Quotes About Organisms

#1. If you look in the animal world, many, many organisms will enter into states of suspended animation.

Mark Roth

#2. DNA is the master blueprint for life and constitutes the genetic material in all free-living organisms and most viruses. RNA is the genetic material of certain viruses, but it is also found in all living cells, where it plays an important role in certain processes such as the making of proteins.

Richard J. Roberts

#3. If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about.

Thomas R. Cech

#4. We are chemosensory idiots. By comparison most other organisms are geniuses.

Edward O. Wilson

#5. Stories, like living organisms, acquire and lose traits over time.

Anonymous

#6. Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death - it's something that happens to you and those around you.

Paul Kalanithi

#7. Industries, unlike organisms, have no organic limits on their own growth; they are constantly in search of new markets, or of new ways to exploit old ones more effectively; as Karl Marx unsympathetically observed, they 'nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

Tim Wu

#8. We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.

Walter Gilbert

#9. Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast. Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol.

Kurt Vonnegut

#10. Since all organisms vary, and all reproduce themselves in greater numbers than can survive, there must always be competition between variants; in other words, the principle of natural selection, too, is universally applicable.

Charles Darwin

#11. Sometime in the first billion years, life appeared on the earth's surface. Slowly, the fossil record indicates, living organisms climbed the ladder from simple to more advanced forms.

Robert Jastrow

#12. When I see how fast technology is advancing, my mind thinks of evolution and how organisms also have to evolve or adapt in order to, in their case, survive.

Tony DiTerlizzi

#13. Chiropractic embraces the science of life, the knowledge of how organisms act in health and disease, and also the art of adjusting the neuroskeleton.

Daniel D. Palmer

#14. Life on the planet is being homogenized by the expanding human population and the frequent and rapid movement of people and goods, which carry invasive organisms with them. These invasives often flourish in their new ecosystems because, like the woolly adelgid, they have escaped their predators.

Richard Preston

#15. What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.

Richard Dawkins

#16. 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

#17. Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign.

B.V. Lawson

#18. You are not what you think you are. Instead of the form staring back at you when you look in the mirror, what you should imagine is your body as a collection of multiple dynamic ecosystems made up of very tiny, and very biologically diverse, organisms.

Rob DeSalle

#19. Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.

Stephen Jay Gould

#20. The truth is, natural organisms have managed to do everything we want to do without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet or mortgaging the future.

Janine Benyus

#21. Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality).

Stephen Jay Gould

#22. No biologist has actually seen the origin by evolution of a major group of organisms.

G. Ledyard Stebbins

#23. Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbaninzation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

Stewart Brand

#24. Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.

Zygmunt Bauman

#25. An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.

John B. S. Haldane

#26. Each organism, no matter how simple or complex, has around it a sacred bubble of space, a bit of mobile territoriality which only a few other organisms are allowed to penetrate and then only for short periods of time.

Edward Hall

#27. There is a deep interconnectedness of all life on earth, from the tiniest organisms, to the largest ecosystems, and absolutely between each person.

Bryant McGill

#28. Warming today is taking place at least ten times faster than it did at the end of the last glaciation, and at the end of all those glaciations that preceded it. To keep up, organisms will have to migrate, or otherwise adapt, at least ten times more quickly.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#29. Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases.

Paul Kalanithi

#30. For modern science, at least from a philosophical point of view, the critical divide seems to be between inanimate matter and the origin of living organisms, while for Buddhism the critical divide is between non-sentient matter and the emergence of sentient beings.

Dalai Lama XIV

#31. After a geological epoch passed in which single-celled organisms evolved into talk show hosts, Mr. Coffee was still holding out on me.

Darynda Jones

#32. Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.

Asa Gray

#33. The elementary parts of all tissues are formed of cells in an analogous, though very diversified manner, so that it may be asserted, that there is one universal principle of development for the elementary parts of organisms, however different, and that this principle is the formation of cells.

Theodor Schwann

#34. Splitting and gradual divergence of genera is exemplified very well and in a large variety of organisms.

George Gaylord Simpson

#35. We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.

Cornel West

#36. We as a culture are forgetting that we are actually natural organisms and that we have this very, very deep connection and contact with nature. You can't divorce civilization from nature - we totally depend on it.

James Balog

#37. Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don't get wiped out.

