TERMS STARTING WITH
biology ::: n. --> The science of life; that branch of knowledge which treats of living matter as distinct from matter which is not living; the study of living tissue. It has to do with the origin, structure, development, function, and distribution of animals and plants.
TERMS ANYWHERE
amphibiological ::: a. --> Pertaining to amphibiology.
amphibiology ::: n. --> A treatise on amphibious animals; the department of natural history which treats of the Amphibia.
Androgyne [from Greek androgynos man-woman] Hermaphrodite; applied to a dual principle containing both the active and passive powers of nature, as the androgyne ray, the Second Logos, Purusha-prakriti, spirit-matter; to a race, such as the second root-race, whose members are physiologically of both sexes; and in biology to certain animals which have dual sex. Bipolarity, the contrast and interaction between the energic and formative sides of nature, is universally prevalent. Sex is merely a particular and, evolutionally speaking, passing phase of this universal law, and its terms are often used in a purely symbolic sense to define these two sides of nature. We should be careful not to take the symbols literally and ascribe physiological attributes to higher powers.
Animism: (Lat. anima, soul) The doctrine of the reality of souls. Anthropology: (a) the view that souls are attached to all things either as their inner principle of spontaneity or activity, or as their dwellers, (b) the doctrine that Nature is inhabited by various grades of spirits, (s. Spiritism). Biology Psychology: the view that the ground whatever has disowned its relations is an sich. of life is immaterial soul rather than the material body. Metaphysics: the theory that Being is animate, living, ensouled (s. Hylozoism, Personalism, Monadism). Cosmology: the view that the World and the astronomical bodies possess souls (s. World Soul). --W.L. Annihilationism: The doctrine of the complete extinction of the wicked or impenitent at death. Edward White in England in the last century taught the doctrine in opposition to the belief in the eternal punishment of those not to be saved. -- V.F.
Aristotle: A Greek philosopher who lived from 384 BC to 322 BC. Aristotle wrote on numerous subjects including poetry, physics, music, politics and biology. He was the student of Plato. Alongside Plato and Socrates, Aristotle is considered an important figure to the founding of Western knowledge.
Artificial Life "algorithm, application" (a-life) The study of synthetic systems which behave like natural living systems in some way. Artificial Life complements the traditional biological sciences concerned with the analysis of living organisms by attempting to create lifelike behaviours within computers and other artificial media. Artificial Life can contribute to theoretical biology by modelling forms of life other than those which exist in nature. It has applications in environmental and financial modelling and network communications. There are some interesting implementations of artificial life using strangely shaped blocks. A video, probably by the company Artificial Creatures who build insect-like robots in Cambridge, MA (USA), has several mechanical implementations of artificial life forms. See also {evolutionary computing}, {Life}. [Christopher G. Langton (Ed.), "Artificial Life", Proceedings Volume VI, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Addison-Wesley, 1989]. {Yahoo! (http://yahoo.com/Science/Artificial_Life/)}. {Santa Fe Institute (http://alife.santafe.edu/)}. {The Avida Group (http://krl.caltech.edu/avida/Avida.html)}. (1995-02-21)
Atavism [from Latin atavus ancestor] In biology, the reappearance of the characteristics of a remoter ancestor in its descendant; reversion to type; delayed heredity. A manifestation of the activities of life or the life-atoms collectively, which in building new forms “copies family resemblances as well as those it finds impressed in the aura of the generators of every future human being” (SD 1:261). Weismann approached the truth in his theory of the germ-plasm, or aggregate of life-atoms which are transmitted unchanged through generations; but the atom is the vehicle of a jiva or monad — on whatever plane — and is therefore endowed with spirit and soul and, in consequence, memory.
bioinformatics "application" The field of science concerning the application of {computer science} and {information technology} to biology; using computers to handle biological information, especially {computational molecular biology}. (2005-01-07)
bioinformatics ::: (application) The field of science concerning the application of computer science and information technology to biology; using computers to handle biological information, especially computational molecular biology.(2005-01-07)
Bioinformatics ::: is the application of computational technology to handle the rapidly growing repository of information related to molecular biology. Bioinformatics combines different fields of study, including computer sciences, molecular biology, biotechnology, statistics and engineering. It is particularly useful for managing and analyzing large sets of data, such as those generated by the fields of genomics and proteomics.
biological ::: a. --> Of or relating to biology.
biologist ::: n. --> A student of biology; one versed in the science of biology.
biology ::: n. --> The science of life; that branch of knowledge which treats of living matter as distinct from matter which is not living; the study of living tissue. It has to do with the origin, structure, development, function, and distribution of animals and plants.
cell ::: biology: The smallest structural unit of an organism that is capable of independent functioning, consisting of one or more nuclei, cytoplasm, and various organelles, all surrounded by a semipermeable cell membrane. cells.
CLP(R) ::: Constraint Logic Programming (Real).A constraint logic programming language with real arithmetic constraints developed by Joxan Jaffar of IBM TJWRC and S. Michaylov of Monash University in 1986.The implementation contains a byte-code compiler and a built-in constraint solver which deals with linear arithmetic and contains a mechanism for delaying language. There are also powerful facilities for meta programming with constraints.Significant CLP(R) applications have been published in diverse areas such as molecular biology, finance and physical modelling.Version 1.2 for Unix, MS-DOS and OS/2 is available from the authors. It is free for academic and research purposes.E-mail: Roland Yap .[The CLP(R) Language and System, J. Jaffar et al, IBM RR RC16292 (
CLP(R) "language" Constraint Logic Programming (Real) A {constraint logic programming} language with {real} arithmetic {constraints} developed by Joxan Jaffar "joxan@watson.ibm.com" of {IBM} {TJWRC} and S. Michaylov of {Monash University} in 1986. The implementation contains a {byte-code compiler} and a built-in {constraint} solver which deals with {linear arithmetic} and contains a mechanism for delaying {nonlinear} constraints until they become linear. Since CLP(R) is a superset of {PROLOG}, the system is also usable as a general-purpose {logic programming} language. There are also powerful facilities for {meta programming} with constraints. Significant CLP(R) applications have been published in diverse areas such as molecular biology, finance and physical modelling. Version 1.2 for {Unix}, {MS-DOS} and {OS/2} is available from the authors. It is free for academic and research purposes. E-mail: Roland Yap "roland@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au". ["The CLP(R) Language and System", J. Jaffar et al, IBM RR RC16292 (
Computational biology - the development and application of data-analytical and theoretical methods, mathematical modeling and computational simulation techniques to the study of biological, behavioral, and social systems.
computational molecular biology "application" The area of {bioinformatics} concerning the use of computers to characterise the molecular components of living things. (2005-01-07)
computational molecular biology ::: (application) The area of bioinformatics concerning the use of computers to characterise the molecular components of living things.(2005-01-07)
Comte, Auguste: (1798-1857) Was born and lived during a period when political and social conditions in France were highly unstable. In reflecting the spirit of his age, he rose against the tendency prevalent among his predecessors to propound philosophic doctrines in disregard of the facts of nature and society. His revolt was directed particularly against traditional metaphysics with its endless speculations, countless assumptions, and futile controversies. To his views he gave the name of positivism. According to him, the history of humanity should be described in terms of three stages. The first of these was the theological stage when people's interpretation of reality was dominated by superstitions and prejudicesj the second stage was metaphysical when people attempted to comprehend, and reason about, reality, but were unable to support their contentions by facts; and the third and final stage was positive, when dogmatic assumptions began to be replaced by factual knowledge. Accordingly, the history of thought was characterized by a certain succession of sciences, expressing the turning of scholarly interest toward the earthly and human affairs, namely; mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology. These doctrines were discussed in Comte's main work, Cours de philosophic positive. -- R.B.W.
Conjugation: (Lat. con + jungere, yoke together) Grammar: The inflections of a verb. Biology: The union of male and female plant or animal. Logic: Joining the extreme terms of a syllogism by the middle term; joining dissimilar things by their common characteristics or by analogy. Ethics: Conjugations or pairings of the passions: love and hate, desire and avoidance, pleasure and sadness, etc. Synonymous with connexio. Metaphysics: In Aristotle, De Gen. et Corr., the pairings of opposites in the simple bodies: dry and hot (fire), hot and moist (air), moist and cold (water), cold and dry (earth).
Conventional Sciences ::: Science as applied to our known physical world. Includes fields such as chemistry, physics, and biology. Contrasted with Occult Sciences.
