Biology

"As we develop all this information [about the human genome], it will reveal the complexity, the interdependence of all this material. It will point to the origin as the result of an intelligent creator, an intelligent agent."

"It’s a parts list... If I gave you the parts list for the Boeing 777 and it had 100,000 parts, I don’t think you could screw it together and you certainly wouldn’t understand why it flew."

"[A cell’s glycome, however, is] probably many thousands of times more complex than the genome."

"These odds [50,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1] are roughly the same as you could give to the idea of just one of our body's proteins having evolved randomly, by chance. … A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?"

"Children, behold the Chimpanzee; He sits on the ancestral tree From which we sprang in ages gone. I'm glad we sprang: had we held on, We might, for aught that I can say, Be horrid Chimpanzees to-day."

"After the first recognition even by theology of physical evolution, it was easy to predict that the recognition of psychical evolution could not be indefinitely delayed; for the barrier erected by old dogma to keep men from looking backward had been broken down. And today for the student of scientific psychology the idea of pre-existence passes out of the realm of theory into the realm of fact, proving the Buddhist explanation of the universal mystery quite as plausible as any other. "None but very hasty thinkers," wrote the late Professor Huxley, "will reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity. Like the doctrine of evolution itself, that of transmigration has its roots in the world of reality; and it may claim such support as the great argument from analogy is capable of supplying.”"

"With the acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, old forms of thought crumbled; new ideas everywhere arose to take the place of worn-out dogmas; and we now have the spectacle of a general intellectual movement in directions strangely parallel with Oriental philosophy. The unprecedented rapidity and multiformity of scientific progress during the last fifty years could not have failed to provoke an equally unprecedented intellectual quickening among the non-scientific. That the highest and most complex organisms have been developed from the lowest and simplest; that a single physical basis of life is the substance of the whole living world; that no line of separation can be drawn between the animal and vegetable; that the difference between life and non-life is only a difference of degree, not of kind; that matter is not less incomprehensible than mind, while both are but varying manifestations of one and the same unknown reality – these have already become the commonplaces of the new philosophy."

"The old "red in tooth and claw" view of the natural economy has to be updated. We need a new metaphor for the forest, one that helps us visualize plants both sharing and competing. … Evolution's engine is fired by genetic self-interest, but this manifests itself in cooperative action as well as solo selfishness. The natural economy has as many trade unions as robber barons, as much solidarity as individualistic entrepreneurship."

"Los pasivos alzan el clamor llamándose apóstoles de la evolución y condenando todo lo que tiene algo de rebeldía; apelan al miedo, hacen llamamientos patéticos al patriotismo; acuden a la ignorancia y llegan a aconsejar al pueblo que se deje matar y ultrajar en los próximos comicios y vuelvan una y otra vez a ejercer pacíficamente el derecho de sufragio, a que una y otra vez lo burlen y lo asesinen los tiranos. Pero nada de salirse del fétido rincón, al cual se pretende evolucionar agregando más y más inmundicias, más y más cobardías. ... La evolución verdadera que mejore la vida de los mexicanos, no la de sus parásitos, vendrá con la revolución: ésta y aquella se completan y la primera no pueda coexistir con los anacronisnos y subterfugios que despiertan hoy los redentores del pasivismo. Para evolucionar es preciso ser libre y no podemos tener libertad si no somos rebeldes, porque nunca tirano alguno ha respetado a los pueblos pasivos; jamás un rebaño de carneros se ha impuesto con la majestad de su número inofensivo, al lobo que bonitamente los devora sin cuidarse de otro derecho que el de sus dientes. Hay que armarse, pero no de un voto inútil, que siempre valdrá tanto como el tirano quiere, sino de armas efectivas y menos candorosas cuyo uso nos traiga la evolución ascendente y no la regresiva que preconizan los luchadores pacifistas. ¡Pasividad, nunca! Rebeldía, ahora y siempre."

"It's his last book. He wrote in in 1881, the year before he died, and usually we expect that in old age, just before death, that a great scientist will write a pontificating philosophical treatise on the nature of reality. And Darwin... wrote a book on worms. ...He was interested in worms because they were... a metaphor for his larger world-view. The worms that slowly churn the topsoil of England... that work literally beneath our feet, that we never notice, that we think are insignificant because they're so small and lowly, are in fact producing the very soil that is the basis of agriculture. And therefore Darwin uses it as a metaphor for the importance of apparently tiny things when you extend them over long periods of time. And that's what evolution is, the extension of small change (to Darwin) over vast periods of time. So the worms become a metaphor for evolution and for the whole process of temporal change, a very fascinating book."

