and incorrect paleontological interpretation of the fossil record of Gryphaea, in his overall belief that the pace of evolution was rapid and seemingly discontinuous, rather than slow and continuous, he anticipated, at least in part and by three decades, the model of punctuated equilibria, which was proposed by... Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould."

"I didn't add any new elements [to the modern synthetic theory] to speak of. I just modified things so that people could understand how things were in the plant world."

"It is quite likely that it is possible, yes. But what we've said all along -- speaking for both the (Roslin) Institute and the PPL staff - is that we would find it ethically unacceptable to think of doing that. We can't think of a reason to do it. If there was a reason to copy a human being, we would do it, but there isn't."

"Any kind of manipulation with human embryos should be prohibited."

"I'd remind you that in these experiments so far, about one quarter of the lambs that were born alive died within a few days because they hadn't completed normal development. Now, what may be being suggested here is that copies of children would be being produced, and some of those would die soon after birth. So I think that for a clinician to be suggesting doing that is a quite appalling and sad thing for him to be suggesting."

"I think the initial reason why I became interested in farming is that I wanted to be outdoors. I've always enjoyed being outdoors. And so, I looked around and when I was at high school, probably 14 or so, my parents through friends arranged for me to be able to go work on farms on the weekend."

"Is this sort of thing which has been thought about beneficial? So that if you're asking the question, for example, "Is it appropriate to think of making a copy of a person?" You have to ask not only, "What is the benefit to the people who are asking for this to be done?" But also, "What's the impact on the child that's going to be produced?" And that last bit I think often gets missed out."

"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid."

"I suspect that in the beginning Maurice hoped that Rosy would calm down. Yet mere inspection suggested that she would not easily bend. By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. But this was not the case. Her dedicated austere life could not be thus explained — she was the daughter of a solidly comfortable, erudite banking family. Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. The former was obviously preferable because, given her belligerent moods, it would be very difficult for Maurice to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA. Not that at times he'd didn't see some reason for her complaints — King's had two combination rooms, one for men, the other for women, certainly a thing of the past. But he was not responsible, and it was no pleasure to bear the cross for the added barb that the women's combination room remained dingily pokey whereas money had been spent to make life agreeable for him and his friends when they had their morning coffee. Unfortunately, Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot. To start with, she had been given to think that she had a position for several years. Also there was no denying that she had a good brain. If she could keep her emotions under control, there was a good chance she could really help him. But merely wishing for relations to improve was taking something of a gamble, for Cal Tech's fabulous chemist Linus Pauling was not subject to the confines of British fair play. Sooner or later Linus, who had just turned fifty, was bound to try for the most important of all scientific prizes. There was no doubt he was interested. … The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab."

"Watson: But legalities aside, I think we must reevaluate our basic assumptions about the meaning of life. Perhaps, as my former colleague Francis Crick suggested, no one should be thought alive until about three days after birth."

"Prism: But how would society react to such a proposal?"

"Watson: Our society just hasn't faced up to this problem. In a primitive society, if you saw that a baby was deformed, you would abandon it on a hillside. Today this isn't permissible, and with our medicine getting better and better in the sense of being able to keep sick people alive longer, we are going to produce more people living wretched lives. I don't know how you get a society to change on such a basic issue; infanticide isn't regarded lightly by anyone. Fortunately, now through such techniques as amniocentesis, parents can often learn in advance whether their child will be normal and healthy or hopelessly deformed. They then can choose either to have the child or opt for a therapeutic abortion. But the cruel fact remains that because of the present limits of such detection methods, most birth defects are not discovered until birth. If the child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice that only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so chose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have."

"The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind."

"There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work."

"When anti-DNA doomsday scenarios failed to materialize, even the modestly restrictive governmental regulations began to wither away. In retrospect, recombinant-DNA may rank as the safest revolutionary technology ever developed. To my knowledge, not one fatality, much less illness, has been caused by a genetically manipulated organism. The moral I draw from this painful episode is this: Never postpone experiments that have clearly defined future benefits for fear of dangers that can't be quantified. Though it may sound at first uncaring, we can react rationally only to real (as opposed to hypothetical) risks."

"Moving forward will not be for the faint of heart. But if the next century witnesses failure, let it be because our science is not yet up to the job, not because we don't have the courage to make less random the sometimes most unfair courses of human evolution."

"To have success in science, you need some luck. But to succeed in science, you need a lot more than luck. And it's not enough to be smart — lots of people are very bright and get nowhere in life. In my view, you have to combine intelligence with a willingness not to follow conventions when they block your path forward."

"To succeed in science, you have to avoid dumb people (here I was still following Luria's example). Now that might sound inexcusably flip, but the fact is that you must always turn to people who are brighter than yourself."

"To make a huge success, a scientist must be prepared to get into deep trouble. Sometime or another, someone will tell you that you are not ready to do something. … If you are going to make a big jump in science, you will very likely be unqualified to succeed by definition. The truth, however, won't save you from criticism. Your very willingness to take on a very big goal will offend some people who will think that you are too big for your britches and crazy to boot."

"Be sure you have someone up your sleeve who will save you when you find yourself in deep s—."

"Never do anything that bores you. My experience in science is that someone is always telling to do something that leaves you flat. Bad idea. I'm not good enough to do something I dislike. In fact, I find it hard enough to do something that I like. … Constantly exposing your ideas to informed criticism is very important, and I would venture to say that one reason both of our chief competitors failed to reach the Double Helix before us was that each was effectively very isolated."

"Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them."

"No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?"

"If we don't play God, who will?"

"I just can’t sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it’s nonsense."

"People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

"Never be the brightest person in the room. … We're all imperfect."

"Science Ph.D. students have effectively become serfs. And who would become a serf when you can work for Goldman Sachs and get paid $300,000 a year to become a serf? Why drive a Chevy when you can drive a BMW — and now you're condemned to driving a car from Malaysia or something. Life should be fun."

"New ideas require new facts. You explain things by way of ideas. Why do we have a government that is run by rich trash? Because they've used their money to buy the presidency. Bush is a tool for the people who don't want an inheritance tax."

"For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better. I'm basically a libertarian. I don't want to restrict anyone from doing anything unless it's going to harm me. I don't want to pass a law stopping someone from smoking. It's just too dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society. Since we are genetically so diverse and our brains are so different, we're going to have different aspirations. The things that will satisfy me won't satisfy you. On the other hand, if global warming is in any way preventable and it's likely to come, not doing something would be irresponsible to the future of our society."

"Should you be allowed to make an anti-Semitic remark? Yes, because some anti-Semitism is justified. Just like some anti-Irish feeling is justified. If you can't be criticized, that's very dangerous. The whole Larry Summers thing, to say that men are a bit strange and their strangest quality is their ability to understand mathematics -- you're not supposed to even think it."

"I turned against the left wing because they don't like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system."

"If you could make people with ten-point-higher IQs, we'd probably have fewer wars."

"I've seen no evidence of a god, so I'm not going to think about one. Being raised nonreligious made you free. You could look at the evidence. Whether being nonreligious or a Democrat was more important, I can't tell you."

"Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind."

"Science is no stranger to controversy. The pursuit of discovery, of knowledge, is often uncomfortable and disconcerting. I have never been one to shy away from stating what I believe to be the truth, however difficult it might prove to be. This has, at times, got me in hot water. Rarely more so than right now, where I find myself at the centre of a storm of criticism. I can understand much of this reaction. For if I said what I was quoted as saying, then I can only admit that I am bewildered by it. To those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief. I have always fiercely defended the position that we should base our view of the world on the state of our knowledge, on fact, and not on what we would like it to be. This is why genetics is so important. For it will lead us to answers to many of the big and difficult questions that have troubled people for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But those answers may not be easy, for, as I know all too well, genetics can be cruel. My own son may be one of its victims. Warm and perceptive at the age of 37, Rufus cannot lead an independent life because of schizophrenia, lacking the ability to engage in day-to-day activities."

"Since 1978, when a pail of water was dumped over my Harvard friend E. O. Wilson for saying that genes influence human behaviour, the assault against human behavioural genetics by wishful thinking has remained vigorous. But irrationality must soon recede. It will soon be possible to read individual genetic messages at costs which will not bankrupt our health systems. In so doing, I hope we see whether changes in DNA sequence, not environmental influences, result in behaviour differences. Finally, we should be able to establish the relative importance of nature as opposed to nurture."

"The thought that some people are innately wicked disturbs me. But science is not here to make us feel good. It is to answer questions in the service of knowledge and greater understanding. In finding out the extent to which genes influence moral behaviour, we shall also be able to understand how genes influence intellectual capacities."

"Right now, at my institute in the US we are working on gene-caused failures in brain development that frequently lead to autism and schizophrenia. We may also find that differences in these respective brain development genes also lead to differences in our abilities to carry out different mental tasks. In some cases, how these genes function may help us to understand variations in IQ, or why some people excel at poetry but are terrible at mathematics. All too often people with high mathematical abilities have autistic traits. The same gene that gives some people such great mathematical abilities may also lead to autistic behaviour. This is why, in studying autism and schizophrenia, we believe that we shall come very close to a better understanding of intelligence and, therefore, of the differences in intelligence."

"We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in the world have selected over time the genes which determine our capacity to do different things. The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science. To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers. It is very likely that at least some 10 to 15 years will pass before we get an adequate understanding for the relative importance of nature versus nurture in the achievement of important human objectives. Until then, we as scientists, wherever we wish to place ourselves in this great debate, should take care in claiming what are unarguable truths without the support of evidence."

"No one really wants to admit I exist."

"Not at all. I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature. But I haven’t seen any knowledge. And there’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on I.Q. tests. I would say the difference is, it’s genetic."

"Crick, however, was right. Our discovery put an end to a debate as old as the human species: Does life have some magical, mystical essence, or is it, like any chemical reaction carried out in a science class, the product of normal physical and chemical processes? Is there something divine at the heart of a cell that brings it to life? The double helix answer that question with a definitive No."

"That is why the double helix was so important. It brought the Enlightenment revolution in materialistic thinking into the cell. The intellectual journey that had begun with Copernicus displacing humans from the center of the universe and continued with Darwin’s insistence that humans are merely modified monkeys had finally focused in on the very essence of life. And there was nothing special about it. The double helix is an elegant structure, but its message is downright prosaic: life is simply a matter of chemistry."

"The discovery of the double helix sounded the death knell for vitalism. Serious scientists, even those religiously inclined, realized that a complete understanding of life would not require the revelation of new laws of nature. Life was just a matter of physics and chemistry, albeit exquisitely organized physics and chemistry. The immediate task ahead would be to figure out how the DNA-encoded script of life went about its work."

"The problem was insoluble: you cannot, we thought, have DNA without proteins, and you cannot have proteins without DNA. RNA, however, being a DNA equivalent (it can store and replicate genetic information) as well as a protein equivalent (it can catalyze critical chemical reactions) offers an answer. In fact, in the “RNA world” the chicken-and-egg problem simply disappears. RNA is both the chicken and the egg. RNA is an evolutionary heirloom. Once natural selection has solved a problem, it tends to stick with that solution, in effect following the maxim “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In other words, in the absence of selective pressure to change, cellular systems do not innovate and so bear many imprints of the evolutionary past. A process may be carried out in a certain way simply because it first evolved that way, not because that is absolutely the best and most efficient way."

"The opposition to GM foods is largely a sociopolitical movement whose arguments, though couched in the language of science, are typically unscientific. Indeed, some of the anti-GM pseudoscience propagated by the media—whether in the interests of sensationalism or out of misguided but well-intentioned concern—would be actually amusing were it not evident that such gibberish is in fact an effective weapon in the propaganda war."

"Sure enough, the notion of decoding their personal DNA appealed to more than a few well-off individuals, even if it amounted to the scientific equivalent of purchasing a vanity license plate."

"Khan analyzed the data and was relieved to find that his son’s DNA was “pretty boring.” In the brave new world of personal genomics, “boring” is the new “great.”"

"Our low gene count by no means invalidates a reductionist approach to biological systems, nor does it justify any logical inference that we are not determined by our genes. A fertilized egg containing a chimp genome still inevitably produces a chimp, while a fertilized egg containing a human genome produces a human. No amount of exposure to classical music or violence on TV could make it otherwise. Yes, we have a long way to go in developing our understanding of just how the information in those two remarkably similar genomes is applied to the task of producing two apparently very different organisms, but the fact remains that the greatest part of what each individual organism will be is programmed ineluctably into its every cell, in the genome."

"This remarkable feat merely reaffirms what most of us in molecular biology have long known to be the truth: the essence of life is complicated chemistry and nothing more."

"The conclusion that we nearly all carry components of Neanderthal DNA in our genomes, although perhaps a blow to our collective ego, does not appear quite so surprising upon reflection. Indeed, the overall lesson of molecular studies of human evolution is just how astonishingly close we are genetically to the rest of the natural world. In fact, molecular data have often challenged (and overthrown) long-held assumptions about human origins."

"Given what a powerful determinant, mostly for ill, skin color has been in human history and individual experience, it is surprising how little we know about its underlying genetics. This deficit, however, may have had less to do with the limitations of our science and more with the intrusion of politics into science; in an academic world terrorized by political correctness, even to study the molecular basis of such a characteristic has been something of a taboo."

"The law has always had difficulty assimilating the implications, if not the very idea, of scientific evidence. Even the most intelligent lawyers, judges, and juries have customarily found it difficult to understand at first."

"My youthful reasoning on the subject, however absurdly misinformed, nevertheless taught me a very valuable lesson: the danger of assuming that genes are responsible for differences we see among individuals or groups. We can err mightily unless we can be confident that environmental factors have not played the more decisive role. This tendency to prefer explanations grounded in “nurture” over ones rooted in “nature” has served a useful social purpose in redressing generations of bigotry. Unfortunately, we have now cultivated too much of a good thing. The current epidemic of political correctness has delivered us to a moment when even the possibility of a genetic basis for difference is a hot potato: there is a fundamentally dishonest resistance to admitting the role our genes almost surely play in setting one individual apart from another."

"And so having signed on to the liberal end of the political spectrum, and finding themselves in a climate intolerant of truths that don’t conform to ideology, most scientists carefully steer clear of research that might uncover such truths. The fact that they duly hew to the prevailing line of liberal orthodoxy—which seeks to honor and entitle difference while shunning any consideration of its biochemical basis—is, I think, bad for science, for a democratic society, and ultimately for human welfare."

"Knowledge, even that which may unsettle us, it surely to be preferred to ignorance, however blissful in the short term the latter may be. All too often, however, political anxiousness favors ignorance and its apparent safety: we had better not learn about the genetics of skin color, goes the unspoken fear, lest such information be marshaled somehow by hatemongers opposed to mixing among the races."

"The tendency is to focus on the worst-case scenario and to shy away from potentially controversial science; it is time, I think, we looked instead at the benefits."

"Ideology—of any kind—and science are at best inappropriate bedfellows. Science may indeed uncover unpleasant truths, but the critical thing is that they are truths. Any effort, whether wicked or well-meaning, to conceal truth or impede its disclosure is destructive. Too often in our free society, scientists willing to take on questions with political ramifications have been made to pay an unjust price."

"Murray and Herrnstein’s assertion, however, was that the discrepancy was so great that environment likely couldn’t explain it all. Similarly, environmental factors alone may not account for why, globally, Asians have on average higher IQs than other racial groups. The idea of measurable variations in average intelligence among ethnic groups is not one, I admit, I want to live with. But though The Bell Curve’s claims remain questionable, we should not allow political anxieties to keep us from looking into them further."

"The finding that there is a substantial genetic component to our behavior should not surprise us; indeed, it would be far more surprising if this were not the case. We are products of evolution: among our ancestors, natural selection indubitably exerted a strong influence over all traits that have figured in our survival."

"The future promises a detailed genetic dissection of personality, and it is hard to imagine that what we discover will not tip the scales of the nature/nurture debate more and more in the direction of nature—a frightening thought for some, but only if we persist in being held hostage by a static, ultimately meaningless dichotomy. To find that any trait, even one with formidable political implications, has a mainly genetic basis is not to find something set immutably in stone. It is merely to understand the nature upon which nurture is ever acting, and those things we, as a society and as individuals, need to do if we are better to assist the process. Let us not allow transient political considerations to set the scientific agenda. Yes, we may uncover truths that make us uneasy in the light of our present circumstances, but it is those circumstances, not nature’s truth, to which policy makers ought to address themselves."

"Life, we now know, is nothing but a vast array of coordinated chemical reactions. The “secret” to that coordination is the breathtakingly complex set of instructions inscribed—again, chemically—in our DNA."

"If, therefore, we are serious about improving education, we cannot in good conscience ultimately limit ourselves to seeking remedies in nurture. My suspicion, however, is that education policies are too often set by politicians to whom the glib slogan “Leave no child behind” appeals precisely because it is so completely unobjectionable. But children will get left behind if we continue to insist that each one has the same potential for learning."

"The issue, rather, is this: Are we prepared to embrace the undeniably vast potential of genetics to improve the human condition, individually and collectively? Most immediate, would we want the guidance of genetic information to design learning best suited to our children’s individual needs?"

"The reality is that the idea of improving on the genes that nature has given us alarms people. When discussing our genes, we seem ready to commit what philosophers call the naturalistic fallacy, assuming that the way nature intended it is best. By centrally heating our homes and taking antibiotics when we have an infection, we carefully steer clear of the fallacy in our daily lives, but mentions of genetic improvement have us rushing to run the “nature knows best” flag up the mast. For this reason, I think that the acceptance of genetic enhancement will most likely come about through efforts to prevent disease."

"I find such a moralistic response to be profoundly immoral."

