Paul Davies Quotes

You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself.

As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do on land: the great ones eat up the little ones.

The fast fish, not the big fish, eats the small fish.

If you really want to study evolution, you've got go outside sometime, because you'll see symbiosis everywhere!

Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

You think of the rainforest as this incredibly abundant place of fauna and animals and flora. This great, rich wilderness. And yet it is such a biological battlefield in which everything is competing.

That's the food chain that cricket is sometimes. You have to be at the top of it otherwise you get swept away and eaten up.

Nature clasps all her creatures in a universal embrace; there is not one of them which she has not plainly furnished with all means necessary to the conservation of its being.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

The truth is, everything is eating and being eaten.

They are unique in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life that they enclose.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.

The message is not so much that the worms will inherit the Earth, but that all things play a role in nature, even the lowly worm.

Nature is an incredible cooperative. When things operate outside of that cooperative, they die off. It's a very simple rule that nature operates under.

These are the animals that are the reason why you don't see old animals in the wild. You don't see sick animals in the wild. You don't see lame animals in the wild, and its all because of the predator: the lion, the tiger, the leopard, all the cats.

With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of life.

Because of my medical and ideological training, I am accustomed to saying that life is adaptation and symbiosis.

Manifold subsequent experience has led to a truer appreciation and a more moderate estimate of the importance of the dependence of one living being upon another.

If every human being disappeared off the face of the earth in an instant, the earth would still keep spinning and the planet would develop new life forms.

Unfortunately this earth is not a fairy-land, but a struggle for life, perfectly natural and therefore extremely harsh.

A long time ago, I became aware that many of us have a tendency to lump nature into simplistic categories, such as what we consider beautiful or ugly, important or unimportant. As human a thing as that is to do, I think it often leads us to misunderstand the respective roles of life forms and their interconnectedness.

Big fish eat little fish.

Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.