"We applaud the burgeoning emphasis on change in regulatory genes as the stuff of morphological evolution... if only because one of us had written a book to argue that the classical, and widely ignored data on evolution by heterochrony should be exhumed and valued as a primary demonstration of regulatory change. We do not see how point mutations in structural genes can lead, even by gradual accumulations, to new morphological designs. Regulatory changes in the timing of complex ontogenetic programs seem far more promising—and potentially rapid, in conformity with our punctuational predilections. The near identity of humans and chimps for structural genes, and the evidence of major regulatory change indicated by human neoteny provides an important confirmation."

"I do not want to discuss evolution in such depth, however, only touch on it from my own perspective: from the moment when I stood on the Serengeti plains holding the fossilized bones of ancient creatures in my hands to the moment when, staring into the eyes of a chimpanzee, I saw a thinking, reasoning personality looking back. You may not believe in evolution, and that is all right. How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important than how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves."

"Said the little Eohippus, "I am going to be a horse, And on my middle fingernails To run my earthly course! * * * I'm going to have a flowing tail! I'm going to have a mane! I'm going to stand fourteen hands high On the Psychozoic plain!""

"God is an unnecessary hypothesis for explaining the natural world. But … this is not something that needs to be ascribed to God anyway, so it hardly implies that evolution and religion are incompatible, any more than showing that God is not needed to explain plumbing makes plumbing incompatible with religion."

"When we read in Genesis the account of Creation, we risk imagining that God was a magician, with such a magic wand as to be able to do everything. However, it was not like that. He created beings and left them to develop according to the internal laws that He gave each one, so that they would develop, and reach their fullness. He gave autonomy to the beings of the universe at the same time that He assured them of his continual presence, giving being to every reality. And thus creation went forward for centuries and centuries, millennia and millennia until it became what we know today, in fact because God is not a demiurge or a magician, but the Creator who gives being to all entities. The beginning of the world was not the work of chaos, which owes its origin to another, but it derives directly from a Supreme Principle who creates out of love. The Big-Bang, that is placed today at the origin of the world, does not contradict the divine intervention but exacts it. The evolution in nature is not opposed to the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve."

"Paleontologists should recognize that much of their thought is conditioned by a peculiar perspective that they must bring to the study of life: they must look down from its present complexity and diversity into the past: their view must be retrospective. From this vantage point, it is very difficult to view evolution as anything but an easy and inevitable result of mere existence, as something that unfolds in a natural and orderly fashion. Yet we urge a different view. The norm for a species or, by extension, a community is stability. Speciation is a rare and difficult event that punctuates a system in homeostatic equilibrium. That so uncommon an event should have produced such a wondrous array of living and fossil forms can only give strength to an old idea: paleontology deals with a phenomenon that belongs to it alone among the evolutionary sciences and that enlightens all its conclusions—time."

"Recently there's been a resurgence of rejection of evolution - possibly one of the most concrete and indisputable discoveries of science. To the extent that we deny this, we're wandering in the darkness."

"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution"

"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."

"What is the question now placed before society with the glib assurance which to me is most astonishing? That question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence those new fangled theories."

"After the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, mammals gradually became the most dominant life form on earth, the most intelligent of the mammals being the primates, and the most intelligent of the primates, the apes. Due to the separation of the South American, Eurasian and African continents beginning some 150 million years ago, the primates in these three areas afterwards evolved separately. In Africa, apes diverged from monkeys about 23 million years ago, with humans descending from these African apes, our branch splitting off from the ancestors of chimpanzees perhaps as recently as five and a half million years ago, and no earlier than eight million years ago."

"Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering nor for it. Nature is not interested in suffering one way or the other unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquilizes gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favored by natural selection? Not unless the act of tranquilizing a gazelle improved that gene's chances of being propagated into future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so, and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to the death - as many of them eventually are. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease."