"But even if we allow hypothetically that gene enhancement could—like any powerful technology—be applied to nefarious social ends, that only strengthens the case for our developing it. Considering the near impossibility of repressing technological progress, and the fact that much of what is now prohibited is well on its way to becoming practicable, do we dare restrain our own research community and risk allowing some culture that does not share our values to gain the upper hand? From the time the first of our ancestors fashioned a stick into a spear, the outcomes of conflicts throughout history have been dictated by technology."

"And so if there is a paramount ethical issue attending the vast new genetic knowledge created by the Human Genome Project, in my view it is the slow pace at which what we now know is being deployed to diminish human suffering. Leaving aside the uncertainties of gene therapy, I find the lag in embracing even the most unambiguous benefits to be utterly unconscionable. That in our medically advanced society almost no women are screened for the fragile X mutation two decades after its discovery can attest only to ignorance or intransigence."

"I do not dispute the right of individuals to look to religion for a private moral compass, but I do object to the assumption of too many religious people that atheists live in a moral vacuum. Those of us who feel no need for a moral code written down in an ancient tome have, in my opinion, recourse to an innate moral intuition long ago shaped by natural selection promoting social cohesion in groups of our ancestors."

"With its direct contradiction of religious accounts of creation, evolution represents science’s most direct incursion into the religious domain and accordingly provokes the acute defensiveness that characterizes creationism."

"There is in the first place its scientific interest. The discovery of the structure by Crick and Watson, with all its biological implications, has been one of the major scientific events of this century. The number of researches which it has inspired is amazing; it has caused an explosion in biochemistry which has transformed the science. I have been amongst those who have pressed the author to write his recollections while they are still fresh in his mind, knowing how important they would be as a contribution to the history of science. The result has exceeded expectation. The latter chapters, in which the birth of the new idea is described so vividly, are drama of the highest order; the tension mounts and mounts towards the final climax. I do not know of any other instance where one is able to share so intimately in the researcher's struggles and doubts and final triumph. Then again, the story is a poignant example of a dilemma which may confront an investigator. He knows that a colleague has been working for years on a problem and has accumulated a mass of hard-won evidence, which has not yet been published because it is anticipated that success is just around the comer. He has seen this evidence and has good reason to believe that a method of attack which he can envisage, perhaps merely a new point of view, will lead straight to the solution. An offer of collaboration at such a stage might well be regarded as a trespass. Should he go ahead on his own It is not easy to be sure whether the crucial new idea is really one's own or has been unconsciously assimilated in talks with others. The realization of this difficulty has led to the establishment of a some what vague code amongst scientists which recognizes a claim in a line of research staked out by a colleague up to a certain point. When competition comes from more than one quarter, there is no need to hold back. This dilemma comes out clearly in the DNA story. It is a source of deep satisfaction to all intimately concerned that, in the award of the Nobel Prize in 1962, due recognition was given to the long, patient investigation by Wilkins at King's College (London) as well as to the brilliant and rapid final solution by Crick and Watson at Cambridge. Finally, there is the human interest of the story the impression made by Europe and by England in particular upon a young man from the States. He writes with a Pepys like frankness. Those who figure in the book must read it in a very forgiving spirit. One must remember that his book is not a history, but an autobiographical contribution to the history which will some day be written. As the author himself says, the book is a record of impressions rather than historical facts. The issues were often more complex, and the motives of those who had to deal with them were less tortuous, than he realized at the time. On the other hand, one must admit that his intuitive understanding of human frailty often strikes home."

"He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”."

"Consistently rated as one of the greatest books written about science in the past century, it has been hailed as a work that combines the plot line of a racy novel with deep insights about the nature of modern research. But James Watson, author of The Double Helix, has revealed that his masterpiece came close to being suppressed. In an exclusive interview with the Observer, he admitted last week that his account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, when shown to friends and colleagues in the late 60s, triggered such hostility and outrage it seemed fated never to appear in print. … Many publishers were frightened off by threats of legal action from the manuscript's critics. Watson's depictions of several scientists were deeply unflattering and the book's secondary plot, which focuses on Watson's pursuit of young women – or "popsies" as he called them – around Cambridge, was considered irrelevant and patronising. Harvard University Press, having accepted Watson's manuscript for publication, came under pressure from the university's senior administrators and dropped the book. It took the intervention of Lady Alice Bragg, the wife of Watson's former boss, Sir [William] Lawrence Bragg, to save The Double Helix, Watson has revealed."

"The Double Helix opens with the words: "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood." I have never seen James D Watson in a modest mood, either. He is not an innately modest person. In his later years he would consent to press briefings – usually on important anniversaries – and then, with long pauses and enigmatic mumbles, say almost nothing. This was not because he was self-effacing or disliked controversy. He would say almost nothing, one sensed, because he couldn't be bothered with stupid questions from stupid people. He has made it clear more than once that this is his default attitude."

"The evolution of life, and the evolutionary origin of mankind, are scientifically established as firmly and completely as any historical event not witnessed by human observers. Any concession to anti-evolutionists, suggesting that there are scientific reasons to doubt the facticity of evolution, would be propagating a plain untruth."

"According to Goldschmidt, all that evolution by the usual mutations—dubbed "micromutations"—can accomplish is to bring about "diversification strictly within species, usually, if not exclusively, for the sake of adaptation of the species to specific conditions within the area which it is able to occupy." New species, genera, and higher groups arise at once, by cataclysmic saltations—termed macromutations or systematic mutations—which bring about in one step a basic reconstruction of the whole organism. The role of natural selection in this process becomes "reduced to the simple alternative: immediate acceptance or rejection." A new form of life having been thus catapulted into being, the details of its structures and functions are subsequently adjusted by micromutation and selection. It is unnecessary to stress here that this theory virtually rejects evolution as this term is usually understood (to evolve means to unfold or to develop gradually), and that the systematic mutations it postulates have never been observed. It is possible to imagine a mutation so drastic that its product becomes a monster hurling itself beyond the confines of species, genus, family, or class. But in what Goldschmidt has called the "hopeful monster" the harmonious system, which any organism must necessarily possess, must be transformed at once into a radically different, but still sufficiently coherent, system to enable the monster to survive. The assumption that such a prodigy may, however rarely, walk the earth overtaxes one's credulity, even though it may be right that the existence of life in the cosmos is in itself an extremely improbable event."

"The living world is not a single array . . . connected by unbroken series of intergrades."

"My genes have indeed determined what I am, but only in the sense that, given the succession of environments and experiences that were mine, a carrier of a different set of genes might have become unlike myself."

"Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole."

"Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness."

"No known human group . . . simply throw[s] out its dead without any ritual or ceremony. In stark contrast, no animal practices burial of dead individuals of its own species."

"Man is the only living being who has a developed self-awareness and death-awareness."

"The greatest evolutionist of our century."

"Between 1937 and 1941, Dobzhansky went from being able to allow for the possibility of evolutionary mechanisms other than those he favored to a position in which everything that did not fit his definition of evolution was rejected. In the midst of his outpouring of anger at and dismissal of Goldschmidt, Dobzhansky neglected to consider the fact that while Goldschmidt's systemic mutations may not have been observed, neither had the mechanisms of speculation that he, or anyone else, for that matter, had proposed. ...it was and still is the case that, with the exception of Dobzhansky's claim about a new species of fruit fly, the formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed."

"It is in the nature of science that once a position becomes orthodox it should be subjected to criticism.... It does not follow that, because a position is orthodox, it is wrong."

"Тhе сепtгаl роіпt геmаіпs that Darwin provided a theory which predicts that organisms should have parts adapted to ensure their survival and . This has led to the suggestion that life should be defined by the possession of those properties which are needed to ensure evolution by natural selection. That is, entities with the properties of multiplication, variation, and are alive, and entities lacking one or more of those properties are not."

"It is an occupational risk of biologists to claim, towards the end of their careers, that the problems which they have not solved are insoluble."

"Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe."

"Natural selection is the only workable explanation for the beautiful and compelling illusion of 'design' that pervades every living body and every organ. Knowledge of evolution may not be strictly useful in everyday commerce. You can live some sort of life and die without ever hearing the name of Darwin. But if, before you die, you want to understand why you lived in the first place, Darwinism is the one subject that you must study."

"The last decade has seen a steady increase in the application of concepts from the theory of games to the study of evolution. Fields as diverse as sex ratio theory, animal distribution, contest behaviour and reciprocal altruism have contributed to what is now emerging as a universal way of thinking about phenotypic evolution."

"Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed"

"Evolutionary game theory is a way of thinking about evolution at the phenotypic level when the fitnesses of particular phenotypes depend on their frequencies in the population."

"The theory of games was first formalised by Von Neumann & Morgenstern (1953) in reference to human economic behaviour. Since that time, the theory has undergone extensive development... Sensibly enough, a central assumption of classical game theory is that the players will behave rationally, and according to some criterion of self-interest. Such an assumption would clearly be out of place in an evolutionary context. Instead, the criterion of rationality is replaced by that of population dynamics and stability, and the criterion of self-interest by Darwinian fitness."

"Game theory concepts were first explicitly applied in evolutionary biology by Lewontin (1961). His approach, however, was to picture a species as playing a game against nature, and to seek strategies which minimised the probability of extinction. A similar line has been taken by Slobodkin & Rapoport (1974). In contrast, here we picture members of a population as playing games against each other, and consider the population dynamics and equilibria which can arise."

"John Maynard Smith, an engineer by training, knows much about his biology secondhand. He seldom deals with live organisms. He computes and he reads. I suspect that it's very hard for him to have insight into any group of organisms when he does not deal with them directly. Biologists, especially, need direct sensory communication with the live beings they study and about which they write."

"Ionizing radiation has always been with us and will be for all foreseeable time. Our genetic system is probably well adjusted by natural selection to normal background radiation. Added radiation will increase the frequency of mutations; most of these will be harmful. Exposure to radiation in large amounts will increase malignant disease; small amounts may possibly do the same. In view of these potentially harmful effects every reasonable effort should be made to reduce the levels of ionizing radiation to which man is exposed to to the lowest levels that can reasonably be attained."

"La vérité ne se possède pas, elle se cherche."

"In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice."

"Theology is the post hoc rationalization of what you want to believe."

"The fact that both Jews and Christians ignore some of God’s or Jesus’s commands, but scrupulously obey others, is absolute proof that people pick and choose their morality not on the basis of its divine source, but because it comports with some innate morality that they derived from other sources."

"It takes a profound hypocrisy to try to reconcile for others things that you can’t reconcile for yourself."

"No reputable theologian, or rational believer for that matter, adheres strictly to Biblical morality. As everyone knows, believers pick and choose their morality from a smorgasbord of divine commands, both good and bad, in scripture. And doing that shows that you have a sense of right and wrong that doesn’t come from the Bible or God. Ergo, it comes from evolution and culture."

"Religion may be a quest for the truth, but it has no way of finding the truth, or verifying what it claims to find. Our knowledge of what God is like has not advanced one iota over the ideas of the 1500s. And insofar as theological interpretation has changed, it’s done so not as a result of faith’s quest for truth, but of pressure from science and secular morality. Really, can any theologian, philosopher, or scientist tell me anything about God now that we didn’t know 500 years ago? Then ask a scientist what we know now about science that we didn’t know in 1500."

"Come on, readers, give me one example of a question that religion has answered to everyone’s satisfaction—one example of a “truth” found in religion’s quest for truth."

"But this (a listing of illustrations of how the genome can change other than by mutations) doesn’t constitute a crisis—it’s a very interesting finding that shows that variation in a genome can arise by processes other than mutation of an organism’s own DNA. The disposition of that variation still must occur via either natural selection (it can be good or bad) or genetic drift (no effect on fitness). This hasn’t really changed the theory of evolution one iota, though it’s changed our view of where organisms can acquire new genes."

"Damn, but science is just a constant feed of cool new facts and theories. Theology doesn’t come close."

"I am SO tired of this trope. It may indeed be the case that we can’t justify a priori via philosophical lucubrations that we arrive at the truth about nature only by using the methods of science. My answer to that is increasingly becoming, “So bloody what?” The use of science is justified because it works, not because we can justify it philosophically. If we are interested in finding out what causes malaria, no amount of appeal to a deity, philosophical rumination, listening to music, reading novels, or waiting for a revelation will answer that question. We have to use scientific methods, which, of course, is how causes of disease are found."

"Why, exactly, are scientists supposed to accord “respect” to a bunch of ancient fables that are not only ludicrous on their face, but motivate so much opposition to science?"

"Theodicy is the Achilles Heel of faith. There is no reasonable answer to the problem of gratuitous evil (i.e., the slaughter of children or mass killings by natural phenomena like tsunamis), and the will to continue believing in the face of such things truly shows the folly of faith. For those evils prove absolutely either that God is not benevolent and omnipotent, or that there is no god. (Special pleading like “we don’t know God’s mind” doesn’t wash, for the same people who say such things also claim to know that God is benevolent and omnipotent). Both nonbelief or belief in a malicious or uncaring God are unacceptable to the goddy. Ergo, any rational person who contemplates gratuitous evil must become an agnostic, an atheist, or someone who rejects the Abrahamic God. It is a touchstone of rationality."

"Faith is a padlock of the mind, and few keys can open it."

"In the end theologians are jealous of science, for they are aware that it has greater authority than do their own ways of finding “truth”: dogma, authority, and revelation. Science does find truth, faith does not."

"No, we don’t have faith in reason and science in the same way as “Cru” members have faith in God. I see “faith” according to Walter Kaufmann’s definition: strong belief in propositions for which there is insufficient evidence to command the assent of every reasonable person. We have confidence in science because it has led us to provisional truths—it works. Cru doesn’t even know if there’s any God, or, if there is a divine presence, that it’s the Abrahamic god rather than the Hindu god, Yahweh, or Wotan. And we use reason in the same way: it leads us to truth. Revelation, dogma, and authority do not, for if they did there would be only one religion rather than thousands with their disparate and often conflicting doctrines."

"Can a geology teacher blithely tell his students that the earth is flat, or a European history professor that the Holocaust didn’t happen? That’s not academic freedom, but dereliction of duty."

"Some believers are fundamentalists about everything, but every believer is a fundamentalist about something."

"Science has only two things to contribute to religion: an analysis of the evolutionary, cultural, and psychological basis for believing things that aren’t true, and a scientific disproof of some of faith’s claims (e.g., Adam and Eve, the Great Flood). Religion has nothing to contribute to science, and science is best off staying as far away from faith as possible. The “constructive dialogue” between science and faith is, in reality, a destructive monlogue, with science making all the good points, tearing down religion in the process."

"“HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?” That’s the question you should always ask believers when they make unsupported assertions, ranging from “God is loving” to “Our souls live on after death.” The answer will always be one of two things: “The Bible says so,” or “I just know it to be true.” Neither of those are rational answers, but they satisfy the religious. It is in fact the “how-do-you-know-that” query that really distinguishes New Atheism from Old. While atheists have always decried the lack of evidence for theism, it is the infusion of scientists and science-friendly people into atheism, starting with Carl Sagan and continuing on to Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Pinker, and Dennett, that has made us realize that religious dogmas are in fact hypotheses, and you need reasons and evidence for accepting them. If you have none, then you have no reason to believe in God. Nevertheless, religious dogma does change, but not because theology has found better reasons. It’s because a.) science has shown the dogma to be false (Genesis, Adam and Eve, creation, the Exodus, etc.) or b.) secular morality has shown that the tenets of religious belief are no longer supportable (hell as a place of fire, limbo, discrimination against gays, the Mormons’ refusal to let blacks be priests, etc.)"

"He is a dissimulator, a back-pedaler, a coward, and a self-serving ignoramus. In other words, he’s a politician."

"Yes, secularism does propose a physical and purposeless universe, and many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion. But although the universe is purposeless, our lives aren’t. This conflation of a purposeless universe (i.e., one not created for a specific reason) with purposeless human lives is a trick that the faithful use to make atheism seem nihilistic and dark. But we make our own purposes, and they’re real. Right now my purpose is to write this piece, and then I’ll work on a book, and later I’ll have dinner with a friend. Soon I’ll go to Poland to visit more friends. Maybe later I’ll read a nice book and learn something. Those are real purposes, not illusory purposes to which Douthat wants us to devote our only life."

"An “intellectual tradition,” as anyone with two neurons to rub together knows, is not the same thing as evidence. But theologians seem to lack that second neuron."

"Since neither Robbins, nor Hart, nor any other Sophisticated Theologian™ or Hipster Poet has produced any evidence for God that would convince someone who wasn’t already a believer or an incipient believer, we needn’t take their claims seriously. The reason people like Robbins sneer at the New Atheists’ call for evidence is because believers don’t have any."

"Anybody who claims that people don’t cherry-pick their morality from the Bible, choosing that which comports with their extra-Biblical notions of what’s good and bad, is simply blind."

"The justification for naturalism is that it works: we have never understood anything about the universe by assuming the supernatural, while assuming naturalism as a working hypothesis has moved our understanding ever forward."

"Religion claims to help us understand things about the universe, but, unlike science has no way to test or verify its claims. Both science and religion compete to understand reality, but only science has the method to verify its findings, while religion merely buttresses emotional and epistemic commitments made in advance, commitments impervious to evidence."

"Even more than religious belief, acceptance or denial of evolution is a test of character. For if you deny evolution is true, you are either pandering to the public even though you know better (showing that you’re ambitious but lack character), are truly ignorant of the facts (which means you can’t be trusted to be informed about crucial issues), or are a flat-out creationist (showing that you’re batshit crazy)."

"Atheism—at least the refusal to accept gods for which there’s no evidence—is a logical outgrowth of science, and explains (at least to me) why, compared to Americans as a whole, scientists are so much more atheistic. If your career depends on establishing your confidence in a phenomenon proportional to the degree of evidence supporting it, then God is a no-go. The climate of doubt that is endemic—and essential—to the scientific enterprise is a true disaster for religion. Religious people know this, and that largely explains the many ways they attack science."

