Top 100 Quotes About Organisms
#1. The discovery of streptomycin as a product of a rather obscure group of microorganisms, the actinomycetes, led to the study of these organisms as potential producers of other chemotherapeutic substances.
Selman Waksman
#2. There are more organisms living on the skin of a single human than there are humans living on earth * * * There are more living organisms in a teaspoonful of soil than there are people alive on Earth * * *
Tasnim Essack
#3. The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.
Ilya Prigogine
#4. The incredible new medical technology has made it possible for highly disciplined teams of surgeons ... to keep stricken organisms alive even if the brain is irretrievably damaged or lung and heart incapable of functioning without mechanical help. Now it is not dust to dust, but human to vegetable.
Marya Mannes
#5. Darwinists are right to say that selection favours the organisms that leave alive the most progeny, but vigorous growth takes place within a constrained space where feedback from the environment allows the emergence of natural self-regulation.
James E. Lovelock
#6. The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.
Jeremy Rifkin
#7. Jumping genes are fundamental because they're agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn - called Indian corn - that you buy in the fall.
Nina Fedoroff
#8. The living environment is the biosphere, the thin layer around the world of living organisms. We're part of that. Our existence is dependent on it in ways that people haven't even begun to appreciate. Our existence depends not just on its existence, but its stability and its richness.
E. O. Wilson
#9. In their "deep" objectives - in what they evolved to do - humans are not qualitatively different from other living organisms. Like other living things, they evolved to get and use resources to survive and enhance the spread of their genes.
Bobbi S. Low
#10. All living things must grow or they will die. Adaptation to change is a characteristic of all living systems. Thus, all living things must grow, adapt, evolve, or die. Evolution is nature's creative way of pushing living organisms to higher degrees of complexity. We adapt up, not compromise down.
Alvin Conway
#11. The investigation into the possible effects of cosmic rays on living organisms will also offer great interest.
Victor Francis Hess
#12. Neighborhoods and communities are complex organisms that will be resilient only if they are healthy along a number of interrelated dimensions, much as a human body cannot be healthy without adequate air, water, rest, and food.
Ben Bernanke
#13. Digital organisms, while not necessarily any more alive than a phone book, are strings of code that replicate and evolve over time. Digital codes are strings of binary digits - bits.
George Dyson
#15. 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
#16. We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis. Our genomes are catalogues of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature, filed for all kinds of contingencies.
Lewis Thomas
#17. It is man's unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#18. Pumpkins are the only living organisms with triangle eyes.
Harland Williams
#19. Recently a piece of Martian rock has been recovered from Antarctica. NASA has discovered fossils of bacteria-like organisms on this rock, suggesting that life could have come on earth from outer space.
Girish Chandra
#20. We are in fact living organisms that exist in a living universe
L.J. Vanier
#21. We are able to breathe, drink, and eat in comfort because millions of organisms and hundreds of processes are operating to maintain a liveable environment, but we tend to take nature's services for granted because we don't pay money for most of them.
Eugene Odum
#22. Scientific naturalism is a story that reduces reality to physical particles and impersonal laws, [and] portrays life as a meaningless competition among organisms that exist only to survive and reproduce.
Philip Johnson
#23. Studying organisms at a molecular level was totally compelling because it was moving from being a naturalist, which was the 19th-century kind of science, to being very focused and really getting to the heart of these molecules.
Elizabeth Blackburn
#24. The principal result of my investigation is that a uniform developmental principle controls the individual elementary units of all organisms, analogous to the finding that crystals are formed by the same laws in spite of the diversity of their forms.
Theodor Schwann
#25. Unlike the clonal longevity of asexual organisms, sexually reproduced plants and animals usually have briefer, individual life cycles. In short, the enormous diversity afforded by the evolutionary invention of sexual reproduction came with a price - death of the individual.
Richard J. Borden
#26. Human beings are not meant to live alone. There is a fundamental biological imperative that propels you and every organism on this planet to be in a community, to be in relationship with other organisms.
Bruce H. Lipton
#27. Toshiaki learned that all living organisms were governed by their DNA. He was impressed by perfection of this system.Why did existence have the ability to design such a beautiful code? And how could such a simple structure account for endless diversity of life forms?
Hideaki Sena
#28. We are nothing more than a dot amongst the billions of organisms on the Hillis plot
Soroosh Shahrivar
#29. Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady.
