Sydney Brenner Quotes

People have always asked whether evolution is constantly driving onwards and upwards. Is there always going to be improvement? The answer is no: evolution is a progression of form and function, but it is not purposeful.

Sydney Brenner

• Evolution
• Function
• Progression

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Quotes to Explore

• According to my royalty statements, 'The Green Progression' sold 392 copies in hardcover.

  

  L. E. Modesitt
  • Green
  • Progression
  • Royalty

• Whereas HIV only in recent decades became infectious for humans, high risk papillomavirus types have in all likelihood been with us for millions of years, accompanying the human race since the early days of our evolution.

  

  Harald zur Hausen
  • High
  • Risk
  • Race

• So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.

  

  E. O. Wilson
  • World
  • Learning
  • Literature

• The smaller the function, the greater the management.

  

  C. Northcote Parkinson
  • Management
  • Function

• Myths are a waste of time. They prevent progression.

  

  Barbra Streisand
  • Time
  • Waste
  • Progression

• The newly released movie 'Noah' features a retelling of the creation story that clearly depicts Darwinian evolution transforming a single-cell organism into a monkey. The movie also seems to show magic in scenes more reminiscent of the occult than of the Bible story.

  

  Aaron Klein
  • Movie
  • Single
  • Magic

• I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.

  

  Jack Horner
  • People
  • Believe
  • Evolution

• Our dependence on the pollutants of this Earth have always, and will continue to have, far-reaching consequences to our eco-systems, bio systems, geosystems and our race's natural evolution.

  

  Yehuda Berg
  • Earth
  • Race
  • Evolution

• I'm going through an evolution. I'm completely cleaning out my closet. I'm purging, because I saw that show 'Hoarders.' I had a sweatshirt from sixth grade, and I'm going, 'Why do I hold on to this?'

  

  Fergie The Black Eyed Peas
  • Shopping
  • Evolution
  • Cleaning

• Plato... introduces two infinities, because both in increase and diminution there appears to be transcendency, and a progression to infinity. Though... he did not use them: for neither is there infinity in numbers by diminution or division; since unity is a minimum: nor by increase; for he extends number as far as to the decad.

  

  Aristotle
  • Plato
  • Progression
  • Infinity

• The creative principle is less about dogma and more about opening ourselves to the evolution of consciousness.

  

  Alex Grey
  • Evolution
  • Principle
  • Dogma

• When Charles Darwin wrote The Origin Of The Species, no one could have known that the ice cap would melt, that the waters would rise and that life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish. We came from water and now, with the help of stem cell technology and cloning, we must go back to it to survive.When the waters rise, humanity will go back to the place from whence it came.Make no mistake, this is not sci-fi, this is evolution.

  

  Alexander McQueen
  • Life
  • Live
  • Help

• Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

  

  Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Wall
  • Social
  • Function

• The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.

  

  Benjamin Cardozo
  • Law
  • Running
  • Habit

• Why is it so painful to watch a person sink? Because there is something unnatural in it, for nature demands personal progress, evolution, and every backward step means wasted energy.

  

  August Strindberg
  • Why
  • Nature
  • Energy

• A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.

  

  Tom Stoppard
  • Movie
  • Function
  • Sets

• The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!

  

  Jacques Lacan
  • Knowledge
  • Function
  • Psychic

• In the complex course of its evolution, life exhibits a remarkable contrast to the tendency expressed in the Second Law to Thermodynamics. Where the Second Law expressed an irreversible progression toward increased entropy and disorder, life evolves continually higher levels of order. The still more remarkable fact is that this evolutionary drive to greater and greater order also is irreversible. Evolution does not go backward.

  

  J. H. Rush
  • Life
  • Evolution
  • DIsoder

• Evolution does not make happiness its goal; it aims simply at evolution and nothing else.

  

  Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Happiness
  • Evolution
  • Aims

• Our crisis is a birth. We are one living system and we have come to the limit of one phase of natural growth on a finite planet We must learn ethical evolution quickly As we seek to facilitate a gentle birth, a graceful and nonviolent transition to the next stage of our evolution, we will discover a natural pattern, a design of our birth transition, and develop a plan to cooperate with this design.

  

  Barbara Marx Hubbard
  • Evolution
  • Birth
  • Crisis

• In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

  

  Will Self
  • World
  • Fall
  • Morality

• If a white man falls off a chair drunk, it's just a drunk. If a Negro does, it's the whole damn Negro race.

  

  Bill Cosby
  • Fall
  • Drunk
  • Negro

• We call for an end to the killing of one another, and we denounce the violence and fanaticism that threatens life. The victory of the resurrection must be experienced as a victory of life, of brotherhood, of the future, of hope.

  

  Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople
  • Violence
  • Victory
  • Killing

• People have always asked whether evolution is constantly driving onwards and upwards. Is there always going to be improvement? The answer is no: evolution is a progression of form and function, but it is not purposeful.

  

  Sydney Brenner
  • Evolution
  • Function
  • Progression