"One child dead because of superstition is one too many."

"Postmodernism poisons everything."

"I have to say that I find Ali’s argument truly revolting—not just because it’s intellectually weak and actually deceptive, but because it debases the entire realm of university scholarship of which I’m a member. When I see pieces like hers—lame apologetics that are meant from the outset to reinforce an opinion already held—I thank Ceiling Cat that I am a scientist: a member of the guild in which using your scholarship to reinforce emotional commitments is considered a sin."

"After all, by what lights can you see atheism as a “leap of faith”? What is the “faith” there? Failure to accept gods is no more a leap of faith than is doubting the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, or Santa Claus. It’s not “faith” when you refuse to accept a proposition for which there’s no evidence."

"He is the embodiment of greed, ambition, bigotry, and dislike of the marginalized. Of course, all that means is that he simply instantiates in a clear way the values of the GOP, but they don’t like those being so out in the open! Trump is in fact the very product of what Republicans stand for: he’s a monster they created, but now they don’t like it. They want those values, but expressed sotto voce, and by a slicker candidate."

"Theology schools are the wisdom teeth of academia: useless and sometimes injurious remnants of earlier times. If you want to teach comparative religion in college, you can do it in sociology departments, and if you want to teach the history of religion or of how scripture was confected, you can do it in history departments. There is no rationale for a modern secular university to teach theology, for it is the study of a nonexistent being and its supposed wants."

"I’m not sure who’s in charge of “The Stone,” the New York Times‘s philosophy column, but that person is not doing their job. Imagine if some of our greatest living philosophers would post there about matters diverse: ethics, animal rights, abortion, drone strikes, and so on. But all too often the column is about God; that is, we have Great Minds lucubrating about nonexistent beings. Among all species of philosophy, the philosophy of religion is the most intellectually depauperate. It’s a waste of time."

"On the Right we have a bunch of regressive conservatives who demonize minorities and women and have no sympathy for the downtrodden, while on the Left we have regressive Leftists who try to censor people’s speech, take the side of extremist Islamists against women and gays, and shut down disagreement by other Leftists who aren’t pure enough. What is a person to do? The answer, of course, is to call out both sides for regressive behavior."

"Faith is not a virtue, but a character flaw."

"To Parker Bright, Hannah Black, and other critics of this painting, I say this: I completely reject your criticism. If only artists of the proper ethnicity can depict violence inflicted on their group, then only writers of the proper ethnicity can write about the same issues, and so on with all the arts. And what goes for ethnicity or race goes for gender: men cannot write about suffering inflicted on women, nor women about suffering inflicted on men. Gays cannot write about straight people and vice versa. The fact is that we are all human, and we are all capable of sharing, as well as depicting, the pain and suffering of others. I will not allow you to fracture art and literature the way you have fractured politics. Yes, horrible injustices have been visited on minority groups, on women, on gays, and on other marginalized people, but to allow that injustice to be conveyed only by “properly ethnic or gendered artists” is to deny us our common humanity and deprive us of emotional solidarity. No group, whatever its pigmentation or chromosomal constitution, has the exclusive right to create art or literature about their own subgroup. To deny others that right is to censor them. To those who say this painting has caused them “unnecessary hurt” because it is by a white artist about black pain, I say, “Your own pain about this artwork is gratuitous; I do not take it seriously. It’s the cry of a coddled child who simply wants attention.”"

"The editorial, very poorly written for a college full of smart students, shows how far this “hate speech” cancer has spread. Let me provide for you Coyne’s Glossary for the words at issue:"

"We needn’t take things like reasoning on faith. We use reason because it works. And science isn’t really based on axioms: it’s not math. It’s based on a method that, refined over time, leads us to widely accepted facts about the universe: the facts that we can rely on to do things like establish the genealogy of species, cure disease, and land probes on comets. You can’t accomplish such things through prayer."

"Danger! Mushbrains and believers at work!"

"The realization that God is not the source of morality is, I think, one of the great contributions of philosophy to clarifying human thought."

"Remember three things about censorship. First, it doesn’t work to suppress art or words that you don’t like. Second, trying to censor something just arouses interest in it, as well as resentment towards those who try to tell others what they can or cannot see. Third, exhibiting art or recommending that students read a book does not mean an endorsement of the image or contents."

"Guilt is the great weapon of the Authoritarian Left, and we must resist it when it comes to endorsing free expression."

"The truth is the truth, regardless of whether it fits your ideological biases."

"If religion makes a society happier, there’s no data to show that. All we see is that on average countries that are well off are less religious and are happier; and that goes for U.S. states as well. Checkmate, religionists."

"If Hawking’s world is “small,” well, at least what he found was testable, and might be true. Father de Souza’s claims are either untestable or have already been shown to be doubtful, and he has no evidence for any of them. In requiring people to believe fairy tales, de Souza’s world is not just small, but nonexistent."

"This implicit denigration of objectivity, and of the way science is done, irritates me immensely. It privileges anecdotes over data, “lived experience” over objective tests, and confirmation bias over uncomfortable truths. But that is the way that many humanities scholars, corrupted by postmodernism, have operated. Denying or denigrating an objective search for truth, they’re free to say whatever they want, or “discover” whatever they find ideologically convenient."

"What the comedy club in Montreal is doing is not only ridiculous, but is a prime example of virtue signaling: making a gesture to trumpet your own ideological purity, but a gesture that has no effect on society and no mitigation of injustice."

"In other words, (Helen) Pluckrose et al. got a lot more attention than I did. And that’s fine. For they did, to my mind, expose a creeping rot in the floorboards of academic humanities, which has becoming increasingly solipsistic, tendentious, propagandistic, and devoid of critical thinking but besotted with intersectionalist ideology."

"There is no compromise possible between catering to woke students and maintaining journalistic standards. We all know that this is true. If you feed the beast, it only gets hungrier, and is never full."

"“Safety” and “harm” have become the new buzzwords to use when somebody does something you don’t like."

"Everyone else besides the faithful already knows that religion has nothing useful to say to science."

"As we know, wokeness prizes ideology and narrative over truth."

"Yes, the claim that sex in humans is not a binary is pretty much a lie, and is made on ideological rather than scientific grounds."

"This will not abate: wokeness is a one-way ratchet to pure authoritarianism."

"The Woke are after Pinker again, and if he’s called a racist and misogynist, as he is in this latest attempt to demonize him, then nobody is safe. After all, Pinker is a liberal Democrat who’s donated a lot of dosh to the Democratic Party, and relentlessly preaches a message of moral, material, and “well-being” progress that’s been attained through reason and adherence to Enlightenment values. But that sermon alone is enough to render him an Unperson, for the Woke prize narrative and “lived experience” over data, denigrate reason, and absolutely despise the Enlightenment."

"The GOP, with 100+ of its Congresspeople joining the crazy Texas lawsuit trying to overturn the election, has become a swarming beehive of truthers, conspiracy theorists, and, of course, gun nuts."

"Christianity, and religion in general, is dying in America. (The exceptions are an increase in Islam, probably due to immigration, and in Buddhism, a basically godless religion.) The decline is due largely to a loss of faith among young people, as we’ve seen several times before. Religion wanes one corpse at a time."

"Isn’t it time for us to stop taking this nonsense seriously? I regard panpsychists as I regard theologians: they both make stuff up, none of what they say is testable, and they both actually get paid to foist nonsense on the world."

"If “wokeness” is in some sense equivalent to “making useless performative gestures that at the same time show what a good person you are,” then land acknowledgments are its apogee. They are performances not for Native Americans, but for others who were also complicit in the theft. Put up or shut up. And if you really think you’re responsible for stealing land, give it back—or pay for it."

"Religion and xenophobia go together like hot dogs and mustard."

"But grifters gotta grift, so we’ll always have tarot, psychics, and other scammers."

"A lot of activism, of course, is sincere activism, and I see instances of that all the time. Some of my best friends from college are dedicated to true “social justice”, and have spent their lives doing social work, teaching English to immigrants, deliberately teaching in minority schools, and so on. But what distinguishes “wokeness” from genuine social justice advocates is that the woke are engaged in a performance—usually involved in showing what good people they are, and what a good tribe they belong to."

"Biblical scholarship is useful as a form of historical inquiry and literary exegesis, while theology is a remnant of our childhood as a species, a vestigial belief that’s the mental equivalent of adults holding blankets and sucking their thumbs."

"So because of this one word, used with every intent to be polite, the Easthampton Public Schools lost its best candidate. That’s simply asinine and ridiculous. Look at the tradeoff: they gave away their best candidate so that the word “ladies” could be publicly and eternally demonized. These DEI “experts” should be treated with the ridicule and contempt they deserve."

"The man has no conception of what empirical evidence really is, so strong is his will to believe."

"I continue to be amazed at how much dust is stirred up by simply asserting the biological observation that, in animals and vacular plants, there are but two sexes, and those sexes are defined by the reproductive equipment they have. Males are “designed” (I’m speaking teleologically: “evolved” is what I mean) to make small, mobile gametes, and females to make big immobile ones. For decades this has been uncontroversial: A truth universally acknowledged, to paraphrase Jane Austen. Now, however, for reasons known best to themselves, a small but vocal group of ideologues is denying the sex binary. In my coauthored paper coming out in late June, we hazard some guesses, but those of you following the controversy probably realize that it involves trying to impose one’s ideological views onto nature. This doesn’t work so easily with the sex binary, as even nonscientists can observe it with their own eyes. The result is that deniers of that binary, such as Agustín Fuentes and Laura Helmuth (editor of Scientific American who’s published several pieces denying a sex binary), face considerable pushback from both scientists—who work with male and female organisms—and “regular” people, who have eyes to see and neurons to analyze."

"The U.S., for example, has made huge strides in racial equality and racial justice since 1940, but to listen to some Wokesters you’d think that racism now is as bad as—or even worse than—the days of Jim Crow. Wokesters claim that it’s just gone underground and has a different form. This, to me, is a ludicrous belief, refuted by tons of evidence."

"There are no activists so authoritarian and unforgiving as gender activists."

"I would add that the kowtowing towards the excesses of Islam by many Westerners is craven, patronizing, and evinces “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” How dare Westerners excuse or ignore the behavior of countries that execute gays, atheists, and apostates, oppress women and deny them education, and force women to wear coverings so as not to excite the presumably uncontrollable lust of men, while at the same time demonizing Israel, which does none of these things. It’s because Arabs, even if genetically similar to Israelis, are seen as “people of color”, while Israelis are seen as “white adjacent.” It’s as if implied pigmentation conferred virtue! These differential views of Arab versus Jewish states constitute one of the most pernicious aspects of Authoritarian Leftism and Wokeism."

"But why was the name “James Webb Space Telescope” attacked by Prescod-Weinstein and others? Because of the accusation that, as head of NASA, Webb allowed the demonization of gay employees and oversaw a purge of them from the agency. But as even the NYT reported (October 2022), those accusations are completely false. Will the Offended Woke Physicists give up in light of the evidence and shut their pie-holes about Webb? No, they will not. They still want the name “Webb” effaced. It’s insane. The main reason I think this is a tempest in a teapot is because this renaming accomplishes nothing: it is purely performative, which is why it’s woke, and ludicrously so."

"One of the purposes of a university is to find the truth, but that can’t be done if free discussion is banned."

"But the important conclusion is that wokeness is here and ubiquitous, and seems entrenched in many areas. But whether or not it’s increasing, it needs to be fought at every turn. And that means that those of us who object to the invidious side of Social Justice—of course “social justice” is not all bad; I’m referring to the PERFORMATIVE AND NON-EFFECTIVE PRETENSE of fixing society by changing words, bird names, and monitoring speech and behavior—must stand up and call out this nonsense when we see it, It’s not pleasant, as you’ll be ostracized and demonized, if not fired, but since when was society ever improved without people taking flak from those who wrongly see themselves as the pinnacle of morality?"

"How embarrassing is it, given the situation, that the SSE, the ASN, and the SSB got their biology wrong while the Trump administration got it right! But that’s what happens when scientific societies get ideologically captured."

"It’s funny, but telling, that those who claim that sex is a spectrum or continuum never specify how many sexes there are, either in humans or other species. I suspect that if they responded—based on their “multivariate, multidimensional” definition of sex—that “there are many, many sexes,” or “I can’t answer that”, they would be laughed out of the house. But we all know that that the “spectrum” people are not dumb or willfully ignorant. They are simply imbued with a certain ideology."

"I really dislike land acknowledgments because they’re purely performative. They are there to make the issuer look progressive and moral, but they accomplish exactly nothing. And that is what “woke” means."

"The whole brouhaha serves to demonstrate that “cancel culture”—the attempt to ruin someone’s career if they transgress “progressive” ideological stands—is alive and well."

"No, if there is to ever be a two-state solution, the Palestinian side cannot be run by anyone with a history of sponsoring terrorism. And Palestinian leaders like that are hard to find."

"Well, those opposing extreme gender ideology may be fomenting things, but it’s not because we’re white, religious, or nationalistic. And have these organizations ever considered that there may be many black people or Hispanics who also oppose gender activism? One might even say that blaming all this stuff on white people is a form of racism."

"Keeping budgets secret is what universities do."

"In the end, I am both amazed and amused at people like Kingsnorth who long for the good old days when people embraced Christianity and thus were both moral and fulfilled. There were no god-shaped holes then. But, given a choice of living then and now, I’m sure that all the Christian luddites would choose to live now. As for the god-shaped hole, all I can say is that many people, including me, don’t have one. Our lives get meaning not from embracing Jesus, but from whatever we find fulfilling: friends, loved ones, and family, work, hobbies, and so on. True, some people will always glom onto faith because it’s so easy: all you have to do is go to a church and you get a preexisting set of beliefs, friends and supporters. But people like me simply can’t believe in god if there’s no evidence for god."

"I do care when people like Steve Novella, who should know better, argue that biological sex is not a binary but a spectrum. In fact, there are far more people born with more or fewer than 20 fingers and toes than are born as true intersexes, yet we do not say that “digit number in humans is a spectrum.”"

"Yes, it’s true that gender ideologues will oppose the article and upcoming book, but they have long put ideology over science, a strategy that is a loser, as we know from the failures of creationism and intelligent design."

"The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition."

"This book lays out the main lines of evidence for evolution. For those who oppose Darwinism purely as a matter of faith, no amount of evidence will do—theirs is a belief not based on reason."

"It’s clear that this resistance stems largely from religion. You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion."

"We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most famous is the appendix."

"Tiny, nonfunctional wings, a dangerous appendix, eyes that can’t see, and silly ear muscles simply don’t make sense if you think that species were specially created."

"The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn’t exist."

"We now have many of the answers that once eluded Darwin, thanks to two developments that he could not have imagined: continental drift and molecular taxonomy."

"If you can’t think of an observation that could disprove a theory, that theory simply isn’t scientific."

"If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator."

"Because of the hegemony of fundamentalist religion in the United States, this country has been among the most resistant to the fact of human evolution."

"Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible—though very unlikely—that our whole world is controlled by elves. But supernatural explanations like these are simply never needed; we manage to understand the natural world just fine using reason and materialism."

"Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go."

"We are the one creature to whom natural selection has bequeathed a brain complex enough to comprehend the laws that govern the universe. And we should be proud that we are the only species that has figured out how we came to be."

"A well-understood and testable hypothesis like sexual selection surely trumps an untestable appeal to the inscrutable caprices of a creator."

"Although this book deals with the conflict between religion and science, I see this as only one battle in a wider war—a war between rationality and superstition. Religion is but a single brand of superstition (others include beliefs in astrology, paranormal phenomena, homeopathy, and spiritual healing), but it is the most widespread and harmful form of superstition. And science is but one form of rationality (philosophy and mathematics are others), but it is a highly developed form, and the only one capable of describing and understanding reality."

"It didn’t take long to realize the futility of using evidence to sell evolution to Americans, for faith led them to discount and reject the facts right before their noses."

"I was flabbergasted. How could it be that someone found evidence convincing but was still not convinced? The answer, of course, was that his religion had immunized him against my evidence."

"Science and religion, then, are competitors in the business of finding out what is true about our universe. In this goal religion has failed miserably, for its tools for discerning “truth” are useless. These areas are incompatible in precisely the same way, and in the same sense, that rationality is incompatible with irrationality."

"Understanding reality, in the sense of being able to use what we know to predict what we don’t, is best achieved using the tools of science, and is never achieved using the methods of faith. That is attested by the acknowledged success of science in telling us about everything from the smallest bits of matter to the origin of the universe itself—compared with the abject failure of religion to tell us anything about gods, including whether they exist."

"One can meet all the emotional requisites of a human—except for the assurance that you’ll find a life after death—without the superstitions of religion."

"I will have achieved my aim if, by the end of this book, you demand that people produce good reasons for what they believe—not only in religion, but in any area in which evidence can be brought to bear. I’ll have achieved my aim when people devote as much effort to choosing a system of belief as they do to choosing their doctor. I’ll have achieved my aim If the public stops awarding special authority about the universe and the human condition to preachers, imams, and clerics simply because they are religious figures. And above all, I’ll have achieved my aim if, when you hear someone described as a “person of faith,” you see it as criticism rather than praise."

"If religion and science get along so well, why are so many scientists nonbelievers?"

"Ironically, as the credibility of creationists grows smaller, their voices get louder."

"After all, what new insights has religion produced in the last century?"

"I could go on, but the point is clear: religions make explicit claims about reality—about what exists and happens in the universe. These claims involve the existence of gods, the number of such gods (polytheism or monotheism), their character and behavior (usually loving and beneficent, but, in the case of Hindu and ancient Greek gods, sometimes mischievous or malevolent), how they interact with the world, whether or not there are souls or life after death, and, above all, how the deities wish us to behave—their moral code. These are empirical claims, and although some may be hard to test, they must, like all claims about reality, be defended with a combination of evidence and reason. If we find no credible evidence, no good reasons to believe, then those claims should be disregarded, just as most of us ignore claims about ESP, astrology, and alien abduction. After all, beliefs important enough to affect you for eternity surely deserve the closest scrutiny."