Cosmecology: This title (meaning the ecology of the cosmic) was suggested by Harlan T. Stetson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for a synthesis of the contemporary sciences of astronomy, electro-physics, geology and biology. He suggested that we trace the correlation between changes of a cosmic origin that affect our terrestrial environment, and periods of optimism and depression in the psychology of the human race.
cybernetics "robotics" /si:`b*-net'iks/ The study of control and communication in living and man-made systems. The term was first proposed by {Norbert Wiener} in the book referenced below. Originally, cybernetics drew upon electrical engineering, mathematics, biology, neurophysiology, anthropology, and psychology to study and describe actions, feedback, and response in systems of all kinds. It aims to understand the similarities and differences in internal workings of organic and machine processes and, by formulating abstract concepts common to all systems, to understand their behaviour. Modern "second-order cybernetics" places emphasis on how the process of constructing models of the systems is influenced by those very systems, hence an elegant definition - "applied epistemology". Related recent developments (often referred to as {sciences of complexity}) that are distinguished as separate disciplines are {artificial intelligence}, {neural networks}, {systems theory}, and {chaos theory}, but the boundaries between those and cybernetics proper are not precise. See also {robot}. {The Cybernetics Society (http://cybsoc.org)} of the UK. {American Society for Cybernetics (http://asc-cybernetics.org/)}. {IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (http://isye.gatech.edu/ieee-smc/)}. {International project "Principia Cybernetica" (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html)}. ["Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine", N. Wiener, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1948] (2002-01-01)
cybernetics ::: (robotics) /si:`b*-net'iks/ The study of control and communication in living and man-made systems.The term was first proposed by Norbert Wiener in the book referenced below. Originally, cybernetics drew upon electrical engineering, mathematics, biology, processes and, by formulating abstract concepts common to all systems, to understand their behaviour.Modern second-order cybernetics places emphasis on how the process of constructing models of the systems is influenced by those very systems, hence an elegant definition - applied epistemology.Related recent developments (often referred to as sciences of complexity) that are distinguished as separate disciplines are artificial intelligence, neural networks, systems theory, and chaos theory, but the boundaries between those and cybernetics proper are not precise.See also robot. of the UK. . . .Usenet newsgroup: .[Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine, N. Wiener, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1948](2002-01-01)
deductive classifier ::: A type of artificial intelligence inference engine. It takes as input a set of declarations in a frame language about a domain such as medical research or molecular biology. For example, the names of classes, sub-classes, properties, and restrictions on allowable values.
Differentiation also implies specialization of function, as is seen in biology in connection with the evolution of the cell.
DNA computing ::: (architecture) The use of DNA molecules to encode computational problems. Standard operations of molecular biology can then be used to solve some NP-hard exponential scaling of NP-hard problems still remains, so this method will require a huge amount of DNA to solve large problems.[L. M. Adleman, Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems, Science 266:1021-1024, 1994]. (1997-02-11)
DNA computing "architecture" The use of DNA molecules to encode computational problems. Standard operations of molecular biology can then be used to solve some {NP-hard} {search problems} in parallel using a very large number of molecules. The exponential scaling of NP-hard problems still remains, so this method will require a huge amount of DNA to solve large problems. [L. M. Adleman, "Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems", Science 266:1021-1024, 1994]. (1997-02-11)
electro-biologist ::: n. --> One versed in electro-biology.
electro-biology ::: n. --> That branch of biology which treats of the electrical phenomena of living organisms.
That phase of mesmerism or animal magnetism, the phenomena of which are supposed to be produced by a form of electricity.
evolutionist ::: n. --> One skilled in evolutions.
one who holds the doctrine of evolution, either in biology or in metaphysics.
Evolution: The development of organization. The working out of a definite end; action by final causation. For Comte, the successive stages of historical development are necessary. In biology, the series of phylogenetic changes in the structure or behavior of organisms, best exemplified by Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. In cosmology, cosmogony is the theory of the generation of the existing universe in space and time. Opposite of: epigenesis. See Emergent evolution, Evolutionism. Cf. T. Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin. -- J.K.F.
Genomics - the branch of molecular biology concerned with the structure, function, evolution, and mapping of genomes. See /r/genomics.
In modern sciences dealing with biology, evolution, and anthropology, legitimate inference from facts has been much interfered with by preconceived ideas. Modern science suffers from its failure to see the necessity of postulating an astral or formative world behind the physical, this astral world being in itself but one stage in a rising scale or ladder of invisible worlds. To ascertain the facts upon which to build a true inductive system, we must admit the existence in man of means of direct perception other than those afforded by the physical senses.
In The Secret Doctrine chemistry is mentioned as being, together with biology, one of the magicians of the future, especially in its form of chemical physics, when it is no longer the mechanistic science into which it has degenerated. “In Esoteric Philosophy, every physical particle corresponds to and depends on its higher noumenon — the Being to whose essence it belongs; and above as below, the Spiritual evolves from the Divine, the psycho-mental from the Spiritual — tainted from its lower plane by the astral — the whole animate and (seemingly) inanimate Nature evolving on parallel lines, and drawing its attributes from above as well as from below” (SD 1:218).
It is in his biology that the distinctive concepts of Aristotle show to best advantage. The conception of process as the actualization of determinate potentiality is well adapted to the comprehension of biological phenomena, where the immanent teleology of structure and function is almost a part of the observed facts. It is here also that the persistence of the form, or species, through a succession of individuals is most strikingly evident. His psychology is scarcely separable from his biology, since for Aristotle (as for Greek thought generally) the soul is the principle of life; it is "the primary actualization of a natural organic body." But souls differ from one another in the variety and complexity of the functions they exercise, and this difference in turn corresponds to differences in the organic structures involved. Fundamental to all other physical activities are the functions of nutrition, growth and reproduction, which are possessed by all living beings, plants as well as animals. Next come sensation, desire, and locomotion, exhibited in animals in varying degrees. Above all are deliberative choice and theoretical inquiry, the exercise of which makes the rational soul, peculiar to man among the animals. Aristotle devotes special attention to the various activities of the rational soul. Sense perception is the faculty of receiving the sensible form of outward objects without their matter. Besides the five senses Aristotle posits a "common sense," which enables the rational soul to unite the data of the separate senses into a single object, and which also accounts for the soul's awareness of these very activities of perception and of its other states. Reason is the faculty of apprehending the universals and first principles involved in all knowledge, and while helpless without sense perception it is not limited to the concrete and sensuous, but can grasp the universal and the ideal. The reason thus described as apprehending the intelligible world is in one difficult passage characterized as passive reason, requiring for its actualization a higher informing reason as the source of all intelligibility in things and of realized intelligence in man.
Law of Accelerating Returns - the “returns” of an evolutionary process (such as the speed, cost-effectiveness, or overall “power” of a process) that increase exponentially over time — both for biology and technology.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory "body" (LLNL) A research organaisatin operated by the {University of California} under a contract with the US Department of Energy. LLNL was founded on 2 September 1952 at the site of an old World War II naval air station. The Lab employs researchers from many scientific and engineering disciplines. Some of its departments are the National Ignition Facility, the Human Genome Center, the ASCI Tera-Scale Computing partnership, the Computer Security Technology Center, and the Site 300 Experimental Test Facility. Other research areas are Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atmospheric Science, Automation and Robotics, Biology, Chemistry, Computing, Energy Research, Engineering, Environmental Science, Fusion, Geology and Geophysics, Health, Lasers and Optics, Materials Science, National Security, Physics, Sensors and Instrumentation, Space Science. LLNL also works with industry in research and licensing projects. At the end of fiscal year 1995, the lab had signed agreements for 193 cost-shared research projects involving 201 companies and worth nearly $600m. {(http://llnl.gov/)}. Address: Fremont, California, USA. (1996-10-30)
Life ::: Not to be confused with consciousness although awareness does permeate all form. When we discuss the quality of being alive we will refer to the ability of organic matter to respond to stimuli, reproduce, maintain homeostasis, and grow. This is a bit of an arbitrary distinction as modern biology sees some forms as alive and others as inanimate especially when some of the qualities of "life" blur. For example, viruses are not usually seen as alive since they require a host cell to reproduce in.
Main works: System of Synthttic Philosophy (First Principles of Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Ethics), 1862-92; On Moral and Physical Education, 1861.
Maritain, Jacques: (1882-) Was born in Paris, educated at the Lycee Henri IV and the Sorbonne, where he studied with H. Bergson. He was converted to Catholicism in 1906. Then he studied biology with H. Driesch for two years, and the philosophy of St. Thomas with Father Clerissac. He became an ardent advocate of Thomistic philosophy, stressing its applicability to modern problems. He was a professor at the Institut Catholique (1914) and the Institute of Med. Studies, Toronto (1933), but is now lecturing in the U. S. Chief works: Philos. Bergsonienne (1914), Distinguer pour Unir (1932), Sept Lecons sur l'Etre (1934). G. B. Phelan, Jacques Maritain (N. Y., 1937). -- V.J.B.
Mechanism: (Gr. mechane, machine) Theory that all phenomena are totally explicable on mechanical principles. The view that all phenomena is the result of matter in motion and can be explained by its law. Theory of total explanation by efficient, as opposed to final, cause (q.v.). Doctrine that nature, like a machine, is a whole whose single function is served automatically by its parts. In cosmology, first advanced by Leucippus and Democritus (460 B.C.-370 B.C.) as the view that nature is explicable on the basis of atoms in motion and the void. Held by Galileo (1564-1641) and others in the seventeenth century as the rnechanical philosophy. For Descartes (1596-1650), the essence of matter is extension, and all physical phenomena are explicable by mechanical laws. For Kant (1724-1804), the necessity in time of all occurrence in accordance with causality as a law of nature. In biology, theory that organisms are totally explicable on mechanical principles. Opposite of: vitalism (q.v.). In psychology, applied to associational psychology, and in psychoanalysis to the unconscious direction of a mental process. In general, the view that nature consists merely of material in motion, and that it operates automatically. Opposite of: all forms of super-naturalism. See also Materialism, Atomism. -- J.K.F.
