#Biology

"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."

"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?"

"In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes."

"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. .."

"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."

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

"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."

"Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest... The origin of species — Darwin’s problem — remains unsolved."

"If Darwinists are opposed to mentioning scientific problems with their view, you would think they would be even more opposed to mentioning intelligent design. Yet Darwinists have been discussing ID in public school science classes for years... Biology textbooks have been mentioning intelligent design since the late 1990s—but only to misrepresent and disparage it."

"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."

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

"We all know interspecies romance is weird."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred."

"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. . . ."

"Teaching students the evidence for and against Darwinism is not the same as teaching intelligent design. The U.S. Congress has officially endorsed teaching students 'the full range of scientific views' about Darwinian evolution."

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

"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!"