"The rational scrutiny of religious faith involves asking believers only two questions: How do you know that? What makes you so sure that the claims of your faith are right and the claims of other faiths are wrong?"

"Any “knowledge” incapable of being revised with advances in data and human thinking does not deserve the name of knowledge."

"“The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.”"

"Religion is heavily laden with the kind of confirmation bias that makes people see their own faiths as true and all others as false. In other words, religion is replete with features to help people fool themselves."

"In other words, truth is simply what is: what exists in reality and can be verified by rational and independent observers."

"“What distinguishes knowledge is not certainty but evidence.”"

"Claims of supernatural phenomena like the efficacy of prayer are rendered unfalsifiable by the assertion that “God will not be tested.” (Of course, if the tests had been successful, then testing God would have been fine!)"

"In the end, a theory that can’t be shown to be wrong can never be shown to be right."

"Living with uncertainty is hard for many people, and is one of the reasons why people prefer religious truths that are presented as absolute."

"Although scientists come in all faiths, including no faith at all, there is no Hindu science, no Muslim science, and no Jewish science. There is only science, combining brainpower from the whole world to produce one accepted body of knowledge. In contrast, there are thousands of religions, most differing profoundly in what they see as “true.”"

"These (i. e., the statements of the Nicene Creed) are all empirical statements about reality: they are either true or false, even if some are hard to investigate. These claims, of course, absolutely conflict with those of other faiths. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs don’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Muslims believe that those who do so will spend eternity in hell. Doesn’t choosing among such faiths require a way to evaluate whether this dogma is true?"

"You can find some religions without creationism, but you can’t find creationism without religion."

"The question to ask believers is this: “Does it really matter whether what you believe about God is true—or don’t you care?” If it does matter, then you must justify your beliefs; if it doesn’t, then you must justify belief itself."

"My claim is this: science and religion are incompatible because they have different methods for getting knowledge about reality, have different ways of assessing the reliability of that knowledge, and, in the end, arrive at conflicting conclusions about the universe. “Knowledge” acquired by religion is at odds not only with scientific knowledge, but also with knowledge professed by other religions. In the end, religion’s methods, unlike those of science, are useless for understanding reality."

"In the end, religious investigations of “truth,” unlike those of science, are deeply dependent on confirmation bias. You start with what you were taught to believe, or what you want to believe, and then accept only those facts that support your prejudices. This is the basis for the theological practice of “apologetics,” designed to defend religion against counterarguments and disconfirming evidence....In contrast, science has no apologetics, for we test our conclusions by trying to find counterevidence."

"The most important component of the incompatibility between science and religion is religion’s dependence on faith."

"Theologians intensely dislike the definition of faith as belief without—or in the face of—evidence, for that practice sounds irrational. But it surely is, as is any system that requires supporting a priori beliefs without good evidence. In religion, but not science, that kind of faith is seen as a virtue."

"“Blasphemy” and “heresy” are terms of religion, not science."

"In fact, changes like the elimination of limbo don’t come from new information, but from secular currents in society that make church dogma seem insupportable or even barbaric."

"Just as many churches don’t want to be seen as rejecting science, neither do they wish to lag too far behind public morality, and so they often tweak their religious “truths” to reflect the zeitgeist."

"But all that changed when Darwin explained those designlike features by natural selection. The best evidence for God simply vanished."

"One can’t read a great deal of theology without appreciating the mental dexterity of its practitioners when faced with hard problems. And as a scientist, I regret how much more we’d understand about nature had that dexterity been applied to science instead, or to any field involved in studying what’s real."

"Most of the world’s believers reject these claims (i. e., of Scientology, Mormonism, and Christian Science) as blatantly false. But that’s only because these three religions are fairly new. They were founded in the last two centuries, and we see their origin not as divine but as obvious fabrications of humans—in the case of Joseph Smith, of a con man. But if you look with equally critical eyes at the doctrines of older faiths, their tenets seem equally bizarre."

"To a very large extent, which religion you accept and which you reject are accidents of birth. And after you’ve been religious for years, and surrounded by those who believe likewise, you become emotionally invested in your faith’s truth. This makes you more susceptible to confirmation bias and less likely to be skeptical about your beliefs."

"The different claims among these faiths have consequences, for they’ve produce endless misery over the course of history....Clearly, religions aren’t incompatible only with science: they’re incompatible with one another....This farrago of conflicting and irresolvable claims about reality stands in stark contrast to science."

"What I am saying is two things. First, religion hasn’t obviously come closer to understanding the divine....I also claim that insofar as theology or religious beliefs do change within a faith, those changes are driven largely by either science or changes in secular culture....Religious morality, at least as promulgated by priests, rabbis, imams, and theologians, is usually one step behind secular morality."

"The methodological conflicts between science and religion cannot be brokered, for faith has no reliable way to find truth."

"Our reliance on naturalism, then, is not an assumption decided in advance, but a result of experience—the experience of men like Darwin and Laplace who found that the only way forward was to posit natural rather than supernatural explanations. Because of this success, and the recurrent failure of supernaturalism to explain anything about the universe, naturalism is now taken for granted as the guiding principle of science."

"If you spend your life looking in vain for the Loch Ness Monster, stalking the lake with a camera, sounding it with sonar, and sending submersibles into its depths, and yet still find nothing, what is the more sensible view: to conclude provisionally that the monster simply isn’t there, or to throw up your hands and say, “It might be there; I’m not sure”? Most people would give the first response—unless they’re talking about God."

"It’s important to realize that philosophical naturalism is, like atheism, a provisional view. It’s not the kind of worldview that says, “I know there is no god,” but the kind that says, “Until I see some evidence, I don’t accept the existence of gods.”"

"Science in fact has a lot to say about the supernatural. It can and has tested it, and so far has found no evidence for it....Indeed, over its history science has repeatedly investigated supernatural claims and, in principle, could find strong evidence for them. But that evidence hasn’t appeared."

"Theists’ typical response to these failures (i. e., of prayer to affect rates of healing) is to say either “God won’t let himself be tested” or “That’s not what prayer is about: it’s simply a way to converse with God.” But you can bet that had these studies shown a large positive effect, the religious would be noisily flaunting this as evidence for God. The confirmation bias shown by accepting positive results but explaining away negative ones is an important difference between science and religion."

"This shows what we already know: belief may arise by indoctrination or authority, but is often maintained by social utility. But if no conceivable evidence can shake your faith in a theistic God, then you’ve deliberately removed yourself from rational discourse. In other words, your faith has trumped science."

"Hume was right about one thing: to have real confidence in a miracle, one needs evidence—massive, well-documented, and either replicated or independently corroborated evidence from multiple and reliable sources. No religious miracle even comes close to meeting those standards."

"In the end, theistic evolution is not a useful compromise between science and religion. Insofar as it makes testable predictions, it has been falsified, and insofar as it makes claims that can’t be tested, it can be ignored."

"It is curious that those who claim such firm knowledge about God’s nature and works become silent when asked about God’s methods."

"That doesn’t mean that the religious completely abjure evidence. If it supports their preconceptions, they’ll accept it."

"When facing “scientific” arguments for God like these, ask yourself three questions. First, what’s more likely: that these are puzzles only because we refuse to see God as an answer, or simply because science hasn’t yet provided a naturalistic answer? In other words, is the religious explanation so compelling that we can tell scientists to stop working on the evolution and mechanics of consciousness, or on the origin of life, because there can never be a naturalistic explanation? Given the remarkable ability of science to solve problems once considered intractable, and the number of scientific phenomena that weren’t even known a hundred years ago, it’s probably more judicious to admit ignorance than to tout divinity. Second, if invoking God seems more appealing than admitting scientific ignorance, ask yourself if religious explanations do anything more than rationalize our ignorance. That is, does the God hypothesis provide independent and novel predictions or clarify things once seen as puzzling—as truly scientific hypotheses do? Or are religious explanations simply stop-gaps that lead nowhere?...Does invoking God to explain the fine-tuning of the universe explain anything else about the universe? If not, then that brand of natural theology isn’t really science, but special pleading. Finally, even if you attribute scientifically unexplained phenomena to God, ask yourself if the explanation gives evidence for your God—the God who undergirds your religion and your morality. If we do find evidence for, say, a supernatural origin of morality, can it be ascribed to the Christian God, or to Allah, Brahma, or any one god among the thousands worshipped on Earth? I’ve never seen advocates of natural theology address this question."

"Of course, atheism, which is merely the lack of belief in gods, isn’t responsible for explaining altruism and ethics, a task that properly belongs to philosophy, science, and psychology. And those areas have offered plenty of nonreligious explanations for the “Moral law” and altruism. The explanations involve evolution, reason, and education."

"So if morality is innate, it’s certainly malleable."

"The rapid change in many aspects of morality, even in the last century, also suggests that much of its “innateness” comes not from evolution but from learning. That’s because evolutionary change simply doesn’t occur fast enough to explain societal changes like our realization that women are not an inferior moiety of humanity, or that we shouldn’t torture prisoners. The explanation for these changes must reside in reason and learning: our realization that there is no rational basis for giving ourselves moral privilege over those who belong to other groups."

"But some of our moral behaviors, if not sentiments, almost certainly evolved. Evidence for that comes from finding parallels between the behavior of our own species and that of our relatives."

"But the God hypothesis for morality and altruism has its own problems. It fails, for example, to specify exactly which moral judgments were instilled in people by God and which, if any, might rest on secular reason. It doesn’t explain why slavery, torture, and disdain for women and strangers were considered proper behaviors not too long ago, but are now seen as immoral. For if anything is true, God-given morality should remain constant over time and space. In contrast, if morality reflects a malleable social veneer on an evolutionary base, it should change as society changes. And it has."

"While our view of the world is filtered through our senses, evolution has, by and large, molded those senses to perceive the world accurately, for there’s a severe penalty to be paid for seeing things wrongly. That holds not only for the external environment, but also for the character of others. Without accurate perceptions, we couldn’t find food, avoid predators and other dangers, or form harmonious social groups. And following those perceptions is indeed the pursuit of “true beliefs”: beliefs based on evidence. Natural selection doesn’t mold true beliefs; it molds the sensory and neural apparatus that, in general, promotes the formation of true beliefs."

"It doesn’t trivialize morality to argue that it is based on evolution and secular reason."

"When one has a religious experience, what is “true” is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality."

"Can you prove that leprechauns don’t live in my garden? Well, not absolutely, but if you never see one, and they have no effects, than you can provisionally conclude that they don’t exist. And so it is with all the fanciful features and creatures we firmly believe don’t exist."

"Putting all this together, we see that religion is like Sagan’s invisible dragon. The missing evidence for any god is simply too glaring, and the special pleading too unconvincing, to make its existence anything more than a logical possibility. It’s reasonable to conclude, provisionally but confidently, that the absence of evidence for God is indeed evidence for his absence."

"Science’s results alone justify its usefulness, for it is, hands down, the single best way we’ve devised to understand the universe."

"The conflation of faith as “unevidenced belief” with its vernacular use as “confidence based on experience” is simply a word trick used to buttress religion."

"The orderliness of nature—the so-called set of natural laws—is not an assumption but an observation."

"Accommodationists further accuse scientists of having “faith in reason.” Yet reason is not an a priori assumption, but a tool that’s been shown to work. We don’t have faith in reason; we use reason, and we use it because it produces results and progressive understanding... Reason is simply the way we justify our beliefs, and if you’re not using it, whether you’re justifying religious or scientific beliefs, you deserve no one’s attention."

"Isn’t science, as some maintain, based on a “faith” that it’s good to pursue the truth? Hardly. The notion that knowledge is better than ignorance is not a quasi-religious faith, but a preference: we prefer to know the truth because accepting what’s false doesn’t give us useful answers about the universe."

"Every bit of truth clawed from nature over the last four centuries has involved completely ignoring God, for even religious scientists park their faith at the laboratory door."

"As the journalist Nick Cohen noted about accusations that atheism is like religion, “It’s not a charge I’d throw around if I were seeking to defend faith. When people say of dozens of political and cultural movements from monetarism to Marxism that their followers treat their cause ‘like a religion,’ they never mean it as a compliment. They mean that dumb obedience to higher authority and an obstinate attachment to dogma mark its adherents.”"

"Most religions, and certainly the Abrahamic ones, have three features that are foreign to science. The most important is religion’s linkage to moral codes that define and enforce proper behavior, behavior supposedly reflecting God’s will. The second is the widespread belief in eternal reward and punishment: the notion that after death not just your fate but everyone else’s depends on adherence to conduct mandated by your religion. And the third is the notion of absolute truth: that the nature of your god, and what it wants, is unchanging. While some believers see their ability to fathom God’s nature as limited, and don’t accept the notion of a heaven or hell, the certainty of religious dogma is ar more absolute and far less provisional than the pronouncements of science. This combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic. It is what leads many believers not only to accept unenlightened views, like the disenfranchisement of women and gays, opposition to birth control, and intrusions into people’s private sex lives, but also to force those views on others, including their own children and society at large, and sometimes even to kill those who disagree."

"For good people to do evil doesn’t require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of its key elements: belief without evidence—in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but in any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent."

"Science has a huge advantage over “other ways of knowing”: built-in methods of self-correction."

"But none of this criticism of science makes religion even a tiny bit more credible... In contrast, religion has never been right in its claims about the universe—at least not in a way that all rational people can accept. There is no reliable method to show that the Trinity exists, that God is loving and all-powerful, that we’ll meet our dead relatives in the afterlife, or that Brahma created the universe from a golden egg. Lacking a way to show its tenets are wrong, religion cannot show them to be right, even provisionally."

"The harm, as I’ve said repeatedly, comes not from the existence of religion itself, but from its reliance on and glorification of faith—belief, or, if you will, “trust” or “confidence”—without supporting evidence. And faith, as employed in religion (and in most other areas), is a danger to both science and society. The danger to science is in how faith warps the public understanding of science: by arguing, for instance, that science is based just as strongly on faith as is religion; by claiming that revelation or the guidance of ancient books is just as reliable a guide to truth about our universe as are the tools of science; by thinking that an adequate explanation can be based on what is personally appealing rather than on what stands the test of empirical study."

"Religion has no warrant and no method for decreeing what is and what is not beyond science."

"Medicine can cure; faith cannot."

"Above all, religion, faith healing, and alternative medicine all show the diagnostic feature of faith: an agenda not to find the truth, but to support one’s biases, emotions, and personal beliefs."

"The first argument, that religion is a social necessity and will always be with us, is dubious. It can be demolished with only two words: northern Europe."

"I’m not a Marxist, but Marx got at least one thing right: for many, religion weakens the incentive to fix both personal and societal problems."

"Religion has nothing to tell scientists that can improve their trade. Indeed, the progress of science has required shedding all vestiges of religion, whether those be the beliefs themselves or religious methods for finding “truth.” We do not need those hypotheses."

"What might be considered a real contribution of science to religious belief is the empirical demonstration that some of those beliefs are wrong."

"I have argued that religion is to science as superstition is to reason; indeed, that is the very reason they are incompatible."

"In the end, why isn’t it better to find out how the world really works instead of making up stories about it, or accepting stories concocted centuries ago?"

"It is time to stop seeing faith as a virtue, and to stop using the term “person of faith” as a compliment."

"A world that is faithless would not be without the arts, either. Those don’t rest on faith, so imaginative art, literature, and music would still be with us. Too, we would retain justice, law, and compassion, perhaps in even greater measure than now, for our judgment wouldn’t be warped by adherence to unevidenced divine strictures."

"Indeed, secular morality, which is not twisted by adherence to the supposed commands of a god, is superior to most “religious” morality."

"Coyne is also s special kind of scientist---one who accepts some things on faith himself! Most important is "determinism," when means that all of reality as we know it evolves completely deterministically according to physical laws."

"Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table."

"I think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet. We have one chance to live it and to contribute to the future of society and the future of life. The only "afterlife" is what other people remember of you."

"I could trace own EST brainwave to a flight back from a trip to Japan. But, of course, great ideas are often simultaneously conceived by several people who have responded in a similar way to the climate of thinking, and it can be hard to pin down when and precisely how a flash of inspiration is born. Kaplan had taught me that good ideas are a dime of dozen for a smart person, and the only thing that distinguishes good from great is in how an idea is executed—how it becomes reality. Scientific history is littered with stories of one person having an idea but not following through on it only to see another have a similar inspiration and then prove it to be valid."

"At the hearing I not only described the EST method and the rapid rate of human gene discovery but also voiced by concerns about NIH's patent efforts, a subject I was glad to get out in the open. The room went quiet as many were startled by this discovery and then Watson suddenly shouted that it was "sheer lunacy" to file such patents, adding that "virtually any monkey" could use the EST method and that he was "horrified." As Cook-Deegan, a Duke University genome discussant, described the event, "Watson was lying in wait and took aim with heavy artillery." Cook-Deegan, who was Watson's assistant at the time, told me later that Watson had practiced the lines for a week prior to the hearing."

"Tenure actually delivers a doubly whammy to the organizations that endure this outmoded arrangement. The second-rate people who thrive in a tenured environment like nothing more than to surround themselves with more mediocrity and drive out those who might excel and reveal the shortcomings of the entrenched."

"Experience of artificial fertilization, such as is effected with ornamental plants in order to obtain new variations in colour, has led to the experiments which will here be discussed. The striking-regularity with which the same hybrid forms always reappeared whenever fertilisation took place between the same species induced further experiments to be undertaken, the object of which was to follow up the developments of the hybrids in their progeny."