Peter Watts

#38. An atmosphere ultraviolet rays from the sun, even from a weak sun, would have tended to break apart any incipient bonds made by molecules. And yet right there" - she tapped the stromatolites - "you have organisms almost at the surface. It's a puzzle.

Bill Bryson

#39. stromatolites - a kind of living rock made by billions and billions of microscopic cyanobacteria. The tiny respirations of these organisms over millions of years largely created Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere, paving the way for more complex living things.

Bill Bryson

#40. Owing to the difficulty of dealing with substances of high molecular weight we are still a long way from having determined the chemical characteristics and the constitution of proteins, which are regarded as the principal con-stituents of living organisms.

Karl Landsteiner

#41. The naturalists of yore esteemed the ocean to be a treasury of wonders, and sought therein for monstrosities and organisms contrary to the law of nature, such as they interpreted it.

Edward Forbes

#42. Not only are mortals rotten, the very atmosphere in which we live is materially and physically rotten, swarming with maggots, with obscene appearances, poisonous minds, and foul organisms.

Antonin Artaud

#43. Words are themselves organisms, ...

Ali Smith

#44. It was a highly geared world whose nature was conflict and action, a world whose limited area and vision imperiously urged men to satisfy their organisms, a world that existed on a plane of animal sensation alone. It

Richard Wright

#45. The river moves from land to water to land, in and out of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have never forgotten: that you cannot separate the land from the water, or the people from the land.

Lynn Culbreath Noel

#46. Put simply, unlike terrestrial organisms it did not adapt to its surroundings over the course of hundreds of millions of years, so as only then to produce a rational species, but it had gained control over its environment from the start.

Stanislaw Lem

#47. We know from biology that new forms of organisms simulate their primitive form as closely as possible at first, even though obliged to exist under changed internal and external conditions.

Wilhelm, Ostwald

#48. Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel - just as fire does.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#49. We're organisms; we're conceived, we're born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living: plants and bugs and bacteria.

William M. Bass

#50. Human sign systems are in this sense extensions of the various ways in which molecules read each other, cells read enzymes, organisms read sensations, and all write upon each other.

Christopher Vitale

#51. Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.

Kevin Kelly

#52. The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

Kevin Kelly

#53. There is an inflow of vital power, which is received by all living organisms during sleep ... this vital energy is the only power by which the body may be healed, repaired, renewed or maintained

Wallace D. Wattles

#54. 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

#55. Few books I had read so directly and wholly addressed that fundamental fact of existence: all organisms, whether goldfish or grandchild, die.

Paul Kalanithi

#56. The concept of evolution postulates that living organisms have common roots, and in turn, the existence of common features is powerful support for the concept of evolution.

Hans Adolf Krebs

#57. Perhaps genes did regulate the aging process. Perhaps different organisms had different life spans because a universal regulatory 'clock' was set to run at different speeds in different species.

Cynthia Kenyon

#58. Here at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, we have genetically rearranged various viruses and bacteria as part of our medical research. In fact, we have been able to create entirely new types of DNA molecules by splicing together the genetic information from different organisms - recombinant DNA.

James D. Watson

#59. On Earth, among millions of lineages or organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence ; this makes me believe its utter improbablity.

Ernst Mayr

#60. Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

E. O. Wilson

#61. It is remarkable that the elements diffused through the host of stars are some of those most closely connected with the living organisms of our globe.

William Huggins

#62. There are many ways for organisms to probe the external world. Some smell it, others listen to it, many see it. Each species, therefore, lives in its own unique sensory world of which other species may be partially or totally unaware.

Richard Axel

#63. Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today.

Carl Sagan

#64. Insects are major players in nature's recycling effort, and in nature a corpse is simply organic matter to be recycled. Left to its own devices, nature quickly populates a corpse with a diverse community of organisms, all dedicated to reducing the body to its basic components.

M. Lee Goff

#65. All the physical and chemical laws that are known to play an important part in the life of organisms are of this statistical kind; any other kind of lawfulness and orderliness that one might think of is being perpetually disturbed and made inoperative by the unceasing heat motion of the atoms.

Erwin Schrodinger

#66. There are more living organisms in a tablespoon of highly organic soil than there are people on the planet.

Howard Warren Buffett

#67. In living organisms, nucleic acid molecules are the only indefinite hereditary replicators, or at least they were until the invention of language and music.

