Top 1200 Evolutionary Biology Quotes & Sayings

Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.

I don't believe, for instance, that evolutionary biology or any scientific endeavor has much to say about love. I'm sure a lot can be learned about the importance of hormones and their effects on our feelings. But do the bleak implications of evolution have any impact on the love I feel for my family? Do they make me more likely to break the law of flaunt society's expectations of me? No. I simply does not follow that human relationships are meaningless just because we live in a godless universe subject to the natural laws of biology.

Evolutionary biology is crazy because sometimes it seems anybody can draw any conclusion they want.

Scientific practice is above all a story-telling practice. ... Biology is inherently historical, and its form of discourse is inherently narrative. ... Biology as a way of knowing the world is kin to Romantic literature, with its discourse about organic form and function. Biology is the fiction appropriate to objects called organisms; biology fashions the facts "discovered" about organic beings.

"Tiger is a natural kind" and "Tiger is a historical particular" are incompatible with each other, and evolutionary biology provides a reason for favoring the latter over the former.

Evolution makes biology make sense. And if you don't teach your students the evolutionary core of biology, you're making it harder for them.

In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!

Paleontologist Niles Eldredge, a prominent evolutionist, said: 'The doubt that has infiltrated the previous, smugly confident certitude of evolutionary biology’s last twenty years has inflamed passions.' He spoke of the 'lack of total agreement even within the warring camps,' and added, 'things really are in an uproar these days . . . Sometimes it seems as though there are as many variations on each [evolutionary] theme as there are individual biologists.'

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.

My fascination is broadly with biology and the fact that our increased understanding of biology allows for breakthroughs in a broad set of diseases.

We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things.

I disagree with those who argue that evolutionary biology and the existence of God are incompatible.

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

The hold of the evolutionary paradigm is so powerful that an idea which is more like a principle of medieval astrology than a serious twentieth century scientific theory has become a reality for evolutionary biologists.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans experienced evolutionary benefits from brain developments that included aversion to loss and risk and from instincts for cooperation that helped strengthen communities.

The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.

Are we biology or God or something higher? I know my heart beats and I listen to it. The beat is biology, but what is the song?

Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.

The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable - it was the birth of molecular biology.

If it is true that an influx of doubt and uncertainty actually marks periods of healthy growth in a science, then evolutionary biology is flourishing today as it seldom has flourished in the past. For biologists collectively are less agreed upon the details of evolutionary mechanics than they were a scant decade ago. Superficially, it seems as if we know less about evolution than we did in 1959, the centennial year of Darwin's on the Origin of Species.

This is not to deny that there are versions of theism that do conflict with evolutionary biology. Young Earth Creationism is an example; it claims that God created life on earth within the past 10,000 to 50,000 years. But other types of theism are different.

Despite the fact that human beings think that they have escaped the evolutionary paradigm, they've done nothing of the kind, and so we should expect the belief systems that people hold to mirror the evolutionary interests that people have.

The more evolutionary theory gets called an atheistic theory, the greater the risk that it will lose its place in public school biology courses in the United States. If the theory is thought of in this way, one should not be surprised if a judge at some point decides that teaching evolutionary theory violates the Constitutional principle of neutrality with respect to religion.

Instead of studying what biology has already made, we have to imagine what biology could make. You can say, 'Oh, I want a cure for cancer,' but that doesn't tell you what evolutionary pathway will take you from here to there. What are the intermediate steps?

The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.

If belief in evolution is a requirement to be a real scientist, it’s interesting to consider a quote from Dr. Marc Kirschner, founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School: “In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.

To be honest, what I struggled with in my degree is what's so helpful when it comes to social media in that I lack focus. I'll start reading about evolutionary biology and end up on quantum physics. While that makes writing your dissertation very difficult, for a page like IFLS, that's amazing because I get a wide range of everything.

Philosophers of biology generally recognize that evolutionary fitness (roughly, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment) is multiply realizable.

The thing that upsets me is the ubiquitous use of reward technology, which uses our evolutionary biology against us.

In the past, biology has been a backwater type of activity - a bunch of nerds in a lab. Now the sheer potential of biology to re-program our physical world is a new reality for everyone.

Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology.

Now we see evolutionary trends in a variety of areas ranging from atomic and molecular physics through fluid mechanics, chemistry and biology to large scale systems of relevance in environmental and economic sciences

Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.

Evolutionary biology is genuinely scientific, but more than that it opens the door to a world more marvellous than any Christian fundamentalist has ever read into the pages of the Bible.

What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.

Ever since Darwin, we've been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.

You can always find an evolutionary quotation for anything. But the question is whether it's functional, which is not the same as being evolutionary.

There's a lot of evidence in evolutionary sciences that show that altruism and acting in ways that are empathetic to others are actually beneficial on an evolutionary basis.

What I want to do is demonstrate that biology can learn how to make a vast array of molecules that people thought were outside the realm of biology.

My undergraduate, I double-majored in biology and chemistry. Biology was kind of my love.

If I want to know how we learn and remember and represent the world, I will go to psychology and neuroscience. If I want to know where values come from, I will go to evolutionary biology and neuroscience and psychology, just as Aristotle and Hume would have, were they alive.

I have a B.S. in Biology from MIT, an M.Sc. in Human Biology and a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Oxford University, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. I never intended for so many degrees, but I enjoyed getting them all.

It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place.

It will be in the convergence of evolutionary biology, developmental biology and cancer biology that the answer to cancer will lie. Nor will this confluence be a one-way street.

What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.

Our task now is to resynthesize biology; put the organism back into its environment; connect it again to its evolutionary past; and let us feel that complex flow that is organism, evolution, and environment united. The time has come for biology to enter the nonlinear world.

Biology can be divided into the study of proximate causes, the study of the physiological sciences (broadly conceived), and into the study of ultimate (evolutionary) causes, the subject of natural history.

In the fight between biology and morality, biology has commonly won in the end.

I don't think biology is replacing the feeling experienced through art. Biology is capable of giving additional insights. It's a parallel, not a substitutive process.

I don't endorse deism or interventionist theism. My point is just that evolutionary biology is logically compatible with the former and with some versions of the latter.

Whether it's in an inner-city school or a rural community, I want those students to have a chance to take A.P. biology and A.P. physics and marine biology.

People are always invoking evolutionary psychology for everything. "Why do men hang around asking women out? Oh, to improve their reproductive success," every damn thing - religion, art - it can all be explained by evolutionary psychology. But in our hearts we know that evolutionary psychology is only sort of accurate, because it really doesn't capture what's most interesting about our lives.

I remember my first lecture on my first day in evolutionary biology, how populations and species change. I sat thinking, 'Why doesn't everyone know this?' I look back on it almost in horror: I came so close to not knowing how exciting our world is.

The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology.

So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.

Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.

Instead of fighting the ego, I align with the evolutionary impulse and I ask myself: What does the evolutionary impulse wants to say or do through me?

Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology.

I took biology in high school and didn't like it at all. It was focused on memorization. ... I didn't appreciate that biology also had principles and logic ... [rather than dealing with a] messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense. I wish I had learned sooner that biology could be fun as well.