"It is willingly granted that by cultivation the origination of new varieties is favored, and that by man's labor many varieties are acquired which, under natural conditions, would be lost; but nothing justifies the assumption that the tendency to formation of varieties is so extraordinarily increased that the species speedily lose all stability, and their offspring diverge into an endless series of extremely variable forms. Were the change in the conditions the sole cause of variability we might expect that those cultivated plants which are grown for centuries under almost identical conditions would again attain constancy."

"Gärtner by the results of these transformation experiments, was led to oppose the opinion of those naturalists who dispute the stability of plant species and believe in a continuous evolution of vegetation. He perceives in the complete transformation of one species into another an indubitable proof that species are fixed within limits beyond which they cannot change."

"I am inclined to regard the separation of parental traits in the progeny of hybrids in Pisum as complete and thus permanent. The progeny of hybrids carries one or the other of the parental traits, or the hybrid form of the two; I have never observed gradual transitions between the parental traits or a progressive approach towards one of them. The course of development consists simply in this; that in each generation the two parental traits appear, separated and unchanged, and there is nothing to indicate that one of them has either inherited or taken over anything from the other"

"It concerns the opinion of Naudin and Darwin that a single pollen grain does not suffice for fertilization of the ovule. I used Mirabilis Jalappa for an experimental plant, as Naudin had done; the result of my experiment is, however, completely different. From fertilizations with single pollen grains, I obtained eighteen well-developed seeds, and from these an equal number of plants, of which ten are already in bloom"

"Of the experiments of previous years, those dealing with Matthiola annua and glabra, Zea, and Mirabilis were concluded last year. Their hybrids behave exactly like those of Pisum. Darwin's statements concerning hybrids of the genera mentioned in The variation of animals and plants under domestication, based on reports of others, need to be corrected in many respects."

"Jesus appeared to the disciples after the resurrection in various forms. He appeared to Mary Magdalene so that they might take him for a gardener. Very ingeniously these manifestation of Jesus is to our minds difficult to penetrate. (He appears) as a gardener. The gardener plants seedlings in prepared soil. The soil must exert a physical and chemical influence so that the seed of the plant can grow. Yet this is not sufficient. The warmth and light of the sun must be added, together with rain, in order that growth may result. The seed of supernatural life, of sanctifying grace, cleanses from sin, so preparing the soul of man, and man must seek to preserve this life by his good works. He still needs the supernatural food, the body of the Lord, which received continually, develops and brings to completion of the life. So natural and supernatural must unite to the realization of the holiness to the people. Man must contribute his minimum work of toil, and God gives the growth. Truly, the seed, the talent, the grace of God is there, and man has simply to work, take the seeds to bring them to the bankers. So that we "may have life, and abundantly"."

"Investigations that before had only been imagined as desirable now became easy to pursue, and questions as to the genetic inter-relations and compositions of varieties can now be definitely answered. Without prejudice to what the future may disclose whether by way of limitation or extension of the Mendelian method, it can be declared with confidence and certainty that we have now the means of beginning an analysis of living organisms, and distinguishing many of the units or factors which essentially determine and cause the development of their several attributes. Briefly put, the essence of the Mendelian lies in the discovery of the existence of unit characters or factors."

"The birth of modern genetics was due to the discoveries of Gregor Mendel (1823–1884), an Augustinian monk who taught natural science to high school students in the town of Brno in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic). Mendel’s greatest insight was to focus on discrete, clear-cut characters rather than measuring continuously variable properties, such as height or weight. Mendel used pea plants and studied characteristics such as whether the seeds were smooth or wrinkled, whether the flowers were red or white, and whether the pods were yellow or green, etc. When asked if any particular individual inherited these characteristics from its parents, Mendel could respond with a simple “yes” or “no,” rather than “maybe” or “partly.” Such clear-cut, discrete characteristics are known as Mendelian characters(Fig. 1.01)."

"Agriculture is the backbone of the livelihood security system of nearly 700 million people in the country and we need to build our food security on the foundation of home grown food."

"Let me make it very clear that the days of cheap food are over, just as the days of cheap oil are over"

"When you take up lab-to-land transfer, you should know the socio-economic circumstances of the farmer. You should not do experiments with the farmer, because he is already poor. You must be very sure that whatever you are recommending is both economically and ecologically sound. If farm economics and farm ecology go wrong, nothing else can go right in agriculture."

"So there is a big transformation. Also if you see the average lifespan, which was 28–29 in 1947, is now 64–65. In Kerala it is 74 or so. I am sure soon it will become 80–90. That is partly also because of food, because without nutrition, it is not possible. So we have had a transformation in our economic wellbeing. But that is not spread evenly in society; there are still very poor people, the highly deprived. In my view, the first task of both science and society is to address this issue"

"I followed Swami Vivekananda's teachings when I was young. He said, this life is short, its vanities are transient. He alone lives who lives for others. I think more than any other country, in our country, this is very important today. ‘Others’ also includes family members, because charity begins at home. But if you are an educated person, do something which can help improve the lives and livelihoods of your fellow people. And then towards the latter part of your life, you feel more satisfied that you have one something not only for yourself or for your family, but you have done something which has made a slight difference in the lives of the less privileged."

"The right to food has to become the right to good food"

"Eternal vigilance is the price of food security."

"Developing countries can leapfrog several stages in the development process through the application of bio-technology in agriculture"

"The Green Revolution was criticised by social activists on the ground that the high-yield technology involving the use of mineral fertilizers and chemical pesticides is environmentally harmful. Similarly, some economists felt that the new technologies would bypass small and marginal farmers, for although the technologies are scale-neutral, they are not resource-neutral. This led to my coining the term “ever-green revolution,” to emphasise the need to enhance productivity in perpetuity without ecological harm."

"Norman Borlaug is the living embodiment of the human quest for a hunger free world. His life is his message.""

"Land and water management should be given ‘Number One' priority for achieving evergreen revolution. No less important is to achieve the utmost efficiency in investment as well as in the use of water."

"The magic happens only when the artist serves with love and the listener receives with the same spirit."

"Dr. Swaminathan is a living legend. His contributions to Agricultural Science have made an indelible mark on food production in India and elsewhere in the developing world. By any standards, he will go into the annals of history as a world scientist of rare distinction."

"But for [...] his contributions, India today would have been a decimated, depopulated country as prophesied by the American doom-sayers Paddock Brothers!"

"Misconception was especially brought in by describing descent in terms of "blood". The common speech uses expressions such as consanguinity, pure-blooded, half-blood, and the like, which call up a misleading picture to the mind. Blood is in some respects a fluid, and thus it is supposed that this fluid can be both quantitatively and qualitatively diluted with other bloods, just as treacle can be diluted with water."

"Truer notions of genetic physiology are given by the Hebrew expression "seed". If we speak of a man as "of the blood-royal" we think at once of plebeian dilution, and we wonder how much of the royal fluid is likely to be "in his veins"; but if we say he is "of the seed of Abraham" we feel something of the permanence and indestructibility of that germ which can be divided and scattered among all nations, but remains recognisable in type and characteristics after 4000 years."

"It was in the attempt to ascertain the interrelationships between species that experiments n genetics were first made. The words "evolution" and "origin of species" are now so intimately associated with the name of Darwin that we are apt to forger that the idea of common descent had been prominent in the mnds of naturalists before he wrote, and that, for more than half a century, zealous investigators had been devoting themselves to the experimental study of that possibility. Prominent among this group of experimenters may be mentioned Koelreauter, John Hunter, Herbert Knight, Gartner, Jordan. Naudin, Godron, Lecoq, Wichura--men whose names are familiar to every reader of Animals and Plants unders Domestication."

"I well remember receiving from one of the most earnest of my seniors the friendly warning that it was waste of time to study variation, for "Darwin had swept the field." Parenthetically we may notice that though scientific opinion in general became rapidly converted to the doctrine of pure selection, there was one remarkable exception. Systematists for the most part kept aloof. Everyone was convinced that natural selection operating in a continuously varying population was a sufficient account of the origin of species except the one class of scientific workers whose labours familiarised them with the phenomenon of specific difference. From that time the systematists became, as they still in great measure remain, a class apart."

"If species had really arisen by the natural selection for impalpable differences, intermediate forms should abound, and the limits between species should be on the whole indefinite. As this conclusion follows necessarily from the premisses, the selectionists believe and declare that it represents the facts of nature. Difference between species being by axiom indefinite, the differences between varieties must be supposed to be still less definite. Consequently the conclusion that evolution must proceed by insensible transformation of masses of individuals has become an established dogma."

"Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that "acquired characters" or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can really be transmitted to the offspring. The ocurrence of progressive adaptation by transmission of effects of use had seemed so natural to Darwin and his contemporaries that no proof of the physiological reality of the henomenon was thought necessary. Weismann's challenge revealed the utter inadequacy of the evidence on which the beliefs were based. They are doubtless isolated observations which may be interpreted as favouring the belief in these transmissions, but such meagre indications as exist are by general consent admitted to be too slight to be of much assistance in the attempt to understand how the more complex adaptive mechanisms arose."

"The concept of evolution as proceeding through the gradual transformation of masses of individuals by the accumulation of impalpable changes is one that the study of genetics shows immediately to be false. Once for all, that burden so gratuitously undertaken in ignorance of generic physiology by the evolutionists of the last century may be cast into oblivion. For the facts of heredity and variation unite to prove that genetic variation is a phenomenon of individuals."

"That the variations are controlled by physiological law, we have now experimental proof; but that this control is guided ever so little in response to the needs of adaptation there is not the smallest sign."

"In the light of the new knowledge various plausible, but frequently unsatisfying, suggestions put forward, especially by Wallace, Weismann, and their followers, as probable accounts of evolutionary progress, must be finally abandoned."

"As systematic inquiry into the natural facts was begun it was at once found that the accepted ideas of variation were unfounded. Variation was seen very frequently to be a definite and specific phenomenon, affecting different forms of life in different ways, but in all its diversity showing manifold and often obvious indications of regularity. This observation was not in its essence novel. Several examples of definite variation had been well known to Darwin and others, but many, especially Darwin himself in his later years, had nevertheless been disposed to depreciate the significance of such facts. They consequently then lapsed into general disparagement. Upon more careful inquiry the abundance of such phenomena proved to be far greater than was currently supposed, and a discussion of their nature brought into prominence a consideration of greater weight, namely that the differences by which these definite or discontinuous variations are constituted again and again approximate to and are comparable with the class of differences by which species are distinguished from each other."

"Few who are familiar with the facts that genetic research has revealed are now inclined to speculate as to the manner by which the process [species come into existence] has been accomplished. Our knowledge of the nature and properties of living things is far too meagre to justify any such attempts. Suggestions of course can be made: though, however, these ideas may have a stimulating value in the lecture room, they look weak and thin when set out in print."

"In spite of Darwin's hopes, the acceptance of his views has led to no real improvement — scarcely indeed to any change at all in either the practice or aims of systematists. In a famous passage in the Origin he confidently declares that when his interpretation is generally adopted "Systematists will be able to pursue their labours as at present; but they will not be incessantly haunted by the shadowy doubt whether this or that form be a true species. This, I feel sure, and I speak after experience, will be no slight relief. The endless disputes whether or not some fifty species of British brambles are good species will cease." Those disputes nevertheless proceed almost exactly as before. It is true that biologists in general do not, as formerly, participate in these discussions because they have abandoned systematics altogether; but those who are engaged in the actual work of naming and cataloguing animals and plants usually debate the old questions in the old way. There is still the same divergence of opinion and of practice, some inclining to make much of small differences, others to neglect them. Not only does the work of the sytematists as a whole proceed as if Darwin had never written but their attitude towards these problems is but little changed."

"I am well aware that some very eminent systematists regard the whole problem as solved. They hold as Darwin did that specific diversity has no physiological foundation or causation apart from adaptation, and that species are impermanent groups, the delimitations of which are ultimately determined by environmental exigency or "fitness." The specific diversity of living things is thus regarded as being something quite different in nature from the specific diversity of inorganic substances. In practice those who share these opinions are, as might be anticipated, to be found among the 'lumpers' rather than among the 'splitters.' In their work, certainly, the Darwinian theory is actually followed as a guiding principle; unanalysed intergradations of all kinds are accepted as impugning the integrity of species; the underlying physiological problem is forgotten, and while the product is almost valueless as a contribution to biological research, I can scarcely suppose that it aids greatly in the advances of other branches of our science."

"In Darwin's time no serious attempt had been made to examine the manifestations of variability. A vast assemblage of miscellaneous facts could formerly be adduced as seemingly comparable illustrations of the phenomenon "Variation." Time has shown this mass of evidence to be capable of analysis. When first promulgated it produced the impression that variability was a phenomenon generally distributed amongst living things in such a way that the specific divisions must be arbitrary. When this variability is sorted out, and is seen to be in part a result of hybridisation, in part a consequence of the persistence of hybrids by parthenogenetic reproduction, a polymorphism due to the continued presence of individuals representing various combinations of Mendelian allelomorphs, partly also the transient effect of alteration in external circumstances, we see how cautious we must be in drawing inferences as to the indefiniteness of specific limits from a bare knowledge that intermediates exist."

"Since the belief in transmission of acquired adaptations arose from preconception rather than from evidence, it is worth observing that, rightly considered, the probability should surely be the other way. For the adaptations relate to every variety of exigency. To supply themselves with food, to find it, to seize and digest it, to protect themselves from predatory enemies whether by offence or defence, to counter-balance the changes of temperature, or pressure, to provide for mechanical strains, to obtain immunity from poison and from invading organisms, to bring the sexual elements into contact, to ensure the distribution of the type; all these and many more are accomplished by organisms in a thousand most diverse and alternative methods. Those are the things that are hard to imagine as produced by any concatenation of natural events; but the suggestions that organisms had had from the beginning innate in them a power of modifying themselves, their organs and their instincts so as to meet these multifarious requirements does not materially differ from the more overt appeals to supernatural intervention. The conception, originally introduced by Hering and independently by S. Butler, that adaptation is a consequence or product of accumulated memory was of late revived by Semon and has been received with some approval, especially by F. Darwin. I see nothing fantastic in the notion that memory may be unconsciously preserved with the same continuity that the protoplasmic basis of life possesses. That idea, though purely speculative and, as yet, incapable of proof or disproof contains nothing which our experience of matter or of life at all refutes. On the contrary, we probably do well to retain the suggestion as a clue that may some day be of service. But if adaptation is to be the product of these accumulated experiences, they must in some way be translated into terms of physiological and structural change, a process frankly inconceivable."

"Memory is a mystery as deep as any that even psychology can propound. [Natural] Philosophers might perhaps encourage themselves to attack the problem of the nature of memory by reflecting that after all the process may in some of its aspects be comparable with that of inheritance, but the student of genetics, as long as he can keep in close touch with a profitable basis of material fact, will scarcely be tempted to look for inspiration in psychical analogies."

"More than one hundred years ago, William Bateson suggested that studying the regulation and timing of development was the key to understanding evolutionary change. He was right."

"Physiologic facts concerning the origin of species in nature were unknown in the time of Darwin. . . The experience of the breeders was quite inadequate to the use which Darwin made of it. It was neither scientific, nor critically accurate. Laws of variation were barely conjectured; the different types of variability were only imperfectly distinguished. The breeders' conception was fairly sufficient for practical purposes, but science needed a clear understanding of the factors in the general process of variation. Repeatedly Darwin tried to formulate these causes, but the evidence available did not meet his requirements. Quetelet's law of variation had not yet been published. Mendel's claim of hereditary units for the explanation of certain laws of hybrids discovered by him, was not yet made. The clear distinction between spontaneous and sudden changes, as compared with the ever-present fluctuating variations, is only of late coming into recognition by agriculturists. Innumerable minor points which go to elucidate the breeders' experience, and with which we are now quite familiar, were unknown in Darwin's time. No wonder that he made mistakes, and laid stress on modes of descent, which have since been proved to be of minor importance or even of doubtful validity."

"To put it in the terms chosen lately by Mr. Arthur Harris in a friendly criticism of my views: "Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.""

"Our choices from diet to outlook to emotional state directly alter our neural and gene activity at every moment."

"The more that we learn about these animals the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds."

"We have as much evidence that T. rex was feathered, at least during some stage of its life, as we do that australopithecines like Lucy had hair."

"Really the best way to understand anything about dinosaurs is by looking at living animals. You look at birds and then look at the closest living ancestor of birds, which is the crocodile. If you look at characteristics that birds and crocodiles have in common, the explanation is that the trait was in the common ancestor that birds and crocodiles had at one time."

"If you saw a baby tyrannosaur you would probably think it was a weird looking bird. A full grown one might have had feathers too, maybe not on its whole body though, maybe more of an ornamental display sort of feathers. So traits in the theropod dinosaurs were more birdlike than say, crocodiles."

"If you look at crocodiles today, they aren’t really representative of what the lineage of crocodiles look like. Crocodiles are represented by about 23 species, plus or minus a couple. Along that lineage the more primitive members weren’t aquatic. A lot of them were bipedal, a lot of them looked like little dinosaurs. Some were armored, others had no teeth. They were all fully terrestrial. So this is just the last vestige of that radiation that we’re seeing. And the ancestor of both dinosaurs and crocodiles would have, to the untrained eye, looked much more like a dinosaur."

"When people look of non-avian dinosaur they’re thinking of extrapolating a cow up to that size. Mammals are much much denser than birds are, because a lot of the skeletons of sauropods (the big, long-necked ones—Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus and the like) and theropod dinosaurs are just air. Theropods don’t have solid bones like we do; they have hollow bones. Sauropods don’t, but they have tremendous air sacs that fill up a lot of their bodies. And thus they weigh way less than a mammal scaled up to that size."