Molecular biology - the branch of biology that deals with the molecular basis of biological activity. It chiefly concerns itself with understanding the interactions between the various systems of a cell, including the interactions between the different types of DNA, RNA and protein biosynthesis as well as learning how these interactions are regulated.
morphology ::: n. --> That branch of biology which deals with the structure of animals and plants, treating of the forms of organs and describing their varieties, homologies, and metamorphoses. See Tectology, and Promorphology.
organology ::: n. --> The science of organs or of anything considered as an organic structure.
That branch of biology which treats, in particular, of the organs of animals and plants. See Morphology.
Palingenesis does not occur in Greek literature, as far as is known; palingenesia is used in the New Testament for spiritual regeneration. With the alchemists the word meant the artificial reproduction of the spectrum of a plant from its ashes. In biology palingenesis means reappearance of ancestral characteristics, instead of new characteristics (cenogenesis).
phage ::: A program that modifies other programs or databases in unauthorised ways; especially one that propagates a virus or Trojan horse. See also worm, mockingbird. The analogy, of course, is with phage viruses in biology.[Jargon File]
phage A program that modifies other programs or databases in unauthorised ways; especially one that propagates a {virus} or {Trojan horse}. See also {worm}, {mockingbird}. The analogy, of course, is with phage viruses in biology. [{Jargon File}]
Phylogeny [from Greek phylo race + geneia producing] The racial history of an organism, as contrasted with ontogeny or the individual history. Phylogenesis is applicable to the process. This branch of biology takes into account the racial affinities of an organism, and forms an important part of the science of evolution.
Physics: (Gr. physis, nature) In Greek philosophy, one of the three branches of philosophy, Logic and Ethics being the other two among the Stoics (q.v.). In Descartes, metaphysics is the root and physics the trunk of the "tree of knowledge." Today, it is the science (overlapping chemistry, biology and human physiology) of the calculation and prediction of the phenomena of motion of microscopic or macroscopic bodies, e.g. gravitation, pressure, heat, light, sound, magnetism, electricity, radio-activity, etc. Philosophical problems arise concerning the relation of physics to biological and social phenomena, to pure mathematics, and to metaphysics. See Mechanism, Physicalism.. Physis: See Nature, Physics. Picturesque: A modification of the beautiful in English aesthetics, 18th century. -- L.V.
PHYSIOLOGY—The branch of biology which treats of the vital phenomena manifested by animals and plants.
Polarity, philosophy of: Philosophies that make the concept of polarity one of the systematic principles according to which opposites involve each other when applied to any significant realm of investigation. Polarity was one of the basic concepts in the philosophy of Cusanus and Schelling. Morris R. Cohen made use of the principle of polarity in scientific philosophy, in biology, in social and historical analysis, in law and in ethics. (Cf. Reason and Nature). -- H.H.
Polygenesis Used in biology and anthropology, meaning arising from many germs or roots; opposed to monogenesis, arising from a single germ or root, although the two theories can be complementary. The human race is distinctly polygenetic inasmuch as it was born from seven different psychomaterial foci on seven different centers of the earth; and mankind did not spring from an actual single couple. Yet it is equally true that mankind is one in origin, all its creators being spiritual beings, working on us and upon lower beings of a psychomaterial nature (SD 2:249, 610). Regarding the evolution of races, differentiation has existed for long ages; yet go far enough towards the origin, and polygenesis merges into a fundamental spiritual unity.
Procreation The progressive series of methods by which the human life-wave has reproduced its kind on earth is closely related to the unfolding of composite human nature, and is also a part of the evolutionary history of the rounds and races. The reimbodying ego manifested its composite nature in the degree corresponding to the various gradations of matter in and through which it slowly descended, plane after plane, to the present state of things. Evidences of this series of former kinds of racial imbodiments, and of the progressive modes of reproduction are found repeated in the development of the human embryo, in the persistence of vestigial organs in adults, and in reproductive methods which still prevail in the lower kingdoms of plant and animal life. The histologist, in watching the division of cells, sees a microscopic review of the age-old history of mankind’s series of imbodiments. He observes, in the lowest forms of life, a homogeneous speck of protoplasm dividing into two. Next, in a nucleated cell, the cell nucleus splits into two subnuclei which develop within the cell wall, or burst through to multiply outside into independent entities. This fission is a copy of the reproductive method of the first root-race. The next type of cell division is budding, where a portion of the parent swells out at the surface, finally to separate and to grow into a full-sized individual, as in many vegetables, the sea anemone, etc. This repeats the way in which the primeval human race merged out of its first reproductive method. At the next step in biology, the parent organism throws off a single cell which develops into a multicellular organism like the parent, as in bacteria and mosses. The formation of these spores is followed by a type of intermediate hermaphroditism with the bisexual organs inhering in the same individual, as in plants. Corresponding to this, about the middle of the second root-race, the “buds” grew more numerous and became what zoologists would call human spores or seeds, or what Blavatsky described as vital sweat. Thus many of these buds at certain seasons when the parent entity had become mature, would leave it, as do the spores or seeds of plants today. These seeds were taken care of by nature and developed in the proper environment. At present, the exceptional cases of multiple human births hint at this long-past condition in procreation.
Program Composition Notation ::: (PCN) A specification language for parallelism between C and Fortran modules. PCN provides a simple language for specifying concurrent algorithms, interfaces modelling, fluid dynamics, computational biology, chemistry, and circuit simulation.Version 2.0 runs on networks of workstations: Sun-4, NeXT, RS/6000, SGI; multicomputers: iPSC/860, Touchstone DELTA; and shared memory multiprocessors: Symmetry/Dynix. .E-mail: Ian Foster , Steve Tuecke .[Productive Parallel Programming: The PCN Approach, I. Foster et al, Sci Prog 1(1):51-66 (1992)]. (1993-02-12)
Program Composition Notation (PCN) A specification language for parallelism between {C} and {Fortran} {modules}. PCN provides a simple language for specifying {concurrent} {algorithms}, interfaces to {Fortran} and {C}, a portable toolkit that allows applications to be developed on a {workstation} or small parallel computer and run unchanged on {supercomputers} and integrated debugging and performance analysis tools. PCN was developed at {Argonne National Laboratory} and the {California Institute of Technology}. It has been used to develop a wide variety of applications, in areas such as climate modelling, fluid dynamics, computational biology, chemistry, and circuit simulation. Version 2.0 runs on networks of workstations: {Sun-4}, {NeXT}, {RS/6000}, {SGI}; {multicomputers}: {iPSC}/860, {Touchstone DELTA}; and {shared memory} multiprocessors: {Symmetry}/{Dynix}. {(ftp://info.mcs.anl.gov/pub/pcn)}. E-mail: Ian Foster "pcn@mcs.anl.gov", Steve Tuecke "tuecke@mcs.anl.gov". ["Productive Parallel Programming: The PCN Approach", I. Foster et al, Sci Prog 1(1):51-66 (1992)]. (1993-02-12)
Root-types In biology animal or plant species derive from seven, ten, or twelve primeval physico-astral root-types, being in the case of every kingdom the origins of the widely differentiated, greatly specialized individuals now found on earth. “Every new Manvantara brings along with it the renovation of forms, types and species; every type of the preceding organic forms — vegetable, animal and human — changes and is perfected in the next, even to the mineral, which has received in this Round its final opacity and hardness; its softer portions having formed the present vegetation; the astral relics of previous vegetation and fauna having been utilized in the formation of the lower animals, and determining the structure of the primeval Root-Types of the highest mammalia” (SD 2:730). Primeval astral man was the root-type of those early mammalians, from whom the anthropoids sprang by human miscegenation, although this does not apply to the animals beneath the mammals.
Spencer, Herbert: (1820-1903) was the great English philosopher who devoted a life time to the formulation and execution of a plan to follow the idea of development as a first principle through all the avenues of human thought. A precursor of Darwin with his famous notion of all organic evolution as a change "from homogeneity to heterogenity," from the simple to the complex, he nevertheless was greatly influenced by the Darwinian hypothesis and employed its arguments in his monumental works in biology, psychology, sociology and ethics. He aimed to interpret life, mind and society in terms of matter, motion and force. In politics, he evidenced from his earliest writings a strong bias for individualism. See Evolutionism, Charles Darwin. -- L.E.D.
Spindle In biology, a fusiform arrangement of fibrils which appears at the nucleus of a cell that is about to divide; for in this early stage of the development of a germ-cell the nucleus forms a double cone which resembles a spindle.
