Quotes About Biologists

#1. Cartoons are like fruit flies. Biologists use fruit flies because their large chromosomes and short life cycle make them ideal for studying hereditary changes.

Robert Mankoff

#2. If there were biologists among the extremophiles organisms that live in extreme conditions, they would surely classify themselves as normal and any life that thrived in room temperature as an extremophile.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#3. On a cooler sun on a primordial earth:
I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'
because we has a dim sun.

Bill Bryson

#4. Deconstructing the concept of race not only conflicts with people's tendency to classify and build family histories according to common descent but also ignores the work of biologists studying non-human species.

J. Philippe Rushton

#5. For what it's worth, in my experience astronomers are more likely than biologists to be believers. But several surveys, more scientific than my anecdotal experiences, have confirmed that in academic settings, the real atheists are to be found in English Literature departments.

Guy Consolmagno

#6. I have always felt sympathy towards the biologists who accept to debate creationists. Now I also understand them better; one can fight opinions, not articles of faith.

Bertrand Meyer

#7. Publicly and among themselves biologists rightly celebrate the diversity of life on Earth ... At the end of the day, however, their confession is heard by no one: they work with a single scientific sample-life on Earth.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#8. In the following years, as the molecular biologists consolidated their political power, their agenda would expand and increasingly prevail; and the needs of the public would continue to be compromised.

Steven Druker

#9. Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.

E. O. Wilson

#10. Most biologists, (says Vogel, 1981) seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region.

Bill Mollison

#11. About the only things that are unique to Earth are our biota and our culture. If aliens ever come here, they'd most likely be either biologists or music fans. Neither one has much reason to antagonize our armed forces.

Seth Shostak

#12. Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians.

H.G.Wells

#13. Feminism differs from reform of any kind, even franchise reform. Feminists, I should say, are not reformers at all, but ratherintellectual biologists and psychologists.

Rheta Childe Dorr

#14. Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians

Russ Rymer

#15. Love-that which biologists, nervous about being misunderstood call "attachment"-fuels the bond between dog and master or mistress.

John Bradshaw

#16. You need some reason why Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn in the 18th century all flocked to Vienna. What was it about Vienna? They must have known on some level that that is where they would flourish. It's what biologists call "selective migration."

Eric Weiner

#17. When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success.

Robin Marantz Henig

#18. Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know the Darwinian theory is just a story, not a scientific explanation.

Phillip E. Johnson

#19. I have a theory that evolutionary biologists are more vain than particle physicists.

Robin Ince

#20. In an age of molecular genomics, it is ever more apparent that the fingerprints of evolution are pressed deeply into human DNA, just as they are into the genomes of every other organism. Biologists understand this, and so do students who study the science of life.

Kenneth R. Miller

#21. Until 1930 or thereabout biologists [using microscopes], in the situation of Astronomers and Astrophysicists, were permitted to see the objects of their interest, but not to touch them; the cell was as distant from us, as the stars and galaxies were from them.

Albert Claude

#22. Biologists have an adolescent fascination with sex. Like teenagers they are embarrassed by the subject because of their ignorance.

Steve Jones

#23. Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing.

George Wald

#24. I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.

John B. S. Haldane

#25. Evolution is among the most well-established theories in the scientific community. To doubt it sounds to biologists as absurd as denying relativity does to physicists.

Leonard Mlodinow

#26. When I went to Amazonia, l went as the field doctor for biologists studying crocodile behavior. There's no way humans should have any encounters with crocodiles. You should stay away from them!

Kenneth Kamler

#27. 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.

Michael Denton

#28. Evolution has long been badly taught. In particular, students - and even professional biologists - acquire theories of evolution without any deep understanding of what problem these theories attempt to solve. They learn but little of the evolution of evolutionary theory.

Gregory Bateson

#29. Throughout the past century there has always existed a significant minority of first-rate biologists who have never been able to bring themselves to accept the validity of Darwinian claims. In fact, the number of biologists who have expressed some degree of disillusionment is practically endless.

Michael Denton

#30. Biologists will teach us that the survival of the species depends on cooperation, not competition.

Robert Holden

#31. Biologists can be divided into two classes: experimentalists who observe things that cannot be explained, and theoreticians who explain things that cannot be observed.

Aharon Katzir

#32. All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence ... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

Stephen Jay Gould

#33. at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia, where wild bottlenoses are regularly fed fish by people standing in the shallows, biologists have documented - on twenty-three occasions - the dolphins reciprocating, swimming up to offer freshly caught tuna, eels, and octopi as gifts.

Susan Casey

#34. ...quantum problems unseat many classical ideas about matter, causality, and change that biologists use, and that disruption in turn entails radical revisions to the ideas about the mechanism in evolution, in ways we don't yet acknowledge.

Ashish Dalela

#35. You may be guided by the unending effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to describe that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so essential to the human condition, but all the search engines in the universe cannot compete with the first kiss.