"A couple things that we do know about theropods—the ones that most closely related to birds—is that they brooded their nests. If you go deeper in the tree, what you see is that for sauropods, we have no direct evidence that they returned to the nest after the eggs were laid. Most of the evidence for that comes from an excavation in Argentina called Auca Mahuevo. What’s thought with sauropods is that they’d just lay a bunch of eggs and leave them alone—the turtle model. Few of those would ever reach adulthood."

"Believers in psychic phenomena — such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis — appear to have won a decisive victory and virtually silenced opposition... What is unique about the present is, that during the last 15 years, scarcely a single scientific paper has appeared attacking the work of the parapsychologists."

"A model that unifies all types of selection (chemical, sociological, genetical, and every other kind of selection) may open the way to develop a general ‘Mathematical Theory of Selection’ analogous to communication theory... Selection has been studied mainly in genetics, but of course there is much more to selection than just genetical selection... yet, despite the pervading importance of selection in science and life, there has been no abstraction and generalisation from genetical selection to obtain a general selection theory and general selection mathematics"

"For his groundbreaking insight into the evolution of altruism, Price merits a special place in the history of evolutionary biology. The painful irony is that his struggle to extinguish all selfish motives in his own life nearly prevented him from achieving it."

"Some students at BYU perceive general education as an unfortunate burden that does little for them professionally. I was rudely awakened to this perception the first time that I taught Biology 100. Having loved biology my entire life, I assumed that all 250 students in my class would be as enthusiastic as I was to study biology. I quickly learned that most of my students dreaded having to take the course and had little interest in the sciences. My challenge was to help them learn to reverently admire the intricate wonders of God's creation that are evident when we study life. General education is especially important at BYU, for here a thoughtful study of the arts and sciences can be, in President Kimball's words, "bathed in the light and color of the restored gospel". Let me share with you a few of my own experiences."

"I have always felt a deep reverence for the intricacy and beauty of nature. While I was an undergraduate student at BYU, I fell in love with biology, especially with genetics. As I studied the biological and physical sciences, I came to view the creation of life in a much broader sense than before. I now view creation not as something that occurred long ago but as a process that continues today in which we are given the sacred privilege to participate. Through the study of biology we are able to gain a glimpse of how the earth and all of life was, and still is, created. Several scientists have shared this sense of wonder as they have spoken of the forest canopy as a great cathedral or of microbes, plants, and animals as God's creations with whom we share the earth. For example, Francis Collins, who is the director of the human genome project, one of the greatest scientific undertakings in history, said:"

"Vibrant human diversity is now commonplace in major cities throughout the world. Some celebrate such a mix of human diversity. Others deplore it, preferring that so-called races be separated both geographically and reproductively. Even today, some people retain the once-popular belief that the 'white' race is superior in intellect, health, and other attributes. Although far more people reject the notion of white supremacy today than in the past, its legacy remains, as evidenced by economic stratification, ongoing segregation, and classification by racial categories. Even among those who reject the supposed superiority of a particular ethnicity over any other, the perception of distinct, genetically determined human races often persists."

"Classification is real, but it is based much more on a set of social definitions than on genetic distinctions. Legally defined categories for race differ from one country to another, and they change over time depending largely on the social and political realities of a particular society or nation. The notion of discrete racial categories arose mostly as an artifact of centuries-long immigration history coupled with overriding worldviews that white superiority was inherent, a purported genetic destiny that has no basis in modern science."

"A better understanding of what science tells us about human genetic diversity is of immense importance, particualrly because it dispels false notions of what race is."

"Few features of humanity are as obvious as the wide array of inherited diversity visible in our outward features. It's also evident that people whose ancestry traces to a particular geographic region typically appear similar to one another and different from other geographic regions. Moreover, we as humans have an almost innate propensity to compartmentalize nearly everything into discrete categories, even when lines that distinguish those categories are complex, blurred, or nonexistent. As an inevitable consequence, people have been subjected to categorization into what we call human races throughout much of the past several centuries."

"Throughout the past several centuries, people have used the term race to describe groups of people in much the same way it was used in past centuries to describe groups of animals. People with ancestry from a particular region of tend to share certain inherited similar features, resembling their parents. However, the children of parents with substantially different ancestral backgrounds often have an appearance that is intermediate between that of their two parents, and in subsequent generations, the offspring may vary. In part because of the obvious similarities between animals and humans for how traits are inherited, and in part because of cultural, political, and religious traditions, notinos of racial purity and superiority have surged and ebbed yet persisted, crossing the boundaries of culture, geography, politics , and time. They are still with us today, and some of the most insidious actions based on notions of racial supremacy happened not long ago."

"Under the guise of eugenic improvement and racial purity, and what the implementation of eugenic measures could supposedly do to improve human society, notions of racial superiority continued in popularity, but with a purported scientific foundation."

"There are those who still believe that notions of racial purity are biologically and theologically sound, and therefore desirable, in spite of the fact that current genetic evidence has obliterated all justification for such notions."

"The world's most prominent human population geneticists have publicly criticized the people who claim genetic research supports the notion of biological races, and the unfounded inferences derived from that notion."

"So-called racial differences in IQ scores are more a consequence of disparities in socioeconomic status and the quality of education than of any genetic differences between ethnic groups. Efforts to improve educational quality and opportunity can increase the economic benefits associated with increased educational achievement."

"Unfortunately, many people find it difficult to accept what current science tells us about the myth of race. It runs counter to what seem to be obvious racial distinctions, mostly in parts of the world where immigration history has juxtaposed people with discontinuous ancestral backgrounds in the same place. The racial categorizations that many of us have experienced throughout our lives have likewise inculcated a sense of racial division that is not easy to abandon. Regardless of what the science shows, the perception of race and the associated racial discrimination are unlikely to disappear soon. Furthermore, a scientific understanding of human evolutionary history challenges commonly-held religious beliefs that are based on literal interpretations of biblical history."

"A significant minority of people fully reject human evolution, opting instead for the belief that humans were specially created with no prior evolutionary ancestry less than ten thousand years ago. Such beliefs are often infused with a non-scientific perception of different races and how the supposedly originated. And, in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence and changing social norms, a relatively large proportion of people still cling to past traditions of white supremacy and racism."

"To understand who we are as a species, and why we vary as we do, we must examine our genetic diversity in the context of a common African origin, followed by intra- and intercontinental diasporas that transpired over a period of tens of thousands of years, culminating in an era of major migrations that reshuffled the worldwide human genetic construction over the past several thousand years and is still underway. Last, we must recognize that today’s human population is far larger, more diverse, and more complex than it ever has been. We are all related, more than seven billion of us, recent cousins to one another, and, ultimately, everyone is African."

"Ancient DNA available from this time in Anatolia shows no evidence of steppe ancestry similar to that in the Yamnaya (although the evidence here is circumstantial as no ancient DNA from the Hittites themselves has yet been published). This suggests to me that the most likely location of the population that first spoke an Indo-European language was south of the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps in present-day Iran or Armenia, because ancient DNA from people who lived there matches what we would expect for a source population both for the Yamnaya and for ancient Anatolians. If this scenario is right the population sent one branch up into the steppe-mixing with steppe hunter-gatherers in a one-to-one ratio to become the Yamnaya as described earlier- and another to Anatolia to found the ancestors of people there who spoke languages such as Hittite."

"People often think that Europeans are homogeneous group that arrived in a simple way there maybe 40 or 50 thousand years ago maybe based on the archaeology and just kind of sat there until they became the Europeans they are today, but that's probably not true: the Europeans today are a replacement population who came in much more recently and replaced the people who were there originally 40 thousand years ago."

"The mixture of highly differentiated populations is a recurrent process in our history."

"About ten thousand years ago there were at least four major populations in West Eurasia — the farmers of the Fertile Crescent, the farmers of Iran, the hunter-gatherers of central and western Europe, and the hunter-gatherers of eastern Europe. All these populations differed from one another as much as Europeans differ from East Asians today. Scholars interested in trying to create ancestry-based racial classifications, had they lived ten thousand years ago, would have categorized these groups as "races," even though none of these groups survives in unmixed form today."

"Ideologies that seek a return to a mythical purity are flying in the face of hard science."

"“Whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today."

"We warn that models in population genetics should be treated with caution. Although they provide an important framework for testing historical hypotheses, they are oversimplifications. For example, the true ancestral populations of India were probably not homogeneous as we assume in our model, but instead were probably formed by clusters of related groups that mixed at different times. (Reich et al. 2009: 492)"

"The circularity of the ‘Ancestral North Indians’ (ANI) vs ‘Ancestral South Indians’ (ASI) concept is another case in point. Reich (2018) admits that he thought it up overnight simply to avert serious differences with his Indian collaborators. No precise definition was ever given to these two supposedly highly distinct groups; they were simply stated to be ‘genetically divergent’ (Reich et al. 2009) and were used in several subsequent studies as though they had been rigorously established. Elsewhere (Danino 2014), I showed that the populations sampled were very seriously restricted, since 18 states of India had either no representation or only one group represented in the 2009 study. Despite such a skewed distribution, Reich et al. exuded confidence in the newly coined terms and found it ‘tempting to assume that the population ancestral to ANI and CEU [Europeans] spoke ‘‘Proto-Indo-European’’ … ’ (Reich et al. 2009, p. 492) – a gratuitous association built, again, on circularity."

"Faith is accepted by free will, not by reason."

"Faith is a large epistemic tool i.e. method of acquiring new knowledge for which reason is blind."

"Andrzej Szczeklik was a fascinating personality in many respects. The scope of his general knowledge was absolutely rare. He saw what others did not notice. It's enough to say he was a better doctor than a good doctor. He could look and listen to what the patient says. Looking, he already knew what was wrong, after little things, after grimaces, after the way of breathing, after the way someone sits down or gets up..."

"At a time when cancer was a rare disease, people lived shorter for other reasons. When there were no antibiotics, they often died for ordinary infections. I therefore think that the "cancer epidemic" does not result from changes in genetic predisposition or carcinogenic factors, but from the fact that in recent decades these imperfections of human nature have been revealed that were previously masked by other diseases."

"I had very happy high school years; I was not a very diligent student, but I had good achievements – I was a winner of biology and chemistry national competition, which gave me a lot of points when I decided to take the entrance examination for medicine, not being completely convinced of the medical profession, since there was never a doctor in my family."

"If you want to be a good doctor for patients, you need to devote some time to it, and if you want to have achievements in scientific research, you need to spend a lot of time in the laboratory. It is difficult to reconcile."

"In lectures, it is important that you lecture simply. We are interested in the smartest students, and we really should take care of those who have most difficulties to understand certain concepts. I try to balance it."

"In science, wherever politics got involved, the results were deplorable."

"The more times your cells divide, the greater the chance of mutations that lead to cancer. That is why the average oncological patient is a mature person or even a senior."

"We can not predict who will develop the cancer. Cancer is a just disease – it affects everyone, regardless of whether we are poor or rich, where we live, how we live."

"We now know that DNA differences are the major systematic source of psychological differences between us. Environmental effects are important but what we have learned in recent years is that they are mostly random – unsystematic and unstable – which means that we cannot do much about them."

"Understanding how DNA makes us who we are will teach us to be more tolerant of each other."

"DNA isn’t all that matters but it matters more than everything else put together."

"The phenomenon of genetic recombination provides a powerful tool for separating mutations and discerning their positions along a chromosome. When it comes to very closely neighboring mutations, a difficulty arises, since the closer two mutations lie to one another, the smaller the probability that recombination between them will occur. Therefore, failure to observe recombinant types among a finite number of progeny ordinarily does not justify the conclusion that the two mutations are inseparable but can only place an upper limit on the linkage distance between them. A high degree of resolution requires the examination of very may progeny. This can best be achieved if there is available a selective feature for the detection of small proportions of recombination."

"Complex as it is, much of the vast network of cellular functions has been successfully dissected, on a microscopic scale, by the use of mutants in which one element is altered at a time. A similar approach may be fruitful in tackling the complex structures and events underlying behavior, using behavioral mutations to indicate modifications of the nervous system. Drosophila offers the same advantages to such a study as it did to classical genetics, namely, large numbers and short generation time, to which now may be added an enormous store of accumulated knowledge concerning the organism. Containing about 105 neurons, the fly's nervous system is roughly halfway, on a logarithmic scale, between a single neuron and the human brain, and the fly is possessed of a rich repertoire of behavior."

"The problems that Benzer and his students are solving are problems that scientists and philosophers from the beginning of recorded history have been unable to solve and also unable to ignore."

"Key aspects of the bacteriophage work illustrate central features of Seymour's ability to design scientific investigations; these features played out again and again in his scientific career, to great success. One of these is the “simple assay.” Seymour was an enthusiast of developing and using simple assays to approach any biological question of interest. Why use a complicated, time-consuming assay if a simple one would address the question equally well? Using a simpler assay would give more time and opportunity to delve in greater depth into the specific scientific question, as well as allow more time and opportunity to address additional questions of great interest."

"If chromosomes are broken by various means, the broken ends appear to be adhesive and tend to fuse with one another 2-by-2. This has been abundantly illustrated in the studies of chromosomal aberrations induced by X-ray treatment. It also occurs after mechanical rupture of ring-shaped chromosomes during somatic mitoses in maize and is assumed to occur during the normal process of crossing-over."

"When, through radiation or other causes, chromosomes are broken within a single nucleus, 2-by-2 fusions may occur between the broken ends. These fusions may lead to rearrangements of parts of the chromatin complement, giving rise to various chromosomal aberrations which are detected as reciprocal translocations, inversions, deficiencies, etc. Since, in the well-investigated cases, the breakages occurred within a single nucleus, the conditions that lead to fusions of broken ends could not easily be ascertained."

"An experiment conducted in the mid-nineteen forties prepared me to expect unusual responses of a genome to challenges for which the genome is unprepared to meet in an orderly, programmed manner. In most known instances of this kind, the types of response were not predictable in advance of initial observations of them. It was necessary to subject the genome repeatedly to the same challenge in order to observe and appreciate the nature of the changes it induces. Familiar examples of this are the production of mutation by X-rays and by some mutagenic agents. In contrast to such “shocks” for which the genome is unprepared, are those a genome must face repeatedly, and for which it is prepared to respond in a programmed manner. Examples are the “heat shock” responses in eukaryotic organisms, and the “SOS” responses in bacteria. Each of these initiates a highly programmed sequence of events within the cell that serves to cushion the effects of the shock. Some sensing mechanism must be present in these instances to alert the cell to imminent danger, and to set in motion the orderly sequence of events that will mitigate this danger. The responses of genomes to unanticipated challenges are not so precisely programmed. Nevertheless, these are sensed, and the genome responds in a descernible but initially unforeseen manner."

"In 1950, Barbara McClintock published a Classic PNAS article, “The origin and behavior of mutable loci in maize,” which summarized the evidence leading to her discovery of transposition. The article described a number of genome alterations revealed through her studies of the Dissociation locus, the first mobile genetic element she identified. McClintock described the suite of nuclear events, including transposon activation and various chromosome aberrations and rearrangements, that unfolded in the wake of genetic crosses that brought together two broken chromosomes 9. McClintock left future generations with the challenge of understanding how genomes respond to genetic and environmental stresses by mounting adaptive responses that frequently include genome restructuring."

"In the year of her election to the National Academy, she began the series of experiments that led her to transposition—work that many now see as the most important of her career. At the time, only she thought so. To most, her conclusions seemed too radical."

"When Barbara McClintock was awarded a Nobel Prize for her work on gene transposition in corn plants, the most striking thing about her was that she made her discoveries by listening to what the corn spoke to her, by respecting the life of the corn and "letting it McClintock says she learned "the stories" of the plants. She "heard them. She watched the daily green journeys of growth from carth toward sky and sun. She knew her plants in the way a healer or mystic would have known them, from the inside, the inner voices of corn and woman speaking to one another. As an Indian woman, I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent, people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people, that it has a story to tell, that the world is alive...This intuitive and common language is what I seek for my writing, work in touch with the mystery and force of life, work that speaks a few of the many voices around us, and it is important to me that McClintock listened to the voices of corn. It is important to the continuance of life that she told the truth of her method and that it reminded us all of where our strength, our knowing, and our sustenance come from. It is also poetry, this science, and I note how often scientific theories lead to the world of poetry and vision, theories telling us how atoms that were stars have been transformed into our living, breathing bodies. And in these theories, or maybe they should be called stories, we begin to understand how we are each many people, including the stars we once were, and how we are in essence the earth and the universe, how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns. In a single moment of our living, there is our ancestral and personal history, our future, even our deaths planted in us and already growing toward their fulfillment. The corn plants are there, and like all the rest we are forever merging our borders with theirs in the world collective."

"As a consequence of disease and environmental forces, as well as other factors, a large number of polymorphisms may exist in a population. Some may be related to present selective forces, and others to forces which operated in the past, but which are no longer significant. Present gene frequencies may also result from gene mixture between populations."

"Viral hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver caused by at least six different, mostly unrelated, viruses [hepatitis viruses A, B, C, D, E, and G (HAV, HBV, HCV, HDV, HEV, and HGV, respectively)]. It can occur in an acute form from which most patients experience a complete recovery. Acute viral hepatitis is characterized by an insidious onset, often with fever and severe malaise and loss of appetite for food, alcohol, and tobacco. Flu-like symptoms may occur early in the illness. The characteristic finding that occurs in many cases is the development of jaundice, a dramatic yellow discoloration of the skin and other surfaces. Symptoms may last for days or weeks. The acute disease usually results in complete recovery with lifelong immunity. Occasionally, acute hepatitis may advance to the fulminant phase; the patient does not recover, but develops liver failure and death may be rapid. Fortunately, this is rare. Hepatitis due to HAV and HEV is nearly always acute. Acute disease also may occur with HBV and probably HGV. HCV is usually chronic."

