For all the accomplishments of molecular biology, we still can’t tell a live cat from a dead cat.

In the future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and...

Dolphins and sharks are natural enemies. Dolphins are like, “Quit eating us,” and sharks are like, “Stop smiling all the time, you morons.

There is a massive, irreconcilable conflict between science and religion. Religion was humanity’s original cosmology, biology and anthropology. It provided explanations for the origin of the world, life and humans. Science now gives us increasingly...

Quite recently the human descent theory has been stigmatized as the ‘gorilla theory of human ancestry.’ All this despite the fact that Darwin himself, in the days when not a single bit of evidence regarding...

[…] the success of Egyptian surgery in setting broken bones is very fully demonstrated in the large number of well-joined fractures found in the ancient skeletons.

I am afraid that those comments go back to the late 80’s. At that time I was a skeptic — the argument based on Koch’s postulates to try to distinguish between cause and association. …...

During the time that Landsteiner gave me an education in the field of immunology, I discovered that he and I were thinking about the serologic problem in very different ways. He would ask, What do...

Everything can’t be explained by some general biological phrase.

It will be noticed that the fundamental theorem proved above bears some remarkable resemblances to the second law of thermodynamics. Both are properties of populations, or aggregates, true irrespective of the nature of the units...

The principal result of my investigation is that a uniform developmental principle controls the individual elementary units of all organisms, analogous to the finding that crystals are formed by the same laws in spite of...

The Department of Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins was founded and directed by Tom Pollard, an engaging young scientist with remarkable energy and enthusiasm.

How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very...

I told my three sons stories about germs more than fifty years ago as fanciful bedtime tales.

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.{The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was not originated by Charles Darwin, though he discussed Spencer’s ‘excellent expression’ in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace (Jul...

Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that’s so big we forget it’s there, that turns minerals on its planet...

Life is stranger than biology textbooks.

Quick dinner with … Ang [Lee] and his wife Jane who’s visiting with the children for a while. We talked about her work as a microbiologist and the behaviour of the epithingalingie under the influence...

Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no struck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on ‘The Survival of the Fittest.’ These are illustrious names, this...

I am above the forest region, amongst grand rocks & such a torrent as you see in Salvator Rosa’s paintings vegetation all a scrub of rhodos. with Pines below me as thick & bad to...

Love, in its purest form, is biology.

The evolution of life, and the evolutionary origin of mankind, are scientifically established as firmly and completely as any historical event not witnessed by human observers. Any concession to anti-evolutionists, suggesting that there are scientific...

All organisms vary. It is in the highest degree improbable that any given variety should have exactly the same relations to surrounding conditions as the parent stock. In that case it is either better fitted...

Through the discovery of Buchner, Biology was relieved of another fragment of mysticism. The splitting up of sugar into CO2 and alcohol is no more the effect of a ‘vital principle’ than the splitting up...

The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.

Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of...

Indeed, not all attacks—especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin—are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.

Healing is a biological process, not an art. It is as much a function of the living organism as respiration, digestion, circulation, excretion, cell proliferation, or nerve activity. It is a ceaseless process, as constant...

In science’s pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history’s inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate...

There is nothing opposed in Biometry and Mendelism. Your husband and I worked that out at Peppards [on the Chilterns] and you will see it referred in the Biometrika memoir. The Mendelian formula leads up...

Love is poetry plus biology.

The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself—not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new...

Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled.

Molecular machines display a key signature or hallmark of design, namely, irreducible complexity. In all irreducibly complex systems in which the cause of the system is known by experience or observation, intelligent design or engineering...

…we do not own these woods. They own us.

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light...

History is biology’s dumping ground

The publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers in 1858, and still more that of the ‘Origin’ in 1859, had the effect upon them of the flash of light, which to a man who has...

That all plants immediately and substantially stem from the element water alone I have learnt from the following experiment. I took an earthern vessel in which I placed two hundred pounds of earth dried in...

Very often conditions are recorded as observable “under thy fingers” […] Among such observations it is important to notice that the pulsations of the human heart are observed.

Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.

I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant’s chair.[Explaining his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial.]

I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology...

In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but...

The cause of nutrition and growth resides not in the organism as a whole but in the separate elementary parts—the cells.

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...

Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.

If you happen to be one of the people who has a split zygomaticus major muscle, where the lower part of it is tethered to the overlying skin, this will create a dimple in your...