Biologists Quotes

• I am of course getting angry if biologists try to use the general concept 'chance' in order to explain phenomena which are so typical for living organisms as, for instance, those appearing in the biological evolution.

  

  Wolfgang Paul
  • Chance
  • Angry
  • Use

• Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

  

  Francis Crick
  • Designed
  • Constantly
  • Evolved

• By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent—what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.

  

  Elizabeth Kolbert
  • Species
  • Continent
  • Biologists

• Most biologists, (says Vogel, 1981) seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region.

  

  Bill Mollison
  • Notion
  • Region
  • Fuzzy

• Biologists can be divided into two classes: experimentalists who observe things that cannot be explained, and theoreticians who explain things that cannot be observed.

  

  Aharon Katzir
  • Biologists
  • Experimentalists
  • Theoreticians

• I have spent a lot of time arguing that the theory of group selection is not the stupid, pernicious doctrine that many biologists once claimed it to be. The theory is not just conceptually coherent; there are adaptations out there in nature (like reduced virulence in some viruses) that evolved because there was group selection.

  

  Elliott Sober
  • Doctrine
  • Selection
  • Viruses

• I have always felt sympathy towards the biologists who accept to debate creationists. Now I also understand them better; one can fight opinions, not articles of faith.

  

  Bertrand Meyer
  • Faith
  • Fight
  • Sympathy

• Evolutionary biologists often appeal to parsimony when they seek to explain why organisms "match" with respect to a given trait. For example, why do almost all the organisms that are alive today on our planet use the same genetic code? If they share a common ancestor, the code could have evolved just once and then been inherited from the most recent common ancestor that present organisms share. On the other hand, if organisms in different species share no common ancestors, the code must have evolved repeatedly.

  

  Elliott Sober
  • Planet
  • Species
  • Ancestors

• Biologists now pretty universally regard vitalism as a vestige of a bygone age.

  

  Elliott Sober
  • Biologists
  • Vestige

• Evolutionary biologists often avoid using the term "race" because there is so much racist baggage that comes with the term. However, they are often okay with the idea that the genealogy of human groups within our species can sometimes be inferred in much the same way as the genealogy of different species.

  

  Elliott Sober
  • Human
  • Species
  • Revolutionary

• If you're a conservation biologist in many fields, you're seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they're chronicling radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in.

  

  Elizabeth Kolbert
  • Conversation
  • Disappear
  • Fields