Biologists From The United States

"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."

"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."

"Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant."

"Here's the thing. You said a "jackdaw is a crow." Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that. As someone who is a scientist who studies crows, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls jackdaws crows. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing. If you're saying "crow family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Corvidae, which includes things from nutcrackers to blue jays to ravens. So your reasoning for calling a jackdaw a crow is because random people "call the black ones crows?" Let's get grackles and blackbirds in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A jackdaw is a jackdaw and a member of the crow family. But that's not what you said. You said a jackdaw is a crow, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the crow family crows, which means you'd call blue jays, ravens, and other birds crows, too. Which you said you don't. It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?"

"Biologist here!"

"Howdy! That's a great question, actually. The reason we fart is due to needing to periodically release gases that build up during digestion. During the digestion process of the foods you eat, naturally occurring beneficial bacteria in your body metabolize (i.e. convert the food in your body to useable energy) and produce waste as a result, some of which is the gas that makes up farts. This is typically where the methane (CH4) in farts comes from, the rest of the fart volume being from air swallowed during the course of the day. For animals like spiders and insects, there are similar processes! Some animals like termites, for example, better match us as they, too, have methane-producing bacteria in their guts which helps them break down wood! For other animals, other digestive processes make waste products and sometimes gas, so yes, spiders (and insects) do fart, in a sense! Since their exoskeletons are generally rigid, though, they may not produce the sound we associate with farting, thus, you might say that most spider and insect farts are "silent but deadly"!"

"Ralph Vary Chamberlin was an influential presence in Arachnology... But Chamberlin was not a well-liked man. It appeared that Ernst Mayr banned him from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard in his later years."

"This man is no mere scholar, one of the common herd, but is a giant among his contemporaries. History will bear out that in his contributions to knowledge in the biological and other sciences he walks abreast of such great figures as Baird, Merriam, Gray, and others."

"He was one of the great figures in the university [of Utah]. As a matter of fact, Chamberlin was the university’s most celebrated scientist, world famous in entomology. I think his specialty was spiders. Now, I mention Chamberlin not simply because he was important as a scientist, though he certainly was, but because he was tremendously important in the intellectual life of Utah. He was at the center of the 1911 hassle over evolution at the BYU, in many ways the most important dispute in the intellectual history of Utah."

"Spiders are different from metaphysics, and I think Ralph was not such a devout Mormon."

"He has been able to to lead the naive student with fixed religious convictions gently around that wide gulf that separated him from the trained scientific mind without pushing him over the precipice of despair and illusion."

"I was still under the malign influence of R. V. Chamberlin, an exemplar of minimal taxonomy."

"A patient bug-hunter who often remembers his classes.... Strong advocate of modern ideas and an authority on spiders and basket-ball. He sees with one eye what many do not see with two. "A man who worked while others slept.""

"The savage mind finds mysterious and arbitrary spiritual powers everywhere, in rivers and springs, inherent in the wind and rain, and presiding over the crops; but, with advance in civilization and the development of ordered knowledge, an ever wider compass is established as the for the reign of natural laws. Those who base their faith in God on the ever-receding miraculous phenomena, on the tacit assumption that human limitations prove the validity of religious interpretations, are ever pointing out some weak spots in the scientific web of cause and effect and saying "Here Science is baffled, and you must admit the need of God." But Science keeps extending her domain; and so the history of the thought of these men is the history of a continuous retreat. Their position is fundamentally a bad one because it makes God a personified symbol of our residuum of ignorance, and justifies Reinach's definition of religion as a "sum of scruples impeding the free use of the human faculties." No, the Creator must be seen as God of all Nature and of every natural law."

"(E)ven within the realm of the strictly scientific; we need constant touch with the concrete realities of living nature to prevent our picturing her as exclusively such as we make her in our specialties and in our private dreams."

"As long as we go back often to Nature herself, and practice the art of then forgetting for the time the fictions and hypotheses necessary in the partial treatments of our specialities,—as long as we thereby allow Nature and her facts to speak to us for themselves,—so long shall we, after each fresh contact, return to our labors with renewed strength and clarified vision."

"When we see men still so unhappily bound with prejudice and tradition that they are blind to the beauties and light of the grandest conception that science has yet won for man, we sorrow, and in sympathy again recall the plea that the unhappy Castelli made to the pope who was about to inflict punishment upon Galileo for his demonstration of the movements of the earth: "Your Holiness, nothing that can be done can now hinder the earth from moving.""

"Only the childish and immature mind can lose by learning that much in the Old Testament is poetical and that some of the stories are not true historically. Poetry is a superior medium for conveying religious truth."

"The history of human progress is a story of emancipation, and its course has by no means been run. The future of the race is in all likelihood to be a scientific future, since science gives the truth needed in actual life and furnishes the means for advance, every achievement enlarging the field of subsequent possibilities. Nothing can stop this growth except suppressions of freedom."

"Not too much science but too little science is at the root of our troubles."

"If you can bring me one student whose faith I have injured in Mormonism, I will bring you five that you, through your narrowness, have driven out of the church."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"He seemed to be so used to having his own way that he could not deal with bad fortune."

"If you want to. That’s the important thing. For you to do what you want to do. Not what you think anyone else wants or expects you to do."

"The intensity of Melissa’s loyalty troubled Snake. She had never known anyone who was so completely oblivious to self-interest. Perhaps Melissa could not yet think of herself as someone with a right to her own dreams; perhaps so many of her dreams had been taken from her that she no longer dared to have them."

"“It’s impossible to protect anyone completely without enslaving them. I think that’s something you’ve never understood because you’ve always demanded too much of yourself. You blame yourself for your sister’s death—” “I didn’t watch her carefully enough.” “What could you have done? Remember her life, not her death. She was brave and happy and arrogant, the way a child should be. You could only protect her more by chaining her to you with fear. She couldn’t live that way, not and remain the person you loved.”"

"He must have been rebuffed and denigrated all his life, to be so afraid of touching another human being."

"She, too, felt the need for fresh air and rain and the ocean’s silent words."

"It was not fear that kept them from misusing what they had. It was self-respect."

"We spend most of our time carrying trivial cargoes for trivial reasons to trivial people."

"He moved inside the temple to perform his duties. They were few, and empty tradition. The god had departed, long before its last, ridiculed worshippers, as gods always do. The keeper knew that, and allowed himself no illusions about his status."

"You’d have everyone substitute your fantasies for their own."

"Jason was an optimist, and Kylis was experienced."

"She had learned to doubt, rather than simply to question."

"Most energy analysts would accept the core of the “efficiency trap” argument, namely, that greater efficiency... does not automatically mean lower consumption. On the contrary, greater efficiency can lead – and has led – to bigger products... and therefore to overall energy use that is just as high, if not higher, than before. ...but he gets carried away with blaming poor old efficiency for a whole manner of ills..."

"What I'm proposing... is for governments to peel back support for large businesses, especially extractive industries. Instead, governments should support small businesses. ...inhibit oversized energy and agricultural systems and promote smaller, localized ones."

"New technologies will not liberate us. Even if they do materialize they will not reduce our consumption of resources. They will not reduce our demand for energy. They will not diminish our impacts on the climate. And they will not bring about a better world."

"It is too late to slow this runaway train down before it tumbles into the chasm."

"We should stop subsidizing the fossil-fuel industries and instead provide subsidies for local and community energy projects."