Is the conclusion that the universe was designed – and that the design extends deeply into life – science, philosophy, religion, or what? In a sense it hardly matters. By far the most important question...

George Gey paid his way through a biology degree at the University of Pittsburgh by working as a carpenter and mason, and he could make nearly anything for cheap or free. During his second year...

People, as curious primates, dote on concrete objects that can be seen and fondled. God dwells among the details, not in the realm of pure generality. We must tackle and grasp the larger, encompassing themes...

This little book has been written in the hope that it may appeal to several classes of readers.Not infrequently I have been asked by friends of different callings in life to recommend them some book...

There are a lot of things animals do that we can’t,” she says, “like flying and camouflage, and we’ve adapted, through technology … It’s funny when people say something is natural, or not. Compared with...

Evidently neither cats nor dogs, nor other animals that listen to human music, were constituted for the appreciation of it, for it is not of the slightest use to them in the struggle for existence....

The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel’s definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and...

Threats to our standing in the eyes of others are remarkably potent biologically, almost as powerful as those to our very survival.

Men and women fall in love abandoning reality in favour of the dream

There are species that retain their characteristics even in conditions that are relatively different from their natural ones; other species in similar circumstances instead become extinct; otherwise what takes place is racial mixing with other...

The controversy between Darwinism and intelligent design has the characteristics of major scientific revolutions in the past. Darwinists are losing power because they treat with contempt the very people on whom they depend the most:...

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,...

The curious fact is that biology tells us nothing about desire. And, when you think about it, culture — novels, movies, opera, and quite a lot of painting — is about desire, how we manage...

A biochemist colleague has kindly provided me with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and enough hydroquinone for 50 bombardier beetles, I am now about to mix the two together. According to the above, they will...

That enormously complex biological interactions are so flawlessly coordinated as to result in such obvious manifestations as human thought or the electrical activity that dries the heartbeat is as exciting to me — actually more...

Disease may be defined as ‘A change produced in living things in consequence of which they are no longer in harmony with their environment.

Some believe what separates men from animals is our ability to reason. Others say it’s language or romantic love, or opposable thumbs. Living here in this lost world, I’ve come to believe it is more...

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

[On scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss][Carl Friedrich] Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal...

This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

Teachers seeking to ‘teach the controversy’ over Darwinian evolution in today’s climate will likely be met with false warnings that it is unconstitutional to say anything negative about Darwinian evolution. Students who attempt to raise...

What a mistake that had been, to create a construct [AI] that could suffer. He knew that now. Life, pain, death, they were no playthings. Biology was serious business, not for amateurs and foolish gods.

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a...

If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story–his real, inmost story?’–for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed,...

Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections – that’s...

chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.

For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains...

Wherever sufficiently numerous series of the remains of any given group, which has endured for a long space of time, are carefully examined, their morphological relations are never in discordance with the requirements of the...

Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.

Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above...

A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.

The beauty in the genome is of course that it’s so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data…which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire...

…on opening the incubator I experienced one of those rare moments of intense emotion which reward the research worker for all his pains: at first glance I saw that the broth culture, which the night...

It is not the organs—that is, the character and form of the animal’s bodily parts—that have given rise to its habits and particular structures. It is the habits and manner of life and the conditions...

Advocacy of leaf protein as a human food is based on the undisputed fact that forage crops (such as lucerne) give a greater yield of protein than other types of crops. Even with conventional food...

The uniformity of the earth’s life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled....

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...

The information contained in an English sentence or computer software does not derive from the chemistry of the ink or the physics of magnetism, but from a source extrinsic to physics and chemistry altogether. Indeed,...

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

Darwin’s theory was received in Russia with profound sympathy. While in Western Europe it met firmly established old traditions which it had first to overcome, in Russia its appearance coincided with the awakening of our...

Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century.

In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne’s lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean...

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

The evolution of higher and of lower forms of life is as well and as soundly established as the eternal hills. It has long since ceased to be a theory; it is a law of...

Throughout history we humans have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of our human condition. Neither philosophy, nor psychology nor biology has, until now, been able to provide the truthful explanation.

I thought the fart was a human thing. It’s something to do with like, arse cheeks, or whatever.

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...

I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from...

On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.

We’re going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.