Biological Principles Quotes

We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles.

We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again. There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it.

Biology sometimes reveals its fundamental principles through what may seem at first to be arcane and bizarre.

What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant.

Biology has tended to be an observational science, and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past, but I hate to predict the future on that.

I loved the idea that biology was logical.

A theoretical grounding in agronomy must, therefore, include knowledge of biological laws.

We have politicians running for office—for school boards—in parts of the country who are denying the fundamental principle of biology. They are trying to equate the fact that Evolution is a theory with the idea that Evolution might not be true…. The teaching of Evolution should not be a political issue…. Evolution was discovered, not invented.

The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology -- the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically.

Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality.

For these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you, and to find you pitching into me for being more Darwinian than yourself. However, you have set me going, and must just take the consequences, for I warn you I will stop at no point so long as clear reasoning will take me further.

In fact perhaps the only law in biology is that all flesh is mortal and all species become extinct eventually.

All basic scientists who look to the NCI for funding should know that I will tolerate no retreat on the study of model systems and the pursuit of fundamental biological principles.