"Primary cancer of the liver (hepatocellular carcinoma, HCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide; HBV is the major cause of HCC. A vaccine that protects against HBV infection was invented in 1969 and is now one of the most commonly used vaccines. National vaccination programs have dramatically reduced the prevalence of HBV infection and carriers, with a concomitant decrease in the incidence of HCC in the vaccine-impacted populations. HBV vaccine is the first widely used cancer prevention vaccine; a second that protects against papilloma virus and cancer of the cervix has recently been introduced."

"In his early years as a physician, Baruch Blumberg developed a keen interest in the genetic polymorphisms and environmental factors that influence disease development. In particular, he was interested in the lipoprotein subtypes that predispose certain individuals to heart disease. As a scientific researcher, Blumberg, while studying these protein fractions, encountered an unusual protein in the serum of Australian aborigine patients with serum hepatitis."

"In 1982 Barry visited Taiwan, where the director of the blood bank at a major hospital in Taipei showed him large refrigerators full of blood from people infected with hepatitis B. What should they do with all these contaminated bottles of blood, the director asked? Barry’s answer: they should make hepatitis B vaccine. The Taiwanese hospital adopted his recommendation, which led by 1984 to Taiwan establishing the world’s first program of universal hepatitis B vaccination."

"Whether or not a researcher of a certain notoriety deserves that the ‘support system’ [to] keep him going, there is a far more general problem: What props up biological research, at least in the vaunted US of A, involves a situation so deeply imbued with entitlement mentality that it has sunk into institutional corruption. A principal symptom of this state of affairs involves the following: People are hired after they have undergone long stints of training; and a potential hiree must present a large body of documented accomplishments. In my day you could get a faculty job with zero post-doc papers, as in the case of yours truly; but now the CV of a successful applicant looks like that of a newly minted full Professor from olden times. Notwithstanding these demands, and the associated high quality of a fledgling faculty-level type, the job starts with some “set-up” money for equipping the lab; but next to no means are provided to initiate that ‘research program’ and to sustain it during the years to come."

"US institutions (possibly also those in other countries) behave as though they… are entitled to research funding, which will magically materialize from elsewhere: “Get a grant, serf! If you can’t do it quickly, or have trouble for some years — or if your funding doesn’t get renewed, despite continuing productivity — forget it!” But what if there are so many applicants (as there are nowadays) that even a meritorious proposal gets the supplicant nowhere or causes a research group to grind prematurely to a halt? What if the situation is worsened when the government at hand is anti-science and otherwise squanders its resources on international adventurism?"

"Having said all this, I acknowledge that “I got mine” from the government over the course of many years. Thus, as I say so long,” one component of my last-gasp disquiet stems from pompously worrying about biologists who are starting out or are in mid-career."

"Conceptual simplicity, recursiveness, and formal separation of levels of selection are attractive features of these equations. But, of course, being able to point to a relevant and generally non-zero part of selective change is far from showing that group selection can override individual selection when the two are in conflict. Moreover, even the possibility of devising model circumstances in which a positive group-selection term (first term) outweighs a negative individual selection one (second term, assuming no further levels), gives no guarantee that ‘altruism’ can evolve by group selection: we have to consider whether the population can get into the specified state, and, if it can, whether its present trend will continue."

"The incursions of barbaric pastoralists seem to do civilizations less harm in the long run than one might expect. Indeed, two dark ages and renaissances in Europe suggest a recurring pattern in which a renaissance follows an incursion by about 800 years. It may even be suggested that certain genes or traditions of the pastoralists revitalize the conquered people with an ingredient of progress which tends to die out in a large panmictic population for the reasons already discussed. I have in mind altruism itself, or the part of the altruism which is perhaps better described as self-sacrificial daring. By the time of the Renaissance it may be that the mixing of genes and cultures (or of cultures alone if these are the only vehicles, which I doubt) has continued long enough to bring the old mercantile thoughtfulness and the infused daring into conjunction in a few individuals who then find courage for all kinds of inventive innovation against the resistance of established thought and practice. Often, however, the cost in fitness of such altruism and sublimated pugnacity to the individuals concerned is by no means metaphorical, and the benefits to fitness, such as they are, go to a mass of individuals whose genetic correlation with the innovator must be slight indeed. Thus civilization probably slowly reduces its altruism of all kinds, including the kinds needed for cultural creativity"

"If humans turn out to be near the Kondrashov limit —that is, if on average every gamete has one bad mutation created during the lifetime of its producer— it is obviously not going to be nearly enough to test a baby for the subset of the few hundreds or so of well-characterized genetic defects"

"All great minds have their unique style and Bill Hamilton was no different. While Huey Newton would blast you against the far wall with the force of his argument, you had to lean in to hear what Bill was saying, so soft was he spoken. It was almost as if he clutched his thoughts close to the chest, but the effort on your part was well worth it. His every thought on every topic was worth your close attention."

"We have a brain that just is desperate for . I mean, it's such a fussy organ. That's the only thing it really takes in for energy. Well, meat is not a very good source of glucose. To have a big brain like this, you need to eat something different, and the most efficient way to get glucose is to eat carbohydrates."

"Where people worry is when you get to the brain, the germ cells and the sentinel features that help people recognize what is a person, as opposed to a rat or a rabbit. Things like skin texture, facial shape, speech, replacing brain cells with human cells, allowing the development of human germ cells in animals. And particularly where there is any possibility of fertilisation within an animal."

"Changing animals by putting human genes or cells into their structure is one way of making them more resemble the bit of the human condition you're interested in studying."

"Yet the class structure which cripples Britain more than any other European state, is as nothing compared with the stratified hierarchies in Austronesian traditional societies from Madagascar through Bali to Samoa. (...) This consciousness of rank is thus clearly not something that was only picked up by Austronesian societies from later Indian influence.” (p.484)"

"Barley cultivation was developed in the Indus Valley."

"We find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the South, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a “male Aryan invasion” of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into Europe. (Oppenheimer, 2003: 152)"

"Another geneticist, S. Oppenheimer, offers independent confirmation (2003) that there was no Aryan entry, either male or female; he focuses on the M17, or so-called “Caucasoid” (=Aryan!), genetic marker: “South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India” ."

"Oppenheimer, a leading advocate of this scenario, summarizes it in these words: “For me and for Toomas Kivisild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into Europe.”"

"First, that the Europeans’ genetic homeland was originally in South Asia in the Pakistan/Gulf region over 50,000 years ago; and second, that the Europeans’ ancestors followed at least two widely separated routes to arrive, ultimately, in the same cold but rich garden. The earliest of these routes was the Fertile Crescent. The second early route from South Asia to Europe may have been up the Indus into Kashmir and on to Central Asia, where perhaps more than 40,000 years ago hunters first started bringing down game as large as mammoths."

"Oppenheimer is a medical doctor who has lived in Southeast Asia for decades. Like most of us, he is vaguely influenced by Marxism, e.g. where he dismisses religion as a means to “control other people's labour”, with explicit reference to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. His book is based on solid scientific research (genetic, anthropological, linguistic and archaeological), and is in that respect very different from the numerous Atlantis books which draw on “revelations” and “channeling”... Stephen Oppenheimer makes a detailed and strong case for the importance of the culture of sunken Sundaland for the later cultures in the wide surroundings. India too must have benefited of certain achievements and human cargo imported from there."

"Living cells respond to DNA damage by a variety of mechanisms, including a series of biochemical pathways called DNA repair. These include three discrete pathways for the excision of damaged bases, called base excision repair, mismatch repair and nucleotide excision repair (NER). NER in human cells is a complex biochemical process during which a large multiprotein complex is assembled at several types of base damage. This multiprotein complex (NER machine) catalyses the excision of damaged bases as oligonucleotide fragments."

"The aesthetic appeal of the DNA double helix initially hindered notions of DNA mutation and repair, which would necessarily interfere with its pristine state. But it has since been recognized that DNA is subject to continuous damage and the cell has an arsenal of ways of responding to such injury. Although mutations or deficiencies in repair can have catastrophic consequences, causing a range of human diseases, mutations are nonetheless fundamental to life and evolution."

"Because of the questions posed by Schrödinger and the nature of the problem of identifying and describing the gene itself, the early development of molecular biology relied greatly on scientists who brought insights from physics to biology—Max Delbrück, Salvador Luria, George Gamow, Sir Lawrence Bragg, Francis Crick, Max Perutz, John Kendrew, Maurice Wilkins, Desmond Bernal, and Linus Pauling being the best known of these scientists."

"It is not medicine we should fear, but the folly of mankind. Every day, the experience of our predecessors increases our ability to change nature by using its own laws. But using this power wisely is what each generation must learn in its turn. We are certainly more powerful today than ever before, but we are no wiser: Technology is cumulative, wisdom is not."

"Will 2022 be easier? I do not know the answer to this. But I know that together we will make it."

"Nigeria spent 18 million dollars on chicken importation in 2009 alone. If the government spends half of that money on developing local breeds; imagine what that will translate to."

"Tissue Culture Laboratory alone could truly supply plants to millions of farmers, if we really invest into plant tissue culture and micro-propagation,”"

"“With the funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we now have the white, black, brown, and the ash-line of the indigenous breed. There are also two mid-lines, which has 25 or 75 percent local blood. They are meat-lines; they are bigger with tougher meat than the imported stock. We can hardly meet the request of our customers here, and other Universities have been taking our stocks.""

"While other countries are talking of electricity-powered vehicles, driverless trucks, and 200miles per hour trains, we are still battling with narrow gauge rail lines and Never Expect Power Always (NEPA), or Hold on your Power (Power Holding)."

"I am different from you because of my genetic makeup. You need to know your genotype yourself, to enable you to know the type of food you can eat and those you cannot eat or whether you are carrying genetic diseases"

"FUNAAB’s Biotechnology Centre was fully equipped to provide an array of services that border on Animal Biotechnology, Plant Biotechnology, Protein Analysis, Bio-informatics, among others"

"When those of us who are now middle-aged went to high school and to college, what we learned about cancer was completely descriptive. We learned how cancer cells look compared to the way normal cells look and it was beautiful, it was elegant. We learned how cancerous organs look compared to the way normal organs look. We learned about how patients decline with cancer. But it was very frustrating at least for me, because we didn’t have any understanding or sense of why these processes were occurring. Exactly what was happening, why it was it happening, when was it happening, how was it happening, all the questions you ask of mystery. We now don’t have them all answered — if it were an easy problem it would have long since been solved. But we do have a very good sense of the kinds of changes that a cell undergoes between the time it is a normal cell and the time that it is growing completely out of control, causes a tumor that can invade, metastasize and kill its host."

"When women our age started in the field, there were very few of us, and we were absolutely on the margins. People pretty much ignored us. I have come to realize that there was a great freedom in being ignored, that you could go after huge questions, because nobody noticed."

"And my mother shrieked ... "You can't leave that child here alone!" And, you know, fair enough. And this unmistakable voice, above and behind me, said, "Emily and I will be fine." And I turned around and said, "Thank you." And my mother looked at me and said, "You can't leave Emily with a total stranger!" And I said, "Mom, if you can't trust Joe DiMaggio, who can you trust?""

"I had this impression from the media that science was for old white guys, people who looked like Einstein, that it wasn’t for people like me ..."

"... CRISPR is, in fact, a bacterial immune system. It’s an ancient system that evolved in microbes to allow prevention of viral infection. Our interest in this started with that fundamental biology, asking, “How does this work?” We did a collaborative research project with Emmanuelle Charpentier, a medical microbiologist, and our work with her laboratory revealed that one of the components of this CRISPR immune system is, in fact, a protein that’s called , that can be programmed to find and cut virus DNA. We published this work back in the summer of 2012, and for me, life hasn't been the same since."

"... I just think you have to embrace your passions. You have to really go for it. People that have been less successful, in my opinion, are those that dabble in something, but then don’t really give it their all. They almost never give themselves a chance to succeed, as they back off too soon. I think for young people, I tell them go for it, find supportive mentors who will help you through the tough times, and then just keep going. Because if you have a good idea, it’s probably going to work out in some way. You may not be able to predict how, but you should just keep pursuing it."

"When I was taught biology, we learned about the structure and code of DNA, and we learned about how proteins do all the heavy lifting in cells, and RNA was treated as this dull intermediary, sort of a middle manager ... I was quite surprised that there was this young genius, Jack Szostak, at Harvard who wanted to focus a hundred percent on RNA because he thought that it was the key to understanding the origin of life."

"... it's kind of a catchy acronym. It stands for Clusters of Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Oh! Don't make me say that again. ... What it means — what it symbolizes — is an immune system in bacteria that uses sequences of DNA (that come originally from viruses) ... that are transcribed into molecules of RNA that can use a search-and-destroy mechanism in cells to find and cut up virus genetic material"

"Two years ago, I was working on my laptop in an airport lounge in Newark, New Jersey, when I glanced up and saw a couple walking with their two boys. The younger boy slowly made his way on crutches, displaying the telltale signs of a hereditary disease called muscular dystrophy. Generally manifesting in childhood, the disease steadily robs those who have it of their ability to walk. Eventually, I knew, the crutches would no longer be enough. My heart skipped a beat. Most types of muscular dystrophy originate with genetic mutations that weaken key muscle proteins, and I had just come from a meeting where a cure appeared possible, using CRISPR technology to rewrite the DNA of kids just like him. Imagining how the technology I’d helped create could change this boy’s life, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Beyond hope and wonder, I was filled with a sense of fierce urgency to expand CRISPR’s impact to the people around the world who need it most."

"Phylogeography is a field of study concerned with the principles and processes governing the geographic distribution of genealogical lineages, especially those within and among closely related species. As the word implies, phylogeography deals with historical, phylogenetic components of the spatial distributions of gene lineages. In other words, time and space are the jointly considered axes of phylogeography onto which (ideally) are mapped particular gene genealogies of interest ... The analysis and interpretation of lineage distributions usually require extensive input from molecular genetics, population genetics, ethology, demography, phylogenetic biology, paleontology, geology, and historical geography. Thus, phylogeography is an integrative endeavor that lies at an important crossroads of diverse microevolutionary and macroevolutionary disciplines ..."

"Recent genome-sequencing efforts have confirmed that traditional "good-citizen" genes (those that encode functional RNA and protein molecules of obvious benefit to the organism) constitute only a small fraction of the genomic populace in humans and other multicellular creatures. The rest of the DNA sequence includes an astonishing collection of noncoding regions, regulatory modules, deadbeat pseudogenes, legions of repetitive elements, and hosts of oft-shifty, self-interested nomads, renegades, and immigrants. To help visualize functional operations in such intracellular genomic societies and to better encapsulate the evolutionary origins of complex genomes, new and evocative metaphors may be both entertaining and research-stimulating."

"An example of how this is the best of times for evolutionary biology is provided by the recent elucidation of a draft sequence of all 3-billion-plus nucleotide pairs in the human genome et al. 2001, et al. 2001). ... Some prognosticators believe that the application of recombinant DNA methods to gene therapy and gene replacement (the repair or replacement of defective genes in the body) soon may lead to a revolution in the history of medicine comparable to the introductions of sanitation, anesthesia, and antibiotics and vaccines. If the new recombinant gene technologies live up to their early billing, we or our children might see a day when gene therapy can alleviate sickle cell anemia, heart disease, cancer, or various other human genetic disorders. Just as we may marvel at our forebears' fortitude in the dark ages before the advent of our modern medicine, our grandchildren may look back with marvel at our fortitude in the era preceding the wide availability of gene therapies. Nonetheless, the technical hurdles remain daunting. … … Ecologists and natural historians are painfully aware that the subject matter of their devotion—biodiversity—is under assault worldwide as the continents fill with people. The collective weight of human activities is leading to the disappearance of wilderness. Atmosphere and oceans are being polluted, marine fisheries are collapsing worldwide, and wetlands and freshwater aquifers have shrunk dramatically. In short, Earth's renewable and nonrenewable resources are being tragically squandered. In the Amazon Basin, for example, which is famous for its rich biota, slash-and-burn fires are so numerous that their light is visible to astronauts in the space shuttle. Some of these astronauts have felt moved to speak in a deeply spiritual tenor about the beauty of the “blue planet” and to bemoan how we are despoiling this special, fragile place."

"Scientists now routinely utilize the genetic information in biological macromolecules—proteins and DNA—to address numerous aspects of the behaviors, life histories, and evolutionary relationships of organisms. When used to best effect, molecular data are integrated with information from such fields as , , , , and paleontology. These time-honored biological disciplines remain highly active today, but each has been enriched if not rejuvenated by contact with the relatively young but burgeoning field of molecular evolution."

"Cavalli-Sforza and his team state that “Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene [=10000 to 3 mya] southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions since the Holocene [=c 10000 to present]. The phylogeography [=neighbouring branches] of the primal mtDNA and Y-chromosome founders suggest that these southern Asian Pleistocene coastal settlers from Africa would have provided the inocula for the subsequent differentiation of the distinctive eastern and western Eurasian gene pools”"

"This neatly fits the earlier findings of non-genetic (morphological) physical anthropology, viz. that the population type of northwestern India has remained the same for at least 8,000 years.... In deference to established Indological opinion, the biologists make a perfunctory nod toward the “supposed” Aryan invasion, only to state that they have found no evidence for this popular supposition: “Their low frequency [i.e. of the West-Asia-related genes] but still general spread all over India plus the estimated time scale does not support a recent massive Aryan invasion, at least as far as maternally inherited genetic lineages are concerned.”"

"We found an extensive deep late Pleistocene genetic link between contemporary Europeans and Indians, provided by the mtDNA haplogroup U, which encompasses roughly a fifth of mtDNA lineages of both populations. Our estimate for this split [between Europeans and Indians] is close to the suggested time for the peopling of Asia and the first expansion of anatomically modern humans in Eurasia and likely pre-dates their spread to Europe.” ...the genetic affinity between the Indian subcontinent and Europe “should not be interpreted in terms of a recent admixture of western Caucasoids10 with Indians caused by a putative Indo-Aryan invasion 3,000–4,000 years BP.”"

