John Lawson Quotes

It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized.

A race is what zoologists term a variety or subdivision of a species.

The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.

I got interested in palaeontology and vertebrate history - sparked by books on human evolution - then vertebrate evolution. Studying with palaeontologists kindled my interest in fieldwork.

I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

My name is not 'William Shatner.'

I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.

I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.

It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.

In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It's the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It's also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields.

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.

Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.

The first step in wisdom is to know the things themselves; this notion consists in having a true idea of the objects; objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate names. Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science.

Alligator: The crocodile of America, superior in every detail to the crocodile of the effete monarchies of the Old World.

It doesn't matter what your name is!

Botany is the art of insulting flowers in Greek and Latin.

What if a tree fell in the forest and no one knew it's biological name? Did it exist?

A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

The chicken is a dinosaur. I mean, it really is. You can't argue with it, because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way.

It is the genus that gives the characters, and not the characters that make the genus.

The name is Schitt," he replied. "Jack Schitt.

If an animal is named after what it eats, how interesting is it?

The names of the plants ought to be stable [certa], consequently they should be given to stable genera.