A Quote by Bill Bryson

Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.

Bill Bryson

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About Ambitious Consider Earth Just Least Organisms Visible

Quote Author

Bill Bryson
American - Writer
Born: December 8, 1951

A sound Physics of the Earth should include all the primary considerations of the earth's atmosphere, of the characteristics and continual changes of the earth's external crust, and finally of the origin and development of living organisms. These considerations naturally divide the physics of the earth into three essential parts, the first being a theory of the atmosphere, or Meteorology, the second, a theory of the earth's external crust, or Hydrogeology, and the third, a theory of living organisms, or Biology.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

You put three facts together - that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there's variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited - and the syllogistic inference is natural selection.

Stephen Jay Gould

I once found a kernel of corn in the middle of a deep wood by Walden, tucked in behind a lichen on a pine, about as high as my head, either by a crow or a squirrel. It was a mile at least from any corn-field.

Henry David Thoreau

If the organisms in a species now have trait T, and this trait now helps those organisms to survive and reproduce because the trait has effect E, a natural hypothesis to consider is that T evolved in the lineage leading to those current organisms because T had effect E. This hypothesis is "natural," but it often isn't true!

Elliott Sober

An organism exists for no other reason than that it is able to... The wonderful, almost transcendent thing about life on earth is that in order to so exist, organisms must relate to each other and to the earth itself.

Richard Mabey

In a lot of ways, if I were ambitious about anything - besides my career - I'd be ambitious about love. Ambitious in the sense that I really hope to find true love.

Sonam Kapoor

The surface of the earth is not simply a stage on which the thousands of present and past inhabitants played their parts in turn. There are much more intimate relations between the earth and the living organisms which populated it, and it may even be demonstrated that the earth was developed because of them.

Louis Agassiz

You are literally never alone. While there are roughly 6.7 billion people on Earth, you may not feel that many of them at all care very much about your existence. But within your colon alone are living at least 1012 billion organisms, or roughly a thousand times the number of people on the planet. Stop your metabolic processes, and you stop theirs.

Eliot Schrefer

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

Bacteria are single-celled organisms. Bacteria are the model organisms for everything that we know in higher organisms. There are 10 times more bacterial cells in you or on you than human cells.

Bonnie Bassler

It's one of the big mysteries about Venus: How did it get so different from Earth when it seems likely to have started so similarly? The question becomes richer when you consider astrobiology, the possibility that Venus and Earth were very similar during the time of the origin of life on Earth.

David Grinspoon

Think of it : zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another : 'My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death'. And you are one of those organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity.

Robert Wright

They talk about how men are chasers, but women are just like that too. At least a lot of the women that I know, who tend to be ambitious, professionally driven women, they love that. Like seeking something professional that is hard to get, I think they feel the same way about men.

Mindy Kaling

Sarah took a deep breath and set off along the passageway again. A clump of lichen on the gatepost opened its eyes and watched her go. The eyes, on tendrils, had an anxious look, and when she had gone some distance away the clump, swiveling its eyes toward each other, commenced to gossip among itself. Most of it disapproved of the direction she had taken. You could tell that from the way the eyes looked meaningfully into each other. Lichen knows about directions.

A.C.H. Smith

I'm really ambitious about is being a really good comic and doing it for the rest of my life and getting really big. Not really famous because I want fame or attention, just a little freedom. So, that's where I'm ambitious.