A Quote by Francis Maitland Balfour

Why it is that animals, instead of developing in a simple and straightforward way, undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they often acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace ... To the Darwinian, the explanation of such facts is obvious. The stage when the tadpole breathes by gills is a repetition of the stage when the ancestors of the frog had not advanced in the scale of development beyond a fish.

Francis Maitland Balfour

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Acquire Advanced After Ancestors Animals Beyond Changes Complicated Course Developing Development Disappear Explanation Facts Fish Frog Function Growth Had Instead Leaving Obvious Often Organs Remaining Repetition Scale Series Short Short Time Simple Stage Straightforward Time Trace Undergo Visible Way Which Why Without

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Francis Maitland Balfour
November 10, 1851 - July 19, 1882

Within one year of starting work, I had found that the nucleus of an endoderm cell from an advanced tadpole was able to yield some normal development up to the nuclear transplant tadpole stage.

John Gurdon

I always say that I've grown little flaps on a stage and I've got these little gills that open, because on the stage I'm in my element and I'm like a fish that's come out when I'm on land, which is filming. I'm never quite as comfortable as I am on the stage.

Rosemary Harris

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but that which is based on observed facts. This is incontestable, in our present advanced stage; but, if we look back to the primitive stage of human knowledge, we shall see that it must have been otherwise then. If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts; it is equally true that facts can not be observed without the guidance of some theory. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part we could not even perceive them.

Auguste Comte

Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one's development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.

Kazuo Ishiguro

It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

Richard P. Feynman

The tadpole poet will never grow into anything bigger than a frog; not though in that stage of development he should puff and blow himself till he bursts with windy adulation at the heels of the laureled ox.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

After having produced aquatic animals of all ranks and having caused extensive variations in them by the different environments provided by the waters, nature led them little by little to the habit of living in the air, first by the water's edge and afterwards on all the dry parts of the globe. These animals have in course of time been profoundly altered by such novel conditions; which so greatly influenced their habits and organs that the regular gradation which they should have exhibited in complexity of organisation is often scarcely recognisable.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.

Anais Nin

Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.

Terence McKenna

I think more obvious to others, is that I'm most vulnerable on stage. Even though I know which songs I'm going to play, I try and keep it loose and base my stage time more on what the audience is requesting of me.

Jason Mraz

If you're doing something on an interesting scale that involves an entire universe of characters, one way to unite them is to have them all undergo a common experience, and there is something at Christmas that unites everybody. It already sets a stage within the stage.

Shane Black

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 in which its ancestors lived that have in the course of time fashioned its bodily form, its organs and qualities.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

Galileo Galilei

The positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance....Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism.

William A. Dembski

The development of the Vertebrate proceeds from an axis upward, in two layers, which coalesce at the edges, and also downward, in two layers, which likewise coalesce at the edges. Thus two main tubes are formed, one above the other. During the formation of these, the embryo separates into strata, so that the two main tubes are composed of subordinate tubes which enclose each other as fundamental organs, and are capable of developing into all the organs.

Karl Ernst von Baer

God had given men reason, by which they could find out things for themselves, but He had given animals knowledge which did not depend on reason, and which was much more prompt and perfect in its way, and by which they had often saved the lives of men.

Anna Sewell

A Quote by Francis Maitland Balfour

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