Synthetic biology - the design and construction of biological devices and systems for useful purposes. It is an area of biological research and technology that combines biology and engineering, thus often overlapping with bioengineering and biomedical engineering. It encompasses a variety of different approaches, methodologies, and disciplines with a focus on engineering biology and biotechnology. See /r/Synthetic_Biology
systems neuroscience ::: A subdiscipline of neuroscience and systems biology that studies the structure and function of neural circuits and systems. It is an umbrella term, encompassing a number of areas of study concerned with how nerve cells behave when connected together to form neural pathways, neural circuits, and larger brain networks.
Teleology: (Gr. telos, end, completion) The theory of purpose, ends, goals, final causes, values, the Good (s.). The opposite of Mechanism. As opposed to mechanism, which explains the present and the future in terms of the past, teleology explains the past and the present in terms of the future. Teleology as such does not imply personal consciousness, volition, or intended purpose (q.v.). Physics, Biology: See Vitalism. Psychology: See Hormic, Instinct, Hedonism, Voluntarism. Epistemology: the view that mind is guided or governed by purposes, values, interests, "instinct", as well as by "factual", "objective" or logical evidence in its pursuit of truth (see Fideism, Voluntarism, Pragmatism, Will-to-believe, Value judgment). Metaphysics: The doctrine that reality is ordered by goals, ends, purposes, values, formal or final causes (q.v.). Ethics: The view that the standard of human life is value, the Good, rather than duty, law, or formal decorum.
The philosophy of Aristotle was continued after his death by other members of the Peripatetic school, the most important of whom were Theophrastus, Eudemus of Rhodes, and Strato of Lampsacus. In the Alexandrian Age, particularly after the editing of Aristotle's works by Andronicus of Rhodes (about 50 B.C.), Aristotelianism was the subject of numerous expositions and commentaries, such as those of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, John Philoponus, and Simplicius. With the closing of the philosophical schools in the sixth century the knowledge of Aristotle, except for fragments of the logical doctrine, almost disappeared in the west. It was preserved, however, by Arabian and Syrian scholars; from whom, with the revival of learning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it passed again to western Europe and became in Thomas Aquinas the philosophical basis of Christian theology. For the next few centuries the prestige of Aristotle was immense; he was "the philosopher," "the master of those who know." With the rise of modern science his authority has greatly declined. Yet Aristotelianism is still a force in modern thought: in Neo-Scholasticism; in recent psychology, whose behavioristic tendencies are in part a revival of Aristotelian modes of thought; in the various forms of vitalism in contemporary biology; in the dynamism of such thinkers as Bergson; and in the more catholic naturalism which has succeeded the mechanistic materialism of the last century, and which, whether by appeal to a doctrine of levels or by emphasis on immanent teleology, seems to be striving along Aristotelian lines for a conception of nature broad enough to include the religious, moral and artistic consciousness. Finally, a very large part of our technical vocabulary, both in science and in philosophy, is but the translation into modern tongues of the terms used by Aristotle, and carries with it, for better or worse, the distinctions worked out in his subtle mind. -- G.R.M.
Three senses of "Ockhamism" may be distinguished: Logical, indicating usage of the terminology and technique of logical analysis developed by Ockham in his Summa totius logicae; in particular, use of the concept of supposition (suppositio) in the significative analysis of terms. Epistemological, indicating the thesis that universality is attributable only to terms and propositions, and not to things as existing apart from discourse. Theological, indicating the thesis that no tneological doctrines, such as those of God's existence or of the immortality of the soul, are evident or demonstrable philosophically, so that religious doctrine rests solely on faith, without metaphysical or scientific support. It is in this sense that Luther is often called an Ockhamist. Bibliography: B. Geyer, Ueberwegs Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Phil., Bd. II (11th ed., Berlin 1928), pp. 571-612 and 781-786; N. Abbagnano, Guglielmo di Ockham (Lanciano, Italy, 1931); E. A. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham (N. Y. & London, 1935); F. Ehrle, Peter von Candia (Muenster, 1925); G. Ritter, Studien zur Spaetscholastik, I-II (Heidelberg, 1921-1922). --E.A.M. Om, aum: (Skr.) Mystic, holy syllable as a symbol for the indefinable Absolute. See Aksara, Vac, Sabda. --K.F.L. Omniscience: In philosophy and theology it means the complete and perfect knowledge of God, of Himself and of all other beings, past, present, and future, or merely possible, as well as all their activities, real or possible, including the future free actions of human beings. --J.J.R. One: Philosophically, not a number but equivalent to unit, unity, individuality, in contradistinction from multiplicity and the mani-foldness of sensory experience. In metaphysics, the Supreme Idea (Plato), the absolute first principle (Neo-platonism), the universe (Parmenides), Being as such and divine in nature (Plotinus), God (Nicolaus Cusanus), the soul (Lotze). Religious philosophy and mysticism, beginning with Indian philosophy (s.v.), has favored the designation of the One for the metaphysical world-ground, the ultimate icility, the world-soul, the principle of the world conceived as reason, nous, or more personally. The One may be conceived as an independent whole or as a sum, as analytic or synthetic, as principle or ontologically. Except by mysticism, it is rarely declared a fact of sensory experience, while its transcendent or transcendental, abstract nature is stressed, e.g., in epistemology where the "I" or self is considered the unitary background of personal experience, the identity of self-consciousness, or the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifoldness of ideas (Kant). --K.F.L. One-one: A relation R is one-many if for every y in the converse domain there is a unique x such that xRy. A relation R is many-one if for every x in the domain there is a unique y such that xRy. (See the article relation.) A relation is one-one, or one-to-one, if it is at the same time one-many and many-one. A one-one relation is said to be, or to determine, a one-to-one correspondence between its domain and its converse domain. --A.C. On-handedness: (Ger. Vorhandenheit) Things exist in the mode of thereness, lying- passively in a neutral space. A "deficient" form of a more basic relationship, termed at-handedness (Zuhandenheit). (Heidegger.) --H.H. Ontological argument: Name by which later authors, especially Kant, designate the alleged proof for God's existence devised by Anselm of Canterbury. Under the name of God, so the argument runs, everyone understands that greater than which nothing can be thought. Since anything being the greatest and lacking existence is less then the greatest having also existence, the former is not really the greater. The greatest, therefore, has to exist. Anselm has been reproached, already by his contemporary Gaunilo, for unduly passing from the field of logical to the field of ontological or existential reasoning. This criticism has been repeated by many authors, among them Aquinas. The argument has, however, been used, if in a somewhat modified form, by Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz. --R.A. Ontological Object: (Gr. onta, existing things + logos, science) The real or existing object of an act of knowledge as distinguished from the epistemological object. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ontologism: (Gr. on, being) In contrast to psychologism, is called any speculative system which starts philosophizing by positing absolute being, or deriving the existence of entities independently of experience merely on the basis of their being thought, or assuming that we have immediate and certain knowledge of the ground of being or God. Generally speaking any rationalistic, a priori metaphysical doctrine, specifically the philosophies of Rosmini-Serbati and Vincenzo Gioberti. As a philosophic method censored by skeptics and criticists alike, as a scholastic doctrine formerly strongly supported, revived in Italy and Belgium in the 19th century, but no longer countenanced. --K.F.L. Ontology: (Gr. on, being + logos, logic) The theory of being qua being. For Aristotle, the First Philosophy, the science of the essence of things. Introduced as a term into philosophy by Wolff. The science of fundamental principles, the doctrine of the categories. Ultimate philosophy; rational cosmology. Syn. with metaphysics. See Cosmology, First Principles, Metaphysics, Theology. --J.K.F. Operation: "(Lit. operari, to work) Any act, mental or physical, constituting a phase of the reflective process, and performed with a view to acquiring1 knowledge or information about a certain subject-nntter. --A.C.B. In logic, see Operationism. In philosophy of science, see Pragmatism, Scientific Empiricism. Operationism: The doctrine that the meaning of a concept is given by a set of operations. 1. The operational meaning of a term (word or symbol) is given by a semantical rule relating the term to some concrete process, object or event, or to a class of such processes, objectj or events. 