Sylvia Earle
#30. As a Talmudic saying goes, over every blade of grass an angel whispers, "Grow, grow!" Living organisms and living faiths must grow, or die!
Bruce Epperly
#31. Wind snapped at me, warm and fragrant. The atmosphere was thick with pollen and micro-organisms, goading my body's ancient defences.
Alastair Reynolds
#32. Animals are not property or "things" but rather living organisms, subjects of a life, who are worthy of our compassion, respect, friendship, and support.
Marc Bekoff
#33. History is a treadmill turned by rising human numbers. Today GM crops are being marketed as the only means of avoiding mass starvation. They are unlikely to improve the lives of peasant farmers ; but they may well enable them to survive in greater numbers.
John Gray
#34. Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#35. As some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.
Charles Darwin
#36. By providing safe nesting sites, woodpeckers are thus keystone organisms for a vast assemblage of birds the world over, including many owls, parrots, parids, flycatchers.
Bernd Heinrich
#37. In today's vastly expanded scientific enterprise, obsessed with impact factors and competition, we will need much more night science to unveil the many mysteries that remain about the workings of organisms.
Francois Jacob
#38. If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.
Andrew H. Knoll
#39. Beespittle, droppings, hairs
of beefur: all become honey.
Virulent micro-organisms cannot
survive in honey.
Denise Levertov
#40. Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers.
John Tooby
#41. Organisms are themselves expressions of ... emergent order and agents of higher levels of emergence.
Brian Goodwin
#42. Organisms in the ocean provide over 40 percent of the oxygen we breathe, and they're the major sink for capturing all the carbon dioxide we constantly release into the atmosphere.
Craig Venter
#43. Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.
George C. Williams
#44. The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins.
Neal Stephenson
#45. Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included ... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a Gigantic project.
Joseph Beuys
#46. Sometimes, when I'm alone, I wonder if it really counts as being alone, since I am covered in millions of other living organisms.
Travis J. Dahnke
#47. If you came from the future and you arrived here, what would you be like? Would your immune system be depressed from that travel? Would you be well? Would you be ill? Would you be affected by micro-organisms of the time period and be hiding out in a basement? How would it all work, practically?
Brit Marling
#48. Out of trillions of organisms that were alive at the beginning of time, are alive now and will be alive at the end of time, only one tampers with its food. You do not want to bet against those kinds of odds.
David Wolfe
#49. The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me, Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it's a woman who's extremely vain.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#50. Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#51. We're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. So we're the amoebas.
Danny Hillis
#52. Beautiful buildings are more than scientific. They are true organisms, spiritually conceived; works of art, using the best technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or any averaging by the committee mind.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#53. 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
#54. Deception and 'con games' are a way of life in all species and throughout nature. Organisms that do not improve their ability to deceive - and to detect deception - are less apt to survive.
Harriet Lerner
#55. The entire evolutionary record on our planet, particularly the record contained in fossil endocasts, illustrates a progressive tendency toward intelligence. There is nothing mysterious about this:
smart organisms by and large survive better and leave more offspring than stupid ones.
Carl Sagan
#56. Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time.
Steven Pinker
#57. 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
#58. Human beings are organisms that have always required both beliefs and knowledge.
Rebecca D. Costa
#59. There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#60. The fossil record contains no trace of these preliminary stages in the development of many-celled organisms.
Robert Jastrow
#61. Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.
Steven Pinker
#62. Each species is a masterpiece of evolution that humanity could not possibly duplicate even if we somehow accomplish the creation of new organisms by genetic engineering. - E. O. Wilson
Jerry A. Coyne
#63. Sean was stung. "I do not fuck everything that has a pulse," he said haughtily. "I have my standards. I limit myself to endoskeletal organisms. I always go for vertebrates. And I dont't do reptiles. Ever.
Shannon McKenna
#64. Trying to understand fundamental processes that take place as organisms develop and how their various cells interact with one another - one can see what happens with those cells by asking questions about the fundamentals of biology.
Martin Chalfie
#65. It is probably fair to estimate the frequency of a majority of mutations, in higher organisms, between one in ten thousand and one in a million per gene per generation.
Francisco J. Ayala
#66. A permanent base on Mars would have a number of advantages beyond being a bonanza for planetary science and geology. If, as some evidence suggests, exotic micro-organisms have arisen independently of terrestrial life, studying them could revolutionise biology, medicine and biotechnology.