Tom Brokaw

#36. If you're a conservation biologist in many fields, you're seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they're chronicling radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#37. Natural selection rendered evolution scientifically intelligible: it was this more than anything else which convinced professional biologists like Sir Joseph Hooker, T. H. Huxley and Ernst Haeckel.

Charles Darwin

#38. I decided to pursue graduate study in molecular biology and was accepted by Professor Itaru Watanabe's laboratory at the Institute for Virus Research at the University of Kyoto, one of a few laboratories in Japan where U.S.-trained molecular biologists were actively engaged in research.

Susumu Tonegawa

#39. Evolutionary biologists tell us we have a "negativity bias" that makes our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. So when we're feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease.

Sharon Salzberg

#40. Biologists have determined brookies to be indicators of ecosystem health and have been recently campaigning to get the word out. If brookies inhabit a stream, the odds are good that the waterway is in excellent condition.

Joseph Monninger

#41. For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline - biology - to the design table. It's not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now.

Janine Benyus

#42. I think that we scientists are seeking an understanding of the natural world. We come in various types - chemists and physicists and biologists and such - and we all have the same goal. We are making progress.

Sheldon Lee Glashow

#43. The question of historicity and actuality with regard to gods and unicorns is a relatively trifling matter which may be left to antiquarians and biologists, for both the god and the unicorn had a business to perform greater than any mere existence in the flesh could explain or provide a basis for.

Odell Shepard

#44. In mathematics we find the primitive source of rationality; and to mathematics must the biologists resort for means to carry out their researches.

Auguste Comte

#45. I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

Margaret Atwood

#46. Only a minority of biologists today hold that the variation of evolution cannot be random. In this point the minority are on more solid ground than the majority. If we want to gain a true insight into evolution, we must look to nonrandom variation.

Lee Spetner

#47. A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells ... and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers.

Tony Hoare

#48. Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.

David Christian

#49. Biologists summarize these hypothalamic duties as the "four F's" of animal behavior - feeding, fleeing, fighting, and, well, sexual congress.

Sam Kean

#50. I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#51. By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent - what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#52. All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years.

Richard Dawkins

#53. As biologists, we contemplate with admiration and awe the wondrous array of sophisticated cell interactions and recognitions evolved in the T cell immune system, which must be a model for other similarly complex biological systems of highly differentiated organisms.

Baruj Benacerraf

#54. As mechanistic biologists, we are hoping that by understanding how the virus works at the molecular level, we will be able to predict with more accuracy how it will evolve.

Jennifer Doudna

#55. I thought this couldn't happen in astronomy. Isn't celestial mechanics supposed to be an exact science? So we poor backward biologists were always being told.

Arthur C. Clarke

#56. Enzymologists usually study the initial rates of reactions measuring product formation as a function of substrate concentration or other variable. Cell biologists are more likely to want to know the effect of a change on the steady state behavior of a complex system.

Irwin Rose

#57. The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore's just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.

Freeman Dyson

#58. It is an occupational risk of biologists to claim, towards the end of their careers, that the problems which they have not solved are insoluble.

John Maynard Smith

#59. The monopoly of science in the realm of knowledge explains why evolutionary biologists do not find it meaningful to address the question whether the Darwinian theory is true.

Phillip E. Johnson

#60. To be with another scientist and make a discovery and share that with a global audience, or working with bear biologists in Alaska, by helicopter - [it's] really what I've given my whole life to. And I get to do that just about every week.

Jeff Corwin

#61. Like no other science, astrophysics cross-pollinate s the expertise of chemists, biologists, geologists and physicists, all to discover the past, present, and future of the cosmos-and our humble place within it.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#62. Frogs will eat red-flannel worms fed to them by biologists; this proves a great deal about both parties concerned.

Will Cuppy

#63. Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.

Steven Pinker

#64. Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that.

Jonathan Miller

#65. My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.

Steven Pinker

#66. There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble.

Richard P. Feynman

#67. Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

Francis Crick

#68. Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology.

Trofim Lysenko

#69. Like all biologists I simply acknowledge the gravity of the current situation. There are scenarios under which things work out well and to that extent I'm a cautious optimist.

Richard Lewontin

#70. I am of course getting angry if biologists try to use the general concept 'chance' in order to explain phenomena which are so typical for living organisms as, for instance, those appearing in the biological evolution.

Wolfgang Paul

#71. The most dangerous cancer cells are actually the ones that are more like stem cells, which have this ability to produce themselves over and over again. More and more cancer biologists say stem-cell-like cells in cancers are the most dangerous.

Elizabeth Blackburn

#72. Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place.

Phillip E. Johnson

#73. That many biologists were bound to get themselves into trouble sooner or later. If you've ever been to an Ichs and Herps meeting, you know it was going to be the herpetologists who got there first.

Joe Roman

#74. Man is not made for space. But with the help of biologists and medical doctors, he can be prepared and accommodated.

Wernher Von Braun

#75. A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.

Jacob M. Appel

#76. But I am not those people. I am just the biologist; I don't require any of this to have a deeper meaning.

Jeff VanderMeer