2. Sentences formed by combining operationally defined terms into propositions are operationally meaningful when the assertions are testable by means of performable operations. Thus, under operational rules, terms have semantical significance, propositions have empirical significance. Operationism makes explicit the distinction between formal (q.v.) and empirical sentences. Formal propositions are signs arranged according to syntactical rules but lacking operational reference. Such propositions, common in mathematics, logic and syntax, derive their sanction from convention, whereas an empirical proposition is acceptable (1) when its structure obeys syntactical rules and (2) when there exists a concrete procedure (a set of operations) for determining its truth or falsity (cf. Verification). Propositions purporting to be empirical are sometimes amenable to no operational test because they contain terms obeying no definite semantical rules. These sentences are sometimes called pseudo-propositions and are said to be operationally meaningless. They may, however, be 'meaningful" in other ways, e.g. emotionally or aesthetically (cf. Meaning). Unlike a formal statement, the "truth" of an empirical sentence is never absolute and its operational confirmation serves only to increase the degree of its validity. Similarly, the semantical rule comprising the operational definition of a term has never absolute precision. Ordinarily a term denotes a class of operations and the precision of its definition depends upon how definite are the rules governing inclusion in the class. The difference between Operationism and Logical Positivism (q.v.) is one of emphasis. Operationism's stress of empirical matters derives from the fact that it was first employed to purge physics of such concepts as absolute space and absolute time, when the theory of relativity had forced upon physicists the view that space and time are most profitably defined in terms of the operations by which they are measured. Although different methods of measuring length at first give rise to different concepts of length, wherever the equivalence of certain of these measures can be established by other operations, the concepts may legitimately be combined. In psychology the operational criterion of meaningfulness is commonly associated with a behavioristic point of view. See Behaviorism. Since only those propositions which are testable by public and repeatable operations are admissible in science, the definition of such concepti as mind and sensation must rest upon observable aspects of the organism or its behavior. Operational psychology deals with experience only as it is indicated by the operation of differential behavior, including verbal report. Discriminations, or the concrete differential reactions of organisms to internal or external environmental states, are by some authors regarded as the most basic of all operations. For a discussion of the role of operational definition in phvsics. see P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, (New York, 1928) and The Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton, 1936). "The extension of operationism to psychology is discussed by C. C. Pratt in The Logic of Modem Psychology (New York. 1939.) For a discussion and annotated bibliography relating to Operationism and Logical Positivism, see S. S. Stevens, Psychology and the Science of Science, Psychol. Bull., 36, 1939, 221-263. --S.S.S. Ophelimity: Noun derived from the Greek, ophelimos useful, employed by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) in economics as the equivalent of utility, or the capacity to provide satisfaction. --J.J.R. Opinion: (Lat. opinio, from opinor, to think) An hypothesis or proposition entertained on rational grounds but concerning which doubt can reasonably exist. A belief. See Hypothesis, Certainty, Knowledge. --J.K.F- Opposition: (Lat. oppositus, pp. of oppono, to oppose) Positive actual contradiction. One of Aristotle's Post-predicaments. In logic any contrariety or contradiction, illustrated by the "Square of Opposition". Syn. with: conflict. See Logic, formal, § 4. --J.K.F. Optimism: (Lat. optimus, the best) The view inspired by wishful thinking, success, faith, or philosophic reflection, that the world as it exists is not so bad or even the best possible, life is good, and man's destiny is bright. Philosophically most persuasively propounded by Leibniz in his Theodicee, according to which God in his wisdom would have created a better world had he known or willed such a one to exist. Not even he could remove moral wrong and evil unless he destroyed the power of self-determination and hence the basis of morality. All systems of ethics that recognize a supreme good (Plato and many idealists), subscribe to the doctrines of progressivism (Turgot, Herder, Comte, and others), regard evil as a fragmentary view (Josiah Royce et al.) or illusory, or believe in indemnification (Henry David Thoreau) or melioration (Emerson), are inclined optimistically. Practically all theologies advocating a plan of creation and salvation, are optimistic though they make the good or the better dependent on moral effort, right thinking, or belief, promising it in a future existence. Metaphysical speculation is optimistic if it provides for perfection, evolution to something higher, more valuable, or makes room for harmonies or a teleology. See Pessimism. --K.F.L. Order: A class is said to be partially ordered by a dyadic relation R if it coincides with the field of R, and R is transitive and reflexive, and xRy and yRx never both hold when x and y are different. If in addition R is connected, the class is said to be ordered (or simply ordered) by R, and R is called an ordering relation. Whitehcid and Russell apply the term serial relation to relations which are transitive, irreflexive, and connected (and, in consequence, also asymmetric). However, the use of serial relations in this sense, instead ordering relations as just defined, is awkward in connection with the notion of order for unit classes. Examples: The relation not greater than among leal numbers is an ordering relation. The relation less than among real numbers is a serial relation. The real numbers are simply ordered by the former relation. In the algebra of classes (logic formal, § 7), the classes are partially ordered by the relation of class inclusion. For explanation of the terminology used in making the above definitions, see the articles connexity, reflexivity, relation, symmetry, transitivity. --A.C. Order type: See relation-number. Ordinal number: A class b is well-ordered by a dyadic relation R if it is ordered by R (see order) and, for every class a such that a ⊂ b, there is a member x of a, such that xRy holds for every member y of a; and R is then called a well-ordering relation. The ordinal number of a class b well-ordered by a relation R, or of a well-ordering relation R, is defined to be the relation-number (q. v.) of R. The ordinal numbers of finite classes (well-ordered by appropriate relations) are called finite ordinal numbers. These are 0, 1, 2, ... (to be distinguished, of course, from the finite cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2, . . .). The first non-finite (transfinite or infinite) ordinal number is the ordinal number of the class of finite ordinal numbers, well-ordered in their natural order, 0, 1, 2, . . .; it is usually denoted by the small Greek letter omega. --A.C. G. Cantor, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, translated and with an introduction by P. E. B. Jourdain, Chicago and London, 1915. (new ed. 1941); Whitehead and Russell, Princtpia Mathematica. vol. 3. Orexis: (Gr. orexis) Striving; desire; the conative aspect of mind, as distinguished from the cognitive and emotional (Aristotle). --G.R.M.. Organicism: A theory of biology that life consists in the organization or dynamic system of the organism. Opposed to mechanism and vitalism. --J.K.F. Organism: An individual animal or plant, biologically interpreted. A. N. Whitehead uses the term to include also physical bodies and to signify anything material spreading through space and enduring in time. --R.B.W. Organismic Psychology: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, an instrument) A system of theoretical psychology which construes the structure of the mind in organic rather than atomistic terms. See Gestalt Psychology; Psychological Atomism. --L.W. Organization: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, work) A structured whole. The systematic unity of parts in a purposive whole. A dynamic system. Order in something actual. --J.K.F. Organon: (Gr. organon) The title traditionally given to the body of Aristotle's logical treatises. The designation appears to have originated among the Peripatetics after Aristotle's time, and expresses their view that logic is not a part of philosophy (as the Stoics maintained) but rather the instrument (organon) of philosophical inquiry. See Aristotelianism. --G.R.M. In Kant. A system of principles by which pure knowledge may be acquired and established. Cf. Fr. Bacon's Novum Organum. --O.F.K. Oriental Philosophy: A general designation used loosely to cover philosophic tradition exclusive of that grown on Greek soil and including the beginnings of philosophical speculation in Egypt, Arabia, Iran, India, and China, the elaborate systems of India, Greater India, China, and Japan, and sometimes also the religion-bound thought of all these countries with that of the complex cultures of Asia Minor, extending far into antiquity. Oriental philosophy, though by no means presenting a homogeneous picture, nevertheless shares one characteristic, i.e., the practical outlook on life (ethics linked with metaphysics) and the absence of clear-cut distinctions between pure speculation and religious motivation, and on lower levels between folklore, folk-etymology, practical wisdom, pre-scientiiic speculation, even magic, and flashes of philosophic insight. Bonds with Western, particularly Greek philosophy have no doubt existed even in ancient times. Mutual influences have often been conjectured on the basis of striking similarities, but their scientific establishment is often difficult or even impossible. Comparative philosophy (see especially the work of Masson-Oursel) provides a useful method. Yet a thorough treatment of Oriental Philosophy is possible only when the many languages in which it is deposited have been more thoroughly studied, the psychological and historical elements involved in the various cultures better investigated, and translations of the relevant documents prepared not merely from a philological point of view or out of missionary zeal, but by competent philosophers who also have some linguistic training. Much has been accomplished in this direction in Indian and Chinese Philosophy (q.v.). A great deal remains to be done however before a definitive history of Oriental Philosophy may be written. See also Arabian, and Persian Philosophy. --K.F.L. Origen: (185-254) The principal founder of Christian theology who tried to enrich the ecclesiastic thought of his day by reconciling it with the treasures of Greek philosophy. Cf. Migne PL. --R.B.W. Ormazd: (New Persian) Same as Ahura Mazdah (q.v.), the good principle in Zoroastrianism, and opposed to Ahriman (q.v.). --K.F.L. Orphic Literature: The mystic writings, extant only in fragments, of a Greek religious-philosophical movement of the 6th century B.C., allegedly started by the mythical Orpheus. In their mysteries, in which mythology and rational thinking mingled, the Orphics concerned themselves with cosmogony, theogony, man's original creation and his destiny after death which they sought to influence to the better by pure living and austerity. They taught a symbolism in which, e.g., the relationship of the One to the many was clearly enunciated, and believed in the soul as involved in reincarnation. Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato were influenced by them. --K.F.L. Ortega y Gasset, Jose: Born in Madrid, May 9, 1883. At present in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Son of Ortega y Munillo, the famous Spanish journalist. Studied at the College of Jesuits in Miraflores and at the Central University of Madrid. In the latter he presented his Doctor's dissertation, El Milenario, in 1904, thereby obtaining his Ph.D. degree. After studies in Leipzig, Berlin, Marburg, under the special influence of Hermann Cohen, the great exponent of Kant, who taught him the love for the scientific method and awoke in him the interest in educational philosophy, Ortega came to Spain where, after the death of Nicolas Salmeron, he occupied the professorship of metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid. The following may be considered the most important works of Ortega y Gasset: Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914; El Espectador, I-VIII, 1916-1935; El Tema de Nuestro Tiempo, 1921; España Invertebrada, 1922; Kant, 1924; La Deshumanizacion del Arte, 1925; Espiritu de la Letra, 1927; La Rebelion de las Masas, 1929; Goethe desde Adentio, 1934; Estudios sobre el Amor, 1939; Ensimismamiento y Alteracion, 1939; El Libro de las Misiones, 1940; Ideas y Creencias, 1940; and others. Although brought up in the Marburg school of thought, Ortega is not exactly a neo-Kantian. At the basis of his Weltanschauung one finds a denial of the fundamental presuppositions which characterized European Rationalism. It is life and not thought which is primary. Things have a sense and a value which must be affirmed independently. Things, however, are to be conceived as the totality of situations which constitute the circumstances of a man's life. Hence, Ortega's first philosophical principle: "I am myself plus my circumstances". Life as a problem, however, is but one of the poles of his formula. Reason is the other. The two together function, not by dialectical opposition, but by necessary coexistence. Life, according to Ortega, does not consist in being, but rather, in coming to be, and as such it is of the nature of direction, program building, purpose to be achieved, value to be realized. In this sense the future as a time dimension acquires new dignity, and even the present and the past become articulate and meaning-full only in relation to the future. Even History demands a new point of departure and becomes militant with new visions. --J.A.F. Orthodoxy: Beliefs which are declared by a group to be true and normative. Heresy is a departure from and relative to a given orthodoxy. --V.S. Orthos Logos: See Right Reason. Ostensible Object: (Lat. ostendere, to show) The object envisaged by cognitive act irrespective of its actual existence. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ostensive: (Lat. ostendere, to show) Property of a concept or predicate by virtue of which it refers to and is clarified by reference to its instances. --A.C.B. Ostwald, Wilhelm: (1853-1932) German chemist. Winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1909. In Die Uberwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialistmus and in Naturphilosophie, his two best known works in the field of philosophy, he advocates a dynamic theory in opposition to materialism and mechanism. All properties of matter, and the psychic as well, are special forms of energy. --L.E.D. Oupnekhat: Anquetil Duperron's Latin translation of the Persian translation of 50 Upanishads (q.v.), a work praised by Schopenhauer as giving him complete consolation. --K.F.L. Outness: A term employed by Berkeley to express the experience of externality, that is the ideas of space and things placed at a distance. Hume used it in the sense of distance Hamilton understood it as the state of being outside of consciousness in a really existing world of material things. --J.J.R. Overindividual: Term used by H. Münsterberg to translate the German überindividuell. The term is applied to any cognitive or value object which transcends the individual subject. --L.W. P
Types, Ancestral In biology used in connection with theories of evolution, which seek for ancestral types which may have served as staring points for physical development. But the causes operative on the physical plane on which science relies, are in fact only secondary causes. The true ancestral types are astral, and indeed, because of distant causal action, even spiritual models reflected in the astral and thence into the physical, and thus governing shape, form, and their correlations with other effects. The secondary causes come into play mainly after the physicalization of the astral forms (cf SD 2:648-9).
While these three types of necessity are generally recognized by philosophers, the weighting of the distinctions is a matter of considerable divergence of view. Those who hold that the distinctions are all radical, sharply distinguish between logical statements, statements of fact, and so-called ethical or value statements. On the other hand, the attempt to establish an a priori ethics may be regarded as an attempt to reduce moral necessity to logical necessity; while the attempt to derive ethical evaluations from the statements of science, e.g. from biology, is an attempt to reduce moral necessity to physical or causal necessity. -- F.L.W.
zoology ::: n. --> That part of biology which relates to the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct.
A treatise on this science.
KEYS (10k)
2 Ken Wilber
1 Richard P Feynman
1 Leonard Adleman
1 Jean Gebser
1 Israel Gelfand
1 Harold Abelson
1 Alfred North Whitehead
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
18 Richard Dawkins
18 Anonymous
17 Siddhartha Mukherjee
17 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
12 Bren Brown
11 Nick Lane
11 David Eagleman
11 Carl Sagan
10 Robert M Sapolsky
10 E O Wilson
9 Neil deGrasse Tyson
9 Elliott Sober
9 Carlos Ruiz Zaf n
8 Viktor E Frankl
7 Steven Pinker
7 Stephen Jay Gould
7 Ray Kurzweil
7 Rachel Carson
7 James Gleick
7 Deepak Chopra
1:The supersession of dualism in biology begins to occur in this science at the moment when the 'time' factor is taken into consideration. ~ Jean Gebser, #KEYS
2:Biology is the study of the larger organisms, whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, #KEYS
3:There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology. ~ Israel Gelfand, #KEYS
4:Sciences reach a point where they become mathematized..the central issues in the field become sufficiently understood that they can be thought about mathematically..[by the early 1990s] biology was no longer the science of things that smelled funny in refrigerators (my view from undergraduate days in the 1960s)..The field was undergoing a revolution and was rapidly acquiring the depth and power previously associated exclusively with the physical sciences. Biology was now the study of information stored in DNA - strings of four letters: A, T, G, and C..and the transformations that information undergoes in the cell. There was mathematics here! ~ Leonard Adleman, #KEYS
5:[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use. ~ Harold Abelson, Introductory lecture to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, #KEYS
6:It marshals a vast amount of scientific evidence, from physics to biology, and offers extensive arguments, all geared to objectively proving the holistic nature of the universe. It fails to see that if we take a bunch of egos with atomistic concepts and teach them that the universe is holistic, all we will actually get is a bunch of egos with holistic concepts. Precisely because this monological approach, with its unskillful interpretation of an otherwise genuine intuition, ignores or neglects the "I" and the "we" dimensions, it doesn't understand very well the exact nature of the inner transformations that are necessary in the first place in order to be able to find an identity that embraces the manifest All. Talk about the All as much as we want, nothing fundamentally changes. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, #KEYS
7:A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all! ~ Richard P Feynman, #KEYS
8:There is one point in particular I would like to single out and stress, namely, the notion of evolution. It is common to assume that one of the doctrines of the perennial philosophy... is the idea of involution-evolution. That is, the manifest world was created as a "fall" or "breaking away" from the Absolute (involution), but that all things are now returning to the Absolute (via evolution). In fact, the doctrine of progressive temporal return to Source (evolution) does not appear anywhere, according to scholars as Joseph Campbell, until the axial period (i.e. a mere two thousand years ago). And even then, the idea was somewhat convoluted and backwards. The doctrine of the yugas, for example, sees the world as proceeding through various stages of development, but the direction is backward: yesterday was the Golden Age, and time ever since has been a devolutionary slide downhill, resulting in the present-day Kali-Yuga. Indeed, this notion of a historical fall from Eden was ubiquitous during the axial period; the idea that we are, at this moment, actually evolving toward Spirit was simply not conceived in any sort of influential fashion.
But sometime during the modern era-it is almost impossible to pinpoint exactly-the idea of history as devolution (or a fall from God) was slowly replaced by the idea of history as evolution (or a growth towards God). We see it explicitly in Schelling (1775-1854); Hegel (1770-1831) propounded the doctrine with a genius rarely equaled; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) made evolution a universal law, and his friend Charles Darwin (1809-1882) applied it to biology. We find it next appearing in Aurobindo (1872-1950), who gave perhaps its most accurate and profound spiritual context, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) who made it famous in the West.
But here is my point: we might say that the idea of evolution as return-to-Spirit is part of the perennial philosophy, but the idea itself, in any adequate form, is no more than a few hundred years old. It might be 'ancient' as timeless, but it is certainly not ancient as "old."...
