A Quote by Thomas Lovejoy

Natural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work. — © Thomas Lovejoy
Natural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work.

Quote Author

Thomas Lovejoy
Born: 1941
Natural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work. Genetic engineers don't make new genes, they rearrange existing ones. Speaking as World Wildlife Fund Executive Vice President, stating the need to conserve biodiversity, even plants and animals having no immediate use, as a unique repository of genes for possible future biogengineering applications.
Thus the genetic basis to the origin of bird species is to be sought in the inheritance of adult traits that are subject to natural and sexual selection.
The Visitors reported by contactees, abductees, and other witnesses may, in fact, be a highly advanced amphibian or reptilian culture from an extraterrestrial world, who evolved into the dominant species on their planet millions of years ago and who have interacted in Earth's evolution as explorers, observers, caretakers, and genetic engineers.
Technology frightens me to death. It's designed by engineers to impress other engineers, and they always come with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other engineers - which is why almost no technology ever works.
As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.
Civil engineers build bridges. Electrical engineers, power grids. Software engineers, apps. From the engineers who created the Great Pyramids to the engineers who are designing and developing tomorrow's autonomous vehicles, these visionaries and their tangible creations are inextricably linked.
The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
Zoologists have reckoned there are up to at least 750 species of animal that have been observed exhibiting same-sex behaviour, or gender role transformation (which is very common in a wide range of fauna). There is only one species on earth, however, which has exhibited homophobia or transphobia. And that is the species homo sapiens sapiens. Us. So let's not allow the foolish, ignorant or bigoted ever to use words like "natural."
But we must here state that we should not see anything if there were a vacuum. But this would not be due to some nature hindering species, and resisting it, but because of the lack of a nature suitable for the multiplication of species; for species is a natural thing, and therefore needs a natural medium; but in a vacuum nature does not exist.
You can imagine a different world in which a number of species developed with different genetically determined linguistic systems. It hasn't happened in evolution. What has happened is that one species has developed, and the genetic structure of this species happens to involve a variety of intricate abstract principles of linguistic organization that, therefore, necessarily constrain every language, and, in fact, create the basis for learning language as a way of organizing experience rather than constituting something learned from experience.
Genetic engineers don't make new genes, they rearrange existing ones.
The human species took a crucial step forward when its vocal musculature came under operant control in the production of speech sounds. Indeed, it is possible that all the distinctive achievements of the species can be traced to that one genetic change.
Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species.
If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.
Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.
We can do genetics. We can do experiments on fruit flies. We can do experiments on yeast. It's not so easy to do experiments on humans. So, in fact, it helps us, to interpret our own genetic code, to have the genetic code of the other species.
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