#Biology

"To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write."

"We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget."

"If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?"

"The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems."

"Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase."

"A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!"

"And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude."

"On ne naît pas femme: on le devient."

"Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,And fathers live transmitted in their sons;Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds,The same their manners, and the same their minds:Till, as erelong successive buds decay,And insect-shoals successive pass away,Increasing wants the pregnant parent vexWith the fond wish to form a softer sex. .."

"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself."

"There were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as "junk DNA,"though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome "junk,"given our level of ignorance."

"Whenever explaining an event, we must choose from three competing modes of explanation. These are regularity, chance, and design... To attribute an event to design is to say that it cannot reasonably be referred to either regularity or chance."

"Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. . . ."

"The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion."

"In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels"

"We all know interspecies romance is weird."

"The phrase 'the fossil record' sounds impressive and authoritative. As used by some persons it becomes, as intended, intimidating, taking on the aura of esoteric truth as expounded by an elite class of specialists. But what is it, really, this fossil record? Only data in search of interpretation. All claims to the contrary that I know, and I know of several, are so much superstition."

"Dream is not that which you see while sleeping it is something that does not let you sleep."

"Are we biology or God or something higher? I know my heart beats and I listen to it. The beat is biology, but what is the song?"

"I try to show the public that chemistry, biology, physics, astrophysics is life. It is not some separate subject that you have to be pulled into a corner to be taught about."