"In 2000 Kivisild and colleagues found that “even the high castes share more than 80 per cent of their maternal lineages with the lower castes and tribals.” Taking all aspects into consideration, the authors concluded that “there are now enough reasons not only to question a ‘recent Indo‐Aryan invasion’ into India some 4000 BP, but alternatively to consider India as a part of the common gene pool ancestral to the diversity of human maternal lineages in Europe” (Kivisild et al., 2000: 267–271)."

"“Indian and western Eurasian haplogroup U varieties differ profoundly; the split has occurred about as early as the split between the Indian and eastern Asian haplogroup M varieties. The data show that both M and U exhibited an expansion phase some 50,000 years ago, which should have happened after the corresponding splits.”... “We believe that there are now enough reasons not only to question a ‘recent Indo-Aryan invasion’ into India some 4000 BP, but alternatively to consider India as a part of the common gene pool ancestral to the diversity of human maternal lineages in Europe.”"

"In 2003 Kivisild and colleagues questioned the correlation between subsistence categories and genetic difference. Their conclusions highlighted India’s genetic complexity and antiquity, since “present‐day Indians [possess] at least 90 per cent of what we think of as autoch- thonous Upper Paleolithic maternal lineages.” Significantly, “the Indian mtDNA tree in general [is] not subdivided according to linguistic (Indo‐European, Dravidian) or caste affiliations, although there may occur (sometimes drastic) population‐wise differences in frequencies of particular sub‐clusters” (Kivisild et al., 2003a: 216–221). In other words, their results found broad agreement with archaeology and anthropology in con- cluding that language and ethnicity cannot be mapped in a one‐to‐one correspondence relationship. ... present-day Indians [possess] at least 90 per cent of what we think of as autochthonous Upper Palaeolithic maternal lineages.... “the Indian mtDNA tree in general [is] not subdivided according to linguistic (Indo-European, Dravidian) or caste affiliations,”... the straightforward suggestion would be that both Neolithic (agriculture) and Indo-European languages arose in India and from there, spread to Europe.”"

"The noticeable genetic divergence of India from other regions is coupled with low levels of genetic divergence across the subgroups within India."

"I fulfilled a childhood dream of understanding how life started and how all human beings are eternal."

"I then look into the technical problems of the diagnostic laboratory in consultation with my medical and technical biologist colleagues."

"In the afternoon, when I have a lesson to teach, I do it, otherwise I am in the research laboratory at the medical school, which is 300 meters from the hospital department. In this laboratory, I carry out most of my research activity and monitor the work of the students I supervise."

"I have other activities that I may be called upon to undertake, such as participation in the work of commissions or juries. And of course I regularly participate in scientific meetings both nationally and internationally."

"To the entire Futura-Sciences team Futura-Sciences is a portal that I already knew well before it dedicated a section to me on the occasion of the UNESCO-L'OREAL prize."

"Type Sciences or ethics or disease or human in the Google search engine for example and you are sure to have a complete scientific file, well documented and even a discussion forum."

"At a time when websites are flourishing so strongly, we need serious, effective portals to really be a scientific reference for young people and even professionals. Futura-Sciences is one in my opinion."

"It is an honour especially since in this category, I actually represent Africa. To this date, I remain the only member from the African continent to bear this title."

"Is to succeed my master and founder of the Faculty of Medicine of Tunis, the late Professor Amor Chadli."

"I saw mothers that had two or three children with a serious and incurable genetic pathology. Such encounters made a strong impression on me and underscored the need for better care for genetic disorders."

"I opted to specialize in medical genetics, a decision that caused much confusion within the medical fraternity."

"To many of them, the study of medical genetics sounded like a luxury, and the idea of a medical doctor conducting research was far too radical."

"I commit to maintain and exemplify the highest standards of scientific integrity and agree to follow the Academy’s Code of Conduct."

"I can't see that happening because the White Paper has been approved by Parliament, even the Decadal Plan, so the wheels are running. And at the end of the day, the politicians can't stall the momentum at which this is going. I mean, they may be able to chirp about certain things, but the doing is actually in the hands of the scientists. And therein lies, you know, some of the frustrations we feel are scientists. We come from a sporting nation. I mean, you know, we all know that the Springboks (national rugby team) are playing on Saturday. There'll be an overwhelming voice of support for that level of stuff. When it comes to politics, we are all very opinionated. You know we can, we can air our opinions, whether we have supported the evidence, etcetera. But at least with the science, even though we don't get the same recognition as scientists and what science can do, the value of science is that it is evidence based. There's a line of evidence, a chain of evidence in terms of support of what it is we are doing. But sadly, during the COVID era, the trust in science was kind of obliterated. And so we have a lot of work to do to rebuild the trust, the confidence and to allow people to see why science, whether it is the, you know, the physical sciences, the hard sciences or the social sciences, to just stand back a little and watch the way science rolls in motion."

"Yes, the private sector is dependent on the public sector to produce the students. And they wait at the end of the pipeline and they suck them all up. So, yes, public-private partnerships early on are desirable, but I think there are challenges on all sides. I'm not so sure I'm not an economist, but I get a sense that, you know, having just been squeezed through the COVID pandemic, that there's challenges on all sides. So let's just hope that in years to come, there's better will, and that the private sector is more amenable to putting in more money into the system."

"Over half of people living with HIV in the USA are now over 50 years old and this proportion is expected to rise to 70% by 2030,”"

"The population of older adults with HIV is increasing globally, including in sub-Saharan Africa where 65% of the current 39 million people living with HIV reside.”"

"The goal is to understand how virus-triggered signals and cell interactions affect blood vessel health and contribute to diseases"

"Understanding these crosstalks will help design therapeutic approaches that promote healthy aging, reduce comorbidities and improve the quality of life for those affected”."

"We’re trying to understand the intersection between HIV, aging processes, and cognitive decline"

"And then use this understanding to develop new treatments for virus-caused damage to blood vessels and related brain and lung issues.”"

"Anthropological geneticists should participate in because of the complexity of their work, its implications for human health and societies, and its tendency to be co-opted for particular political or social agendas. They are positioned to offer important contributions to public conversations on issues of race, genetic identity, history, and conflict. There are multiple avenues to public outreach for academics; among them, is a powerful, underused tool."

"... Getting the science wrong has very real consequences. For example, when a community doesn’t vaccinate children because they’re afraid of “toxins” and think that prayer (or diet, exercise, and “”) is enough to prevent infection, outbreaks happen."

"The maintain that their ancestors were a seafaring people who have lived in since the dawn of history. This discovery of this man, whom the Tlingit called , was consistent with that they descend from an ancient, coastally adapted people who engaged in long-distance trade."

"In her new book, “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,” Raff beautifully integrates new data from different sciences (archaeology, genetics, linguistics) and different ways of knowing, including Indigenous oral traditions, in a masterly retelling of the story of how, and when, people reached the Americas. While admittedly not an archaeologist herself, Raff skillfully reveals how well-dated archaeological sites, including recently announced 22,000-year-old human footprints from , are . She builds a persuasive case with both archaeological and genetic evidence that the path to the Americas was coastal (the ) rather than inland, and that was not a bridge but a homeland — twice the size of Texas — inhabited for millenniums by the ancestors of the . Throughout, Raff effectively models how science is done, how hypotheses are tested, and how new data are used to refute old ideas and generate new ones."

"Around this world and to this very day, among experts and novices alike, say the word “evolution” and most people hear the word “genes.” (P. 19)"

"...[A] new breed of philosopher was coming close to declaring that nothing in philosophy makes sense except in the light of evolution. (P. 26)"

"Science is often associated with complicated instruments and questions so specialized that a PhD is required even to become interested. (P. 31)"

"I was offended by the New Atheist movement, which included the public intellectuals Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great, 2007), in addition to Dawkins and Dennett with their evolutionary credentials. In part I was offended by the poor scholarship of the books, which meant that Dawkins and Dennett were falsely trading on their academic reputations. The fact that the books were written for the general reader wasn’t an excuse. The New Atheists clearly began with animosity toward religion and constructed their arguments to support their predetermined conclusion. (P. 33)"

"Building a scientific edifice is a bit like building a cathedral, stone by stone. Shaping each stone—each single study—is hard work but immensely satisfying, especially knowing that it will be durable. (P. 38)"

"If it is ever documented conclusively, the genetic inferiority of a race on a trait as important as intelligence will rank with the atomic bomb as the most destructive scientific discovery in human history. The correct conclusion is to withhold judgment."

"When the theoretical questions are properly understood, proponents of race science, while entitled to their freedom of inquiry and expression, deserve the vigorous disapprobation they often receive."

"Why don’t we accept racial stereotypes as reasonable hypotheses, okay to consider until they have been scientifically proven false? They are offensive precisely because they violate our intuition about the balance between innateness and self-determination of the moral and cultural qualities of human beings. No reasonable person would be offended by the observation that Africans have curlier hair than the Chinese, notwithstanding the possibility of some future environment in which it is no longer true. But we can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table-tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair."

"Many of the challenges had to do with doubt cast on my abilities to lead, sometimes self-doubt, but also doubt by other parties. I overcame that through self-belief and determination, demonstration of what I can do in all my assignments from the most trivial to strategic. I made a choice that whatever I chose to do will be excellent."

"I find myself now quite comfortable in my own skin, with nothing to prove to anyone but myself. Support of family, colleagues, male and female, can of course not be underestimated! I have had mentors who have supported me along the way as well."

"To never stop learning, and to never stop seeking the next challenge. My aspirations are to be CEO of my own business empire; I have an idea box that I need to act upon!"

"I think it’s no secret that the decision makers in STI are predominantly male, and that is not to say there are no capable women. Of course, the capable women are a lot less few, because of a problem that starts with the access to education and opportunity that is skewed toward the male child, especially in my part of the world."

"I think the world is poorer for not giving a chance to the girl child. I think that skewed system then carves out the research agenda in a manner that could have benefited immensely from having women at the top, given our role in society."

"It is an honour for me to be recognised as one of the 50 most influential people navigating disruption in the ‘collaborators’ category."

"This recognition is in line with the collaboration value in our CSIR EPIC values and is testament to how we live up to these values."

"This is really cutting-edge stuff... it's very exciting, for me as a geneticist, what can be done."

"In terms of the health of a person, this is really a difficult thing to study because there are endless combinations, and trying to understand what is relevant and important is not so easy."

"Because when I started, so little was known about the human genome. It was unthinkable that we could look at a person’s DNA and make a diagnosis for a disease or perform a prenatal diagnosis where we could diagnose babies in utero to see if they inherited a genetic disease from their parents. I feel that I have been so fortunate in my career to have experienced all these changes and to work in a field that has its heyday right now."

"I am the main supervisor from the National Research Centre (NRC)."

"On the Master thesis of my student Malak Doss who is working under my supervision at the NRC."

"It was reported that inattentive ADHD in Egypt constituted high percentage of the finally diagnosed cases."

"Detecting the genetic factors for children with ADHD in the Egyptian population becomes imperative."

"We hypothesize that genetic heterogeneity in the VNTR."

"Is an important factor in the pathophysiology of ADHD and dopamine receptor D4 (DRD4)."

"Is one of the most important candidate genes for ADHD."

"Our findings provide further evidence for an effect of DRD4 where children with smaller number of repeat alleles of this DRD4 gene have higher possibility to develop ADHD In Egyptian children."

"We concluded that taking in consideration the sequence of DRD4 VNTR is very important to estimate the contribution of this dopaminergic receptor to the pathophysiology of ADHD."

"I believe that science holds the key to addressing many of the interconnected challenges we face today — not just one or two isolated issues. Through science and innovation, we can optimize how we utilize our biodiversity by identifying the most suitable crops, animals, fish, and fibers for specific environments. At present, there is often a disconnect between what ecosystems can sustainably produce and what is actually being produced around the world. This imbalance stems largely from decisions that overlook scientific knowledge and the urgent need to meet the demands of a growing population. I am convinced that science and innovation can lead to more efficient production with fewer inputs, ensuring sustainability for the future."

"Science and innovation can greatly improve nutrition. Although over 6,000 plant species are cultivated for food, fewer than 200 dominate global production, and just 9 provide 66% of all crops. This limited genetic base reduces nutritional diversity. Expanding the use of neglected and underused species through technology can boost both food variety and environmental health."

"From an environmental perspective, science and technology offer many ways to reduce our impact—whether in greenhouse gas emissions, water use, or soil management. Agriculture currently consumes most of the world’s freshwater and emits about 30% of greenhouse gases, yet it employs 4.5 billion people. Scientific innovation can make agri-food systems more sustainable through resilient crop varieties, improved farming practices, and technologies that boost productivity while lowering carbon and water footprints."

"our goal is to ensure that farmers enjoy better livelihoods. Today, they remain at the bottom of the income pyramid, receiving the least reward for their hard work. By improving productivity and enhancing the nutritional value of what is produced, we can create stronger economies and ensure that these benefits reach small-scale producers worldwide."

"Marginal environments are going to be the norm of tomorrow, so we'd better be ready for it and have solutions."

"It is doable to make these lands productive but it requires investment in research and in science."

"In a few years, if we don't stop what we're doing to planet earth, we would all be living in marginal environments."

"I don’t think we can afford to have only men in leadership positions anymore. Throughout history, it has been shown that female leadership is different from men’s in many positive ways. So, if we want to bring out the full potential of humankind, we should be conscious of those differences and push for gender equality. It’s not so much equality of positions, it’s much more about equality of opportunities."

"We should also provide women with freedom of choice. With this, eventually society will develop around equal opportunities, and women will feel much more in control of their destiny and not have to choose anymore between having a career and being a mother."

"On the challenges and obstacles that might hold back some women from getting to top managerial positions, there are many common challenges between the Middle East and the West, but also some cultural differences. In terms of common challenges, all mothers feel protective towards their children and want to give them a lot of love and time. This can get in the way for some women wishing to attain high-level positions."

"In higher organisms, the cells of an individual become greatly diversified despite their identity of . How such diversification is achieved and how supra-cellular organization then comes about have remained largely obscure. A new way of getting at theses questions was formulated in ; its purpose was to subject the pivotal genotype-phenotype relationship to experimental manipulation. The intact organism was taken to be the necessary framework for such an experimental study of gene expression, and the mouse, with its wide variety of available s, was easily the most promising vertebrate species. The plan was to make artificial mice: within each, cells with different, rather than identical, genotypes would be included. ... Certain kinds of had previously been extensively employed in studies with '. ... The first indication, in a mammal, of an admixture of genotypes came with 's discovery of erythrocyte mosaicism in fraternal cattle co-twins. ..."

"s owe their existence to a population of persistently proliferating s which probably originate from the normal generative cells of that ... Normal stem cells ordinarily tend to give rise to non-dividing terminally differentiated cellular progeny; malignant stem cells, on the other hand, suffer an impairment of differentiation. Early in embryonic life, stem cells are developmentally versatile; the earliest ones, e.g., s in the mouse, are , or individually capable of forming an entire organism. s are exceptional tumors in that they contain a multiplicity of tissues, a characteristic implying that their stem cells arise from cells more developmentally primitive than is the case in other malignancies."

"She made foundational discoveries and revolutionized many tools and techniques of that paved the way for tremendous progress in our understanding of cancer."

"Beatrice Mintz, known as “Bea” to her friends, was a developmental geneticist. ... Her pioneering work had a major impact on many different areas of science. She began her career addressing one of the most complex and fascinating questions of development: how the many different and diverse tissues in an organism are initiated and develop from a single fertilized egg. In the early 1960s Bea—at about the same time as in Poland and in Philadelphia—generated the first chimeric mice by combining early, genetically distinct, mouse embryos. She had contemplated this experiment for many years at the and began to work seriously on it after moving to (discussing the project with her colleagues) … And indeed, this manipulation of embryos was a breakthrough to a new era of experimental work in mammalian development. (Bea did not like the designation “chimera” because of its association with “monsters” in Greek mythology; she described these mice as “allophenic.”)"

"Methods to introduce s, either from or other organisms, into existing are now well-established and permit the targeted modification of existing grape cultivars. This may provide a means to reduce disease losses and usage in classic cultivars without otherwise changing their wine attributes."

"With potent new analysis tools, researchers could capture a species’ unique genetic fingerprint to trace its origins and evolutionary history. Once s for grapes became available, Meredith and her team at quickly harnessed the power of DNA fingerprinting to identify classic vinifera varieties and resolve longstanding questions about their murky history. Meredith and grad student John Bowers even surprised themselves in 1996 by revealing a mixed heritage of white () and red () grapes for . And in what many call her crowning achievement, Meredith—whose place in the wine pantheon was secured by a 2009 induction into the Vintners Hall of Fame—confirmed that , long claimed California’s “historic” native, is the genetic twin of the nearly extinct Crljenak Kastelanski grape variety, once grown along ’s n Coast."

"... I started to contact other grape geneticists in labs all over the world—initially 10 or 15 different research groups in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, South Africa—and proposed that we form a consortium to develop these s. Each lab would try to develop a few markers and then contribute those markers to the general pool that we would share. We formed the . After a couple of years we had developed several hundred markers. We were able to make some interesting discoveries by just using a couple of dozen markers, because that is enough to prove statistically whether one variety is related to another variety. But once several hundred markers existed it was then possible to develop a of grape, a project that was really just starting around the time that I retired from . The highlight of my career was using these s to reveal genetic relationships among classic s and to then elucidate from that something about the ."

"Plant genetic resources are seldom 'raw materials'; they are the expression of the current wisdom of farmers who have played a highly significant role in the building up of the world's genetic resource base... As is already happening in my country, farmers and national genebanks in developing countries can work together to preserve and expand crop genetic diversity on behalf of all humanity."