Paul Davies
#67. Most organisms either adapt and become part of the system, or get wiped out. The only thing we have to adapt to the system with is our brain. If we don't use it, and we don't adapt fast enough, we won't survive.
George Lucas
#68. People are not the only interesting organism on earth. From the point of view of scientific or commercial value, there are lots of interesting organisms.
Daniel Nathans
#69. Without programmed cell death, the bonds that bind cells in complex multicellular organisms might never have evolved.
Nick Lane
#70. No practical biologist interested in sexual reproduction would be led to work out the detailed consequences experienced by organisms having three or more sexes; yet what else should he do if he wishes to understand why the sexes are, in fact, always two?
Ronald Fisher
#71. Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.
Kevin Kelly
#73. The idea was to study fertilization in as many different phyla and organisms as possible, using the simplest possible equipment and a microscope. Biochemical approaches were not much in vogue, and running gels impossible at first.
Tim Hunt
#74. Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.
James Lovelock
#75. I love it when people lie! Lying is only man's privilege over all other organisms. Lying is what makes me a man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#76. All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.
Stephen Jay Gould
#77. For other organisms, bumbling along from here to nowhere is well managed. For us, it is a messy business and often intolerably horrific. To end all this paradox and horror [...] we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.
Thomas Ligotti
#78. Most organisms have loads of junk DNA - less pejoratively, noncoding DNA - cluttering their cells.
Sam Kean
#79. The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change.
Ronald Fisher
#80. It will be impossible for us to maintain the health of the organism called the earth unless we feel and care for other organisms as we do for ourselves - and unless we take action.
Ilchi Lee
#81. My Calvinism persuades me that we are open to God, in the sense that we are not delimited, not organisms with fixed attributes in the manner of the other creatures, but are instead participants in a reality that utterly exceeds our powers of description.
Marilynne Robinson
#82. I have found the study of organisms to be a truly exciting experience, always interesting and sometimes humbling.
Edward T. Hall
#83. Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
Bill Bryson
#84. For their size, crows are among the brainiest organisms on Earth, outclassing not only other birds (with the possible exception of parrots), but also most mammals.
Candace Savage
#85. Bacteria are single-celled organisms. Bacteria are the model organisms for everything that we know in higher organisms. There are 10 times more bacterial cells in you or on you than human cells.
Bonnie Bassler
#86. You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. But you should know that this is current scientific dogma, and that it is changing our world beyond recognition.
Yuval Noah Harari
#87. We are evolutionary descendents of this marvellous panoply of life. And what that says unequivocally is we have an utter total obligation to make sure we have an environment that not only is good for us but is good for all living organisms.
Leroy Hood
#88. Like all limestones, the famous White Cliffs of Dover, on England's south coast, are made from numberless trillions of tiny marine organisms compressed over time into stone, and exist now as huge reservoirs of carbon. (credit 17.13)
Bill Bryson
#89. Living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity
Leslie Orgel
#90. The organism has one basic tendency and striving - to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism
Carl Rogers
#91. Global climate change has become entangled with the problem of invasive species. A warmer climate could allow some invaders to spread farther, while causing native organisms to go extinct in their traditional habitats and making room for invaders.
Richard Preston
#92. Any attempt to reduce the complex properties of biological organisms or of nervous systems or of human brains to simple physical and chemical systems is foolish.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#93. It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.
Kevin Kelly
#94. Techniques such as genetic engineering, psychoactive drugs and electronic control of the brain make possible a transformation of the species into docile, fully-obedient, 'safe' organisms.
William Sims
#95. In seeking to avoid evil, humanity is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is our ingenuity, rather than our animal nature, that has given our fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.
Ernest Becker
#96. You cannot be other than selfish, for you cannot observe, perceive, or be other than from your perspective of self. All points of Consciousness, even one-celled organisms, perceive. And they do so from the ever-changing selfish perspective that they currently hold.
Esther Hicks
#97. Consciousness is the chronic pain of life, and all higher organisms suffer it every waking moment.
David Marusek
#98. When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is that when a man's body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims.
G.K. Chesterton
#99. It's fair to say when you go out and walk in the woods or on a beach, the most conspicuous forms of life you will see are plants and animals, and certainly there's a huge diversity of those types of organisms, perhaps 10 million animal species and several hundred thousand plant species.
Andrew H. Knoll
#100. Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death.
Paul Stamets
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