Biology Quotes

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities." "Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with " "The human body is essentially something that is other than an animal organism." "Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal" "Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist" "I believe that the brain has evolved, like the rest of the body. And you can't understand the brain as an abstract mechanism that operates on its own. You really have to understand the body and the environment that this brain is operating in" "I have called this principle by which each slight variation if useful is preserved by the term of Natural Selection" "Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose" "When the body becomes part of a larger, fungible organism" "Nature never makes leaps." "The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life" "We are organisms that have evolved mechanisms for learning how to respond to our environments in ways that tend to increase our fitness" "In evolution, you can’t keep what you believe is best for you; you must keep what goes and reliably gets reproduced." "The process of natural selection is smarter than you are." "Expecting an organism to evolve traits just because they are useful to us is a dangerous kind of anthropocentrism." "We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes" "We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here" "I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will" "Natural selection is anything but random." "It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it could not work."