This fundamental shift in the sense or form of the perennial philosophy-as represented in, say, Aurobindo, Hegel, Adi Da, Schelling, Teilhard de Chardin, Radhakrishnan, to name a few-I should like to call the "neoperennial philosophy." ~ Ken Wilber, The Eye Of Spirit,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Biology enables, culture forbids. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 2:The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface. ~ brian-eno, @wisdomtrove 3:Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother. ~ oprah-winfrey, @wisdomtrove 4:Your biography—that is, the experiences that make up your life—becomes your biology. ~ caroline-myss, @wisdomtrove 5:Your biography—that is, the experiences that make up your life—becomes your biology. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 6:When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. ~ kelly-mcgonigal, @wisdomtrove 7:The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry. ~ francis-crick, @wisdomtrove 8:We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 9:I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning. ~ steve-jobs, @wisdomtrove 10:Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action. ~ francis-crick, @wisdomtrove 11:In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove 12:It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove 13:It will be in the convergence of evolutionary biology, developmental biology and cancer biology that the answer to cancer will lie. Nor will this confluence be a one-way street. ~ paul-davies, @wisdomtrove 14:I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism. ~ francis-crick, @wisdomtrove 15:The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith? ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 16:Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body - your thoughts, your actions, your food - the thing you feed your life. ~ caroline-myss, @wisdomtrove 17:While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research. ~ francis-crick, @wisdomtrove 18:Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body - you thoughts, your actions, your food - the thing you feed your life. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 19:Success is deeply rooted in time and place. You may have the drive to read tons of books on biology. But if there are no books on biology in your library, and the library is never open, your drive is meaningless. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove 20:A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 21:Some ... sexist evil probably predates religion and can be ascribed to our biology, but there is no question that religion promulgates and renders sacrosanct attitudes toward women that would be unseemly in a brachiating ape. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 22:The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology. ~ paul-davies, @wisdomtrove 23: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, @wisdomtrove 24:One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together. ~ francis-crick, @wisdomtrove 25:My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity of the wonder of innumerable forms of life has always thrilled me beyond anything else. ~ oliver-sacks, @wisdomtrove 26:Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals. ‘Endowed by their creator’ should be translated simply into ‘born’. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 27:Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 28:And what are the characteristics that evolved in humans? ‘Life’, certainly. But ‘liberty’? There is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 29:What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally & 30:Equally, there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and characteristics. Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings. And it’s not true that these organs, abilities and characteristics are ‘unalienable’. Many of them undergo constant mutations, and may well be completely lost over time. The ostrich is a bird that lost its ability to fly. So ‘unalienable rights’ should be translated into ‘mutable characteristics’. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 31:As an adult I discovered that I was a pretty good autodidact, and can teach myself all kind of things. And developed a great interest in a number of different things from how to build a street hot rod from the ground up to quantum mechanics, and those two different kinds of mechanics, and it was really in the sciences, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, I would begin looking at these things looking for ideas, but in fact you don't read it for ideas you read it for curiosity and interest in the subject. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 32:Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens - ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 33:How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures forbid them to realize this possibility. 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. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 34:According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’. The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently’. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 35:Similar ecological disasters occurred on almost every one of the thousands of islands that pepper the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Arctic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Archaeologists have discovered on even the tiniest islands evidence of the existence of birds, insects and snails that lived there for countless generations, only to vanish when the first human farmers arrived. None but a few extremely remote islands escaped man’s notice until the modern age, and these islands kept their fauna intact. The Galapagos Islands, to give one famous example, remained uninhabited by humans until the nineteenth century, thus preserving their unique menagerie, including their giant tortoises, which, like the ancient diprotodons, show no fear of humans. The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:The Biology of Belief ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
2:Biology was so damn sexy. ~ Lucy Score, #NFDB
3:Belief creates biology. ~ Norman Cousins, #NFDB
4:Biology always beats will power. ~ Mehmet Oz, #NFDB
5:Politics is applied biology. ~ Ernst Haeckel, #NFDB
6:Love is poetry plus biology. ~ Lawrence Durrell, #NFDB
7:Biology transcends society. ~ Jessie Redmon Fauset, #NFDB
8:Your biography becomes your biology. ~ Caroline Myss, #NFDB
9:Biology enables, Culture forbids. ~ Yuval Noah Harari, #NFDB
10:Love, in its purest form, is biology. ~ Ron Currie Jr, #NFDB
11:What least makes a mother is biology. ~ Oprah Winfrey, #NFDB
12:Biology is destiny only for girls. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick, #NFDB
13:History is biology's dumping ground ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
14:Your biography becomes your biology”—if ~ Caroline Myss, #NFDB
15:biology has become an information science, ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
16:I loved the idea that biology was logical. ~ Cynthia Kenyon, #NFDB
17:There are no monotone "values" in biology. ~ Gregory Bateson, #NFDB
18:Ubiquity must never be mistaken for biology. ~ Phil Zuckerman, #NFDB
19:because our biology always needs something more. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
20:Biology has at least 50 more interesting years. ~ James D Watson, #NFDB
21:Don't know much about history Don't know much biology. ~ Sam Cooke, #NFDB
22:Our reality depends on what our biology is up to. ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
23:The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface. ~ Brian Eno, #NFDB
24:Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother. ~ Oprah Winfrey, #NFDB
25:Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity. ~ George Will, #NFDB
26:Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion. ~ Leon Kass, #NFDB
27:is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
28:We have taken control of biology, but not of ourselves. ~ Sean B Carroll, #NFDB
29:Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
30:It is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
31:The laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history. ~ Ariel Durant, #NFDB
32:The laws of biology are written in the language of diversity. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
33:The major thing is to view biology as an information science. ~ Leroy Hood, #NFDB
34:I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology. ~ Tim O Brien, #NFDB
35:I was a close observer of the developments in molecular biology. ~ John Pople, #NFDB
36:Biology is stupid and cruel and should feel bad about itself. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
37:The Biology of Hope and the Healing Power of the Human Spirit, ~ Brian L Weiss, #NFDB
38:Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light. ~ Delia Owens, #NFDB
39:In geopolitics, as in biology, expiration dates are never visible. ~ John Feffer, #NFDB
40:I've always liked all the sciences like math, physics and biology ~ Sigrid Agren, #NFDB
41:There’s a difference between biology and real love, I’ve learned. ~ Ginger Scott, #NFDB
42:Sexuality is the great field of battle between biology and society. ~ Nancy Friday, #NFDB
43:I remember being in strong physics, physiology and biology classes. ~ Barbara Block, #NFDB
44:I've always hated biology who cares how a cell divides, it just does ~ Sara Shepard, #NFDB
45:My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
46:Where did biology, morality, literature, and philosophy intersect? ~ Paul Kalanithi, #NFDB
47:Culture is how biology responds and makes its living conditions better. ~ C J Cherryh, #NFDB
48:Technology evolves faster than people do, faster than biology does. ~ Chuck Klosterman, #NFDB
49:The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease by Marc Lewis. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
50:Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. ~ Theodosius Dobzhansky, #NFDB
51:It is in our biology, this reptilian feeling of wanting what the next guy has. ~ Ruby Wax, #NFDB
52:The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology. ~ John Maynard Smith, #NFDB
53:There is more to biology than rats, Drosophila, Caenorhabditis, and E. coli. ~ Ernst Mayr, #NFDB
54:My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
55:Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
56:Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology. ~ Ray Comfort, #NFDB
57:In the fight between biology and morality, biology has commonly won in the end. ~ Semir Zeki, #NFDB
58:The use of thermodynamics in biology has a long history rich in confusion. ~ Harold Morowitz, #NFDB
59:Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness ~ Adrienne Rich, #NFDB
60:So how do you do it? Not make a baby, balance an equation. I did biology last year. ~ Hank Green, #NFDB
61:Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license. ~ Erwin Chargaff, #NFDB
62:I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
63:Biology is not destiny; you can be the child of an evil person and be a good person ~ Dennis Prager, #NFDB
64:I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
65:I don't believe in destiny; I just believe in biology, and hotness, and wanting girls. ~ Ned Vizzini, #NFDB
66:One begins to wonder if all the most interesting problems in physics are now in biology. ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
67:On the day that your mentality
Decides to catch up with your biology,
Come 'round ~ Morrissey,#NFDB
68:The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
69:your biography—that is, the experiences that make up your life—becomes your biology. ~ Caroline Myss, #NFDB
70:...until she was old enough to understand about God and biology and luck, she asked. ~ Melissa Senate, #NFDB
71:THE STRIKING CONTRAST In biology we are faced with an entirely different situation. ~ Erwin Schr dinger, #NFDB
72:The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
73:But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
74:The most successful of biology’s creatures coexist in mutually beneficial ecosystems. ~ Douglas Rushkoff, #NFDB
75:Family isn’t a matter of history. Or biology,” he said softly. “It’s a matter of choice. ~ Courtney Milan, #NFDB
76:free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
77:It’s a combination. It’s a combination of electronics and biology. ~ Elon Musk, Human Civilization and AI, #NFDB
78:As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones. ~ Bruce Chatwin, #NFDB
79:I'm not the one going for a biology degree. I'm just a philosophy major who eats people. ~ Scott Westerfeld, #NFDB
80:I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures. ~ Jack Horner, #NFDB
81:If certain Jewish communities had distinctive qualities, they were due to history, not biology. ~ Shlomo Sand, #NFDB
