A Quote by Marston Bates

One dictionary that I consulted remarks that "natural history" now commonly means the study of animals and plants "in a popular and superficial way," meaning popular and superficial to be equally damning adjectives. This is related to the current tendency in the biological sciences to label every subdivision of science with a name derived from the Greek. "Ecology" is erudite and profound; while "natural history" is popular and superficial. Though, as far as I can see, both labels apply to just about the same package of goods.

Marston Bates

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About Adjectives Animals Apply As Far As Biological Biological Science Both Commonly Current Derived Dictionary Ecology Equally Erudite Every Far Goods Greek History Just Label Labels Meaning Means Name Natural Natural History Now Package Plants Popular Profound Related Remarks Same Science Sciences See Study Superficial Tendency Though Way While

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Marston Bates
American - Author
July 23, 1906 - April 3, 1974

My background is that I've spent a lot of time marketing entertainment. One of the old saws in package goods is you can take something that is popular and you can make it more popular. But if you take something less popular, you can't automatically market it into the same success as something that's already popular.

Fred Seibert

Natural history is not equivalent to biology. Biology is the study of life. Natural history is the study of animals and plants-of organisms. Biology thus includes natural history, and much else besides.

Marston Bates

Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.

Henry David Thoreau

I just don't care about popular culture. It looks to me pointless and superficial. If I had free time I'd rather read a 19th century novel.

Noam Chomsky

There is this looking at the world as shapes and patterns and colors that have meaning, and you can't deny the superficial because the superficial is what meets the eye.

Wolfgang Tillmans

We are all human, and caring about the way something looks and feels does not mean we're superficial--it means we're human. We don't need to exploit sex to recognize that a certain amount of sexiness is both pleasurable and natural.

Kathy Sierra

The philosophy that I have worked under most of my life is that the serious study of natural history is an activity which has far-reaching effects in every aspect of a person's life. It ultimately makes people protective of the environment in a very committed way. It is my opinion that the study of natural history should be the primary avenue for creating environmentalists.

Roger Tory Peterson

In analysing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The selfsame procedure which zoology, a branch of the natural sciences, applies to the study of animals, anthropology must apply to the study of man; and by doing so, it enrolls itself as a science in the field of nature.

Maria Montessori

The first half of 'Book Reports' deals with the history of popular music and rock criticism. When I hooked all those historical pieces together, building on the minstrelsy piece, it became my history of popular music.

Robert Christgau

'Hollywood Don't Surf!' is really about how Hollywood's superficial view of surfing culture has influenced popular culture and the story of what happened when real surfers tried to change that.

Greg MacGillivray

You see, deep down beneath my superficial and shallow exterior, I'm really very superficial and shallow.

Ian Kelsey

I don't have time for superficial friends. I suppose if you're really lonely you can call a superficial friend, but otherwise, what's the point?

Courteney Cox

There is this looking at the world as shapes and patterns and colors that have meaning, and you can't deny the superficial because the superficial is what meets the eye. The content can never be disconnected from the surface, and this active interest in surface can never be disregarded from the good art that we admire.

Wolfgang Tillmans

I just think that if we stopped playing on the superficial level and concentrated on women in real crises throughout the world, it would be a better thing if we all stood together about the important stuff and stopped getting distracted by superficial things.

Natalie Dormer

Almost everyone... seems to be quite sure that the differences between the methodologies of history and of the natural sciences are vast. For, we are assured, it is well known that in the natural sciences we start from observation and proceed by induction to theory. And is it not obvious that in history we proceed very differently? Yes, I agree that we proceed very differently. But we do so in the natural sciences as well.

Karl Popper

A Quote by Marston Bates

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