"In any developing science there are disagreements. But scientists — and here is what separates real scientists from the pseudoscientists of the school of intelligent design — always know what evidence it would take to change their minds. One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. It is not a theory, and for pity’s sake, let’s stop confusing the philosophically naive by calling it so. Evolution is a fact."

"Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered … has no purpose in mind. … It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker."

"This belief, that Darwinian evolution is "random", is not merely false. It is the exact opposite of the truth. Chance is a minor ingredient in the Darwinian recipe, but the most important ingredient is cumulative selection which is quintessentially non-random."

"Mere chance … alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species and species of the same genus."

"The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient."

"The theory of evolution by Darwin does not explain how this transition occurred, from inert matter to living matter and then to the only form of living matter endowed with reason, which is man. It is not scientifically rigorous. A rigorous scientific theory meets the requirements of scientific rigor of Galileo, who was the father of science: mathematical description and experimental reproducibility. Requirements that evolutionary theory does not meet, precisely because it cannot describe nor even less reproduce the transition from nonliving matter to living species, plant and animal. It cannot answer the question of why among millions of species, only one, the human being, is endowed with reason. The science of life has not figured out how life arises; it is not an exact science."

"Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised."

"Taylor: A planet where apes evolved from men?"

"Samuel Butler's famous aphorism that the chicken is only an egg's way of making another egg has been modernized: the organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA."

"Just as the line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the center, and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in moving the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a race of biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Creator minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the needs and purposes of man."

"Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation... reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature. With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view remained..."

"Organic evolution has its physical analogue in the universal law that the world tends, in all its parts and particles, to pass from certain less probable to certain more probable configurations or states. This is the second law of thermodynamics. It has been called the law of evolution of the world; and we call it, after Clausius, the Principle of Entropy, which is a literal translation of Evolution in Greek."

"They were only built by chance; maybe a tweak or two to give them green eyes, or better hearing, or to keep them safe from cancer. The engines of their creation had no foresight and no future. All that matters to evolution is what works in the moment."

"Out of the dusk a shadow, Then a spark; Out of the cloud a silence, Then a lark; Out of the heart a rapture, Then a pain; Out of the dead, cold ashes, Life again."

"Darwinian man though well behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved!"

"survival of the fittest"

"Evolution is a change from an indefinite, incoherent, homogeneity to a definite, coherent, heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations."

"This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.""

"Before I gifted Picard my golem my intention was to live beyond my years. To become my own legacy. Now I see, in my final days, that wasn't just poor humanity, it was poor science. Because evolution is not an act of preservation. It's addition."

"When you were a tadpole and I was a fish, in the Palæozoic time And side by side in the sluggish tide, we sprawled in the ooze and slime."

"This argument [that life is too improbable to have arisen by chance] comes up repeatedly: its latest manifestation is Hoyle's discussion of the likelihood of a wind blowing through a junkyard assembling a Boeing 707 [sic]. What is wrong with it? Essentially, it is that no biologist imagines that complex structures arise in a single step."

"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."

"You grow, we all grow, we're made to grow. You either evolve or disappear."

"If I did not think you a good tempered & truth loving man I should not tell you that... I have read your book [On the Origin of Species] with more pain than pleasure. Parts of it I admired greatly; parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore; other parts I read with absolute sorrow; because I think them utterly false & grievously mischievous— You have deserted—after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth—the the true method of induction. … I have written in a hurry & in a spirit of brotherly love."

"I do not believe in evolution … and none of your professors believe in evolution. … Beliefs are opinions."

"Molecular biologists may have ignored mitochondria because they did not immediately recognize the far-reaching implications and applications of the discovery... It took time to accumulate a database of sufficient scope and content to address the many challenging questions related to anthropology, disease, evolution, and more."

"The hallmark of evolution is its ability to process situations and generate order without relying on the crutch of a conscious designer. Most complex systems grow organically, solutions evolving through unguided and mindless forces, never reaching any final state."

"Things evolve to evolve. Evolutionary processes are the linchpin of change. These processes of discovery represent a complexity of simple systems that flux in perpetual tension as they teeter at the edge of chaos. This whirlwind of emergence is responsible for the spontaneous order and higher, organized complexity so noticeable in biological evolution—one–celled critters beefing up to become multicellular organisms."