Biology

"Neuroscience systems level courses teach: 1) the role of neuroanatomical structures of the brain for perception, movement, and cognition; 2) methods to manipulate and study the brain including lesions, electrophysiological recordings, microstimulation, optogenetics, and pharmacology; 3) proper interpretation of behavioral data to deduce brain circuit operation; and 4) the similarities, differences, and ethics of animal models and their relation to human physiology. These four topics come together quite dramatically in Dr. Jose Delgado’s 1960s famous experiments on the neural correlates of aggression in which he stopped bulls in mid-charge by electrically stimulating basal ganglia and thalamic structures."

"A blind neuroscientist could give precise quantitative details regarding electrical discharges in the eye produced by the stimulus of light, and a blind craftsman could with instruction fashion a good material model of the eye; but sight and seeing can be known only by one who sees."

"[I]t is particularly encouraging to see the growing number of computational studies being conducted at the cellular and molecular levels. Perhaps no where else in neuroscience is the risk of getting lost in the trees and separated from overall brain function as great."

"Neuroscience is the field of study that endeavors to make sense of such diverse questions; at the same time, it points the way toward the effective treatment of dysfunctions. The exchange of information among a half-dozen branches of science and the clinical practice of mental health have shaped a new scientific approach to the study of the brain."

"Nothing in neurobiology makes sense except in the light of behavior."

"As a brain researcher, I'd started out simply accepting the strictly objective principles of the behaviorist position. In the 1950s and early 1960s, all respectable neuroscientists thought in these terms. In those days, we wouldn't have been caught dead implying that consciousness or subjective experience can affect physical brain processing. My first break with this thinking — although I certainly didn't see it that way at the time — came in a 1952 discussion of mind-brain theory in which I proposed a fundamentally new way of looking at consciousness. In it, I suggested that when we focus consciously on an object — and create a mental image for example — it's not because the brain pattern is a copy or neural representation of the perceived object, but because the brain experiences a special kind of interaction with that object, preparing the brain to deal with it. I maintained that an identical feeling or thought on two separate occasions did not necessarily involve the identical nerve cells each time. Instead, it is the operational impact of the neural activity pattern as a whole that counts, and this depends on context — just as the word "lead" can mean different things, depending on the rest of the sentence."

"I have read a great deal now on the neurological side and much on the anthropological side and on the philosophical side and we have had all these discussions and all the time I have the feeling that something may break. I mean that some little light at the end of the tunnel may be sensed or some flash of insight may come. I of course know very well that there is no guarantee it will come, but I have already got myself into this state of expectancy that something will come to my imagination which has some germ of truth about it in this most difficult field."

"The phenomenal world according to neuroscience is the result of the final transformations of sense data somewhere in the brain. Yet the brain itself belongs to that phenomenal world. R. D. Laing (1976) asks, "How, as a member of the set we have to account for, can it be used to account for the set as a whole, and all members of the set, including itself?""

"The more we discover scientifically about the brain the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena and the more wonderful do the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a superstition held by dogmatic materialists. It has all the features of a Messianic prophecy, with the promise of a future freed of all problems—a kind of Nirvana for our unfortunate successors."

"The first proponent of cortical memory networks on a major scale was neither a neuroscientist nor a computer scientist but... a Viennes economist."

"When you study science, and especially these realms of the biology of what makes us human, what's clear is that every time you find out something, that brings up ten new questions, and half of those are better questions than you started with."

"When he meets a simple geometrical construction, for instance in the honeycomb, he would fain refer it to physical instinct, or to skill and ingenuity, rather than to the operation of physical forces or mathematical laws; when he sees in a snail, or nautilus, or tiny foraminiferal or radiolarian shell a close approach to sphere or spiral, he is prone of old habit to believe that after all it is something more than a spiral or a sphere, and that in this "something more" there lies what neither mathematics nor physics can explain. In short, he is deeply reluctant to compare the living with the dead, or to explain by geometry or by mechanics the things which have their part in the mystery of life."

"What good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world — temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity with moral ethics."

"Posing questions about the living world and seeking answers through scientific inquiry are the central activities of biology, the scientific study of life. Biologists’ questions can be ambitious."

"Complexity has always been difficult to resolve and to understand. Evolutionary biologists were among the first scientists to recognize this problem, when they dug their way toward new theories about evolution. They discovered that matter does not lack purpose."

"No biologist today would think of submitting a paper entitled "New evidence for evolution;" it simply has not been an issue for a century."

"More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track."

"There are two kinds of biologists, those who are looking to see if there is one thing that can be under stood, and those who keep saying it is very complicated and that nothing can be understood... You must study the simplest system you think has the properties you are interested in."

"Any competent biologist is aware of a multitude of problems yet unresolved and of questions yet unanswered. After all, biologic research shows no sign of approaching completion; quite the opposite is true. Disagreements and clashes of opinion are rife among biologists, as they should be in a living and growing science. Antievolutionists mistake, or pretend to mistake, these disagreements as indications of dubiousness of the entire doctrine of evolution. Their favorite sport is stringing together quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken out of context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself have been amused and amazed to read ourselves quoted in a way showing that we are really antievolutionists under the skin."

"Today, the central and still fascinating questions for biologists concern the mechanisms by which evolution occurs."

"Today, nearly all biologists acknowledge that evolution is a fact."

"Despite the beliefs and teachings of religion and psychology, impulses are biological and psychic directional signals to nudge the individual toward his or her greatest opportunities for expression and development privately, and also to insure the person's contribution to mass social reality."