John Maynard Smith

#68. In humans, smell is often viewed as an aesthetic sense, as a sense capable of eliciting enduring thoughts and memories. Smell, however, is the primal sense. It is the sense that affords most organisms the ability to detect food, predators, and mates.

Richard Axel

#69. We think of ourselves as individuals, but all that we have accomplished, and all that we will accomplish, is the result of groups of humans cooperating. Those groups are organisms in their own rights.

Ramez Naam

#70. You put three facts together - that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there's variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited - and the syllogistic inference is natural selection.

Stephen Jay Gould

#71. Giant group events are distorting organisms: You can like and hate them in rapid succession.

Jerry Saltz

#72. The most serious disorders may be provoked by the injection of living organisms into the bloodinto a medium not intended for them may provoke redoubtable manifestations of the gravest morbid phenomena.

Antoine Bechamp

#73. About 3.8 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology.

Yuval Noah Harari

#74. The more closely two organisms depend upon each other the harder it becomes to tell where one organism ends and the other begins.

Chris Matakas

#75. If our society continues to support basic research on how living organisms function, it is likely that my great grandchildren will be spared the agony of losing family members to most types of cancer.

Paul D. Boyer

#76. Man, like other organisms, is so perfectly coordinated that he may easily forget, whether awake or asleep, that he is a colony of cells in action, and that it is the cells which achieve, through him, what he has the illusion of accomplishing himself.

Albert Claude

#77. Biophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists, is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.

E. O. Wilson

#78. In terms of the short-term objective [halving world hunger by 2015], the position I have always taken is that we don't need genetically modified organisms.

Jacques Diouf

#79. One of the deepest functions of a living organisms is to look ahead ... to produce future.

Francois Jacob

#80. If the aging process is controlled in a similar way in worms and humans, then we can use what we learn about worms to speed our study of higher organisms.

Cynthia Kenyon

#81. Organisms don't think of CO2 as a poison. Plants and organisms that make shells, coral, think of it as a building block.

Janine Benyus

#82. First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

Phillip E. Johnson

#83. We found evolution will punish you if you're selfish and mean. For a short time and against a specific set of opponents, some selfish organisms may come out ahead. But selfishness isn't evolutionarily sustainable.

Chris Adami

#84. Self-fertilization is a risky strategy, which is why sex is so popular among large and complex organisms.

Randall Munroe

#85. A self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is going on in our organisms.

Antonio Damasio

#86. Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals.

David Christian

#87. We need to have a paradigm shift in our consciousness. If we don't get our act together and come in commonality and understanding with the organisms that sustain us today, not only will we destroy those organisms, but we will destroy ourselves.

Paul Stamets

#88. Organisms sip energy, because they have to work or barter for every single bit that they get.

Janine Benyus

#89. In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change, and so is all-pervasive; galaxies, languages, and political systems all evolve. Biological evolution ... is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual.

Douglas J. Futuyma

#90. When considering female human beings, we should ask ourselves what kind of organisms become overjoyed when presented with decapitated plants as gifts? I suppose we should consider ourselves fortunate they do not become overjoyed when presented with decapitated animals as gifts.

Robert Black

#91. The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.

Antonio Damasio

#92. what distinguishes us from non-human organisms is that we do not simply react to biochemical impulses; we can transcend them by choosing to interpret them in particular ways.

Kevin Aho

#93. I've always been more interested in organisms that can move on their own than in stationary plants. But when I canoe or hike along the edge of lakes or oceans and see trees that seem to be growing out of rock faces, I am blown away. How do they do it?

David Suzuki

#94. Most people believe that aging is universal but there are biological organisms that never age.

Deepak Chopra

#95. Your mistake," Ng says, "is that you think that all mechanically assisted
organisms
like me
are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we
were before.

Neal Stephenson

#96. The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.

Vladimir Nabokov

#97. In nature's cyclical rhythms, there are no grounds for the discriminatory view that underlies Darwin's view of superiority and inferiority that deems single-celled organisms as lower, and more complicated life forms as higher. It would be more appropriate to say we are all one continuous life-form.

Masanobu Fukuoka

#98. You can't teach biology with a bottle containing dead animals and organisms.

Roman Vishniac

#99. Two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life. They lived, they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn't show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging level of existence.

Bill Bryson

#100. We are sliding back into a dark era, and there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.

Nina Fedoroff