"Biology occupies a position among the sciences at once marginal and central. Marginal because - the living world constituting but a tiny and very "special" part of the universe - it does not seem likely that the study of living beings will ever uncover general laws applicable outside the biosphere. But if the ultimate aim of the whole of science is indeed, as I believe, to clarify man's relationship to the universe, then biology must be accorded a central position, since of all the disciplines it is the one that endeavors to go most directly to the heart of the problems that must be resolved before that of 'human nature' can even be framed in other than metaphysical terms."

"Biology is not physics, because organisms are such complex physical objects, and sociology is not biology because human societies are made by self-conscious organisms. By pretending to a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only engender the scorn of natural scientists and the cynicism of the humanists."

"Purpose has no place in biology, but history has no meaning without it."

"For a biologist the alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all."

"Scientists studying the inner workings of the human organism have found no soul there. They increasingly argue that human behaviour is determined by hormones, genes and synapses, rather than free will - the same forces that determine the behaviour of chimpanzees, wolves and ants."

"Biologists have since debunked Nazi racial theory. In particular, genetic research conducted after 1945 has demonstrated that the differences between the various human lineages are far smaller than the Nazi postulated."

"According to the science of biology, people were not 'created'. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be 'equal'."

"Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries, and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare."

"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."

"Biology is Engineering."

"[A]ll of modern biology is an affirmation of this relatedness of the many species of living things and of their gradual divergence from one another over the course of time."

"What is found in biology is mechanisms, mechanisms built with chemical components and that are often modified by other, later, mechanisms added to the earlier ones. While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology."

"The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry."

"I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives."

"You can’t fight biology. Only push at the rules, here and there."

"For me biology is my life, my motive to life and is in my blood and even my soul.let is way to live. It's a connection between you and your God."

"The fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a Great Designer; perhaps some species are destroyed when the Designer becomes dissatisfied with them, and new experiments are attempted on an improved design. But this notion is a little disconcerting. Each plant and animal is exquisitely made; should not a supremely competent Designer have been able to make the intended variety from the start? The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament)."

"The same Time which so ruthlessly assails the works and the monuments of man, was inspired with a zeal for the perpetuation of those which belong to the gods, really startling. The Vasty Cycles of Days since the Avatar of Time have been consumed by him but for this end. The Populations of the Old World seem to have lived that Time might solemnize their obsequies, and Stamp the forged Seal of Eternity upon their bones. The acts and Inscriptions of man dissolve into thin air, while the Races co-temporary with adolescent Time continue for our own and the years that are To Come. To touch the former with a breath is to blot them out, while the last are hermetically soldered down with stone, and coffined in the Centres of the Earth: so carefully guarded are they from rude and sacriligious [sic] hands, that to unrol the Cerements which bind them, it requires the most peculiar and subtle Genius of Skill, and fingers tipped each one with a most energetic soul."

"There are a hundred million fossils, all catalogued and identified, in museums around the world."

"The record of the rocks contains very little, other than bacteria and one-celled plants until, about a billion years ago, after some three billion years of invisible progress, a major breakthrough occurred. The first many-celled creatures appeared on earth."

"Beginning at the base of the Cambrian period and extending for about 10 million years, all the major groups of skeletonized invertebrates made their first appearance in the most spectacular rise in diversity ever recorded on our planet."

"To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer."

"The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations has been urged by several paleontologists . . . as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection. For the development by this means of a group of forms, all of which are descended from some one progenitor, must have been an extremely slow process; and the progenitors must have lived long before their modified descendants. But we continually overrate the perfection of the geological record, and falsely infer, because certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage. In all cases positive palæontological evidence may be implicitly trusted; negative evidence is worthless, as experience has so often shown. We continually forget how large the world is, compared with the area over which our geological formations have been carefully examined; we forget that groups of species may elsewhere have long existed, and have slowly multiplied, before they invaded the ancient archipelagoes of Europe and the United States. We do not make due allowance for the intervals of time which have elapsed between our consecutive formations,—longer perhaps in many cases than the time required for the accumulation of each formation. These intervals will have given time for the multiplication of species from some one parent-form: and in the succeeding formation, such groups or species will appear as if suddenly created."

"There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks. . . . The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the [evolutionary] views here entertained."

"I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing language, more or less different in the successive chapters, may represent the forms of life, which are entombed in our consecutive formations, and which falsely appear to have been abruptly introduced. On this view, the difficulties above discussed are greatly diminished, or even disappear."

"To discover the changes that have taken place in our globe, which can account for the remains of animals only fitted to live in warm climates being found in so northern a situation; and to explain the circumstances of human bones never having been met with in a fossil state, is the province of the geologist. To examine such fossil bones, and to determine the class to which the animal belonged, comes within the sphere of inquiry of the anatomist, and considerable increases its extent."

"I would not expect religion to be the right tool for sequencing the human genome and by the same token would not expect science to be the means to approaching the supernatural. But on the really interesting larger questions, such as ‘Why are we here?’ or ‘Why do human beings long for spirituality?,’ I find science unsatisfactory. Many superstitions have come into existence and then faded away. Faith has not, which suggests it has reality."

"When I discover something about the human genome, I experience a sense of awe at the mystery of life, and say to myself, ‘Wow, only God knew before.’ It is a profoundly beautiful and moving sensation, which helps me appreciate God and makes science even more rewarding for me."