82:When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. ~ Kelly McGonigal, #NFDB
83:I'm sure it's innate, it's just biology, for a man to want a woman who can give him children. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB
84:In his autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, he speaks of the difference between physics and biology: ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
85:there’s a certain lack of respect for physics and biology when you ignore the power of a firearm. ~ L H Thomson, #NFDB
86:Evolutionary biology is crazy because sometimes it seems anybody can draw any conclusion they want. ~ Naomi Wolf, #NFDB
87:I don't find biology as interesting as politics and humanism. I talk more about existential stuff. ~ Dana Carvey, #NFDB
88:For all the accomplishments of molecular biology, we still can't tell a live cat from a dead cat. ~ Lynn Margulis, #NFDB
89:So you’re a parasite?” We like to think of it as symbiotic, but we can discuss biology another time. ~ Wesley Chu, #NFDB
90:I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life - past, present, and future. ~ Rachel Carson, #NFDB
91:In my lab, we're interested in the transition from chemistry to early biology on the early earth. ~ Jack W Szostak, #NFDB
92:Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas. ~ Ian Hacking, #NFDB
93:iGEM is creating that same sort of idea of team-based projects around biology instead of around robots. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
94:Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
95:We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology. ~ Jeremy Rifkin, #NFDB
96:horizon of hope.” “So men and women are doomed forever, by biology, to be separated? To not even own ~ Carolyn Weber, #NFDB
97:I disagree with those who argue that evolutionary biology and the existence of God are incompatible. ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
98:It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love? ~ Celeste Ng, #NFDB
99:Biology isn’t just genes playing out some unalterable script. It is sensitive to the world around it, ~ Bruce D Perry, #NFDB
100:(It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?) ~ Celeste Ng, #NFDB
101:If we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in morals or politics? ~ Auguste Comte, #NFDB
102:It was one thing to defy the laws of biology, but defying the laws of geometry was downright condescending. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
103:A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology. ~ Truman Capote, #NFDB
104:Within all the worlds of biology, she searched for an explanation of why a mother would leave her offspring ~ Delia Owens, #NFDB
105:Within all the worlds of biology, she searched for an explanation of why a mother would leave her offspring. ~ Delia Owens, #NFDB
106:Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
107:In science, if the last 50 years were the age of physics, the next 50 years will be the age of biology. ~ William J Clinton, #NFDB
108:Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook), ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
109:I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Jackson High Biology Department. Stay in school, kids- Link ~ Kami Garcia, #NFDB
110:The miracles of technology cause us to live in a hectic, clockwork world that does violence to human biology, ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
111:Arriving at cell theory has been considered even more important to biology than Darwin’s theory of evolution, ~ Lewis Wolpert, #NFDB
112:Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology. ~ Thomas Cochrane, #NFDB
113:We can truly see that consciousness is operating creatively even in biology, even in the evolution of species. ~ Amit Goswami, #NFDB
114:I have to keep reminding myself -- this is not me. It is chemistry. It is biology. It is not who I am. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
115:The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
116:Weddell/Canaba was still an ass at heart, Miles reflected. But he did know his molecular biology. After ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, #NFDB
117:Biology doesn't make anyone a parent," Cassia added as she tucked her Eturian prayer stone beneath her shirt. ~ Melissa Landers, #NFDB
118:Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being. ~ Walter Gilbert, #NFDB
119:The twentieth century showed us the evil face of physics. This century will show us the evil face of biology. ~ Douglas Preston, #NFDB
120:But biology does not readjust to accommodate the false theories of scientists …’ – James le Fanu, British physician ~ Tim Noakes, #NFDB
121:Civics lessons and biology lessons intermingled, hormones spoken of alongside the laws that governed their excesses. ~ Hugh Howey, #NFDB
122:Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love. ~ Edward Hoagland, #NFDB
123:In fact perhaps the only law in biology is that all flesh is mortal and all species become extinct eventually. ~ Richard Lewontin, #NFDB
124:What was that?" Galladon demanded. "I think I just destroyed the biology section" Raoden replied with wonder. ~ Brandon Sanderson, #NFDB
125:You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
126:Antoine was Julien’s father in every way that mattered. It is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
127:If molecular biology was about attention to detail and particularity, bioinformatics is about generality and totality. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
128:I've always been interested in science - one of my favourite books is James Watson's 'Molecular Biology of the Gene.' ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
129:I wonder how biology can explain the physical pain you feel in your chest when all you want to do is be with someone. ~ Dan Howell, #NFDB
130:Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
131:Most likely, logic is capable of justifying mathematics to no greater extent than biology is capable of justifying life. ~ IU I Manin, #NFDB
132:The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible. ~ John Shelby Spong, #NFDB
133:The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry. ~ Francis Crick, #NFDB
134:Geology differs from physics, chemistry, and biology in that the possibilities for experiment are limited. ~ Reinout Willem van Bemmelen, #NFDB
135:Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow. ~ Lewis Thomas, #NFDB
136:But the poetry of biology resides hidden in opposing tensions, and the often arduous fun comes from trying to reveal it. ~ Bernd Heinrich, #NFDB
137:By means of the notion of “cultural evolution,” the democratic anthropologist tries to avoid questions of biology. ~ Nicol s G mez D vila, #NFDB
138:Until we recognize the essential role of biology, our attempts to truly unify the universe will remain a train to nowhere. ~ Robert Lanza, #NFDB
139:you choose to help others, you activate this state. Caring for others triggers the biology of courage and creates hope. ~ Kelly McGonigal, #NFDB
140:Biology can be said to define possibilities but not determine them; it is never irrelevant but it is also not determinant. ~ Cordelia Fine, #NFDB
141:If westerners cannot legitimately study the history of Africa or the Middle East, then only fish can study marine biology. ~ Bernard Lewis, #NFDB
142:We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
143:you don’t need to understand any of the biology, just as you don’t need to understand radiation to use a microwave oven. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
144:Biology keeps culture on a leash, which is why you can’t teach a dog to play poker, never mind all those lying paintings. ~ Gregory Cochran, #NFDB
145:Biology will tell you a lot of things, but there are many that it can not explain and you need to look at physics instead. ~ Walter Gilbert, #NFDB
146:Half a million women die each year around the world in pregnancy. It's not biology that kills them so much as neglect. ~ Nicholas D Kristof, #NFDB
147:Are we biology or God or something higher? I know my heart beats and I listen to it. The beat is biology, but what is the song? ~ James Frey, #NFDB
148:I see psychoanalysis, art and biology ultimately coming together, just like cognitive psychology and neuroscience have merged. ~ Eric Kandel, #NFDB
149:We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness... ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
150:Applied physics and chemistry bring more grist to the mill; applied biology will also be capable of changing the mill itself. ~ Julian Huxley, #NFDB
151:Are we biology or God or something higher? I know my heart beats and I listen to it. The beat is biology, but what is the song? ~ James Frey, #NFDB
152:Honestly, I didn't have the patience for biology or history in an academic sense, but I always liked the kind of big questions. ~ Andrew Bird, #NFDB
153:Life is too short to hold in a single tear, a single laugh, a single breath. Biology is how we exist. Emotions are how we live. ~ Jewel E Ann, #NFDB
154:you are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
155:You are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change. ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
156:I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning. ~ Steve Jobs, #NFDB
157:Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
158:Mothers are hormonally wired to respond to, not ignore, their baby’s cries. (Fathers, take note: You can’t argue with biology!) ~ William Sears, #NFDB
159:autoimmune diseases suggests they originate from fundamental disconnect between the outside world and an understimulated biology. ~ Scott Carney, #NFDB
160:Every pair of hands freed means a brain freed for thought. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, #NFDB
161:I learned about HeLa cells in my first basic biology class, and I just became completely obsessed with them from that point on. ~ Rebecca Skloot, #NFDB
162:She said stupidity runs in the Y chromosome. I learned in biology that the X chromosome is for the females and Y for the males, s— ~ Layla Hagen, #NFDB
163:Biology tells us that we are animals, and like all living things we exist only because we capture energy from our surroundings. When ~ Ian Morris, #NFDB
164:We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
165:Don't know much about history, don't know much biology, don't know much about a science book, don't know much about the French I took. ~ Sam Cooke, #NFDB
166:It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets. ~ Alastair Reynolds, #NFDB
167:Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action. ~ Francis Crick, #NFDB
168:There is no true understanding of Biology without Chemistry. And there's no true understanding of Chemistry without Physics. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
169:We are well on our way to a unified theory of biology that will merge body and environment, brain and mind, genome and microbiome. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
170:when you thumb your nose at the laws of physics like you've been doing, the universe tends to get you back through biology." Atticus ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
171:At the time I finished high school, I was determined to study biology, deeply convinced to eventually be a researcher. ~ Christiane Nusslein Volhard, #NFDB
172:If you look at winners of the Nobel Prize in biology, you'll find a fair smattering of people who don't know how to work a pipette. ~ Aubrey de Grey, #NFDB
173:But honestly, if you do a rigorous survey of my work, I'll bet you'll find that biology is a theme far more often than physical science. ~ David Brin, #NFDB
174:The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand. ~ James D Watson, #NFDB
175:Freud's antique notion of women as diminished men is quite wrong. Biology instead reveals every man's battle to escape the woman within. ~ Steve Jones, #NFDB
176:The supersession of dualism in biology begins to occur in this science at the moment when the ‘time’ factor is taken into consideration. ~ Jean Gebser, #NFDB
177:Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy? ~ Auguste Comte, #NFDB
178:So we've moved from an era when women's biology was women's destiny to today, which is an era in which men's biology is men's destiny. ~ Warren Farrell, #NFDB
179:The discovery of any kind of life [in Space] at all would be a tremendous watershed moment in biology, as well as all of science. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
180:The supersession of dualism in biology begins to occur in this science at the moment when the ‘time’ factor is taken into consideration. ~ Jean Gebser, #NFDB
181:During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists’ understanding of mutations in DNA. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
182:I like to surf. I like to play guitar. I want to do college classes online. I wanted to do marine biology for a long time, but I don't know. ~ Ali Lohan, #NFDB
183:Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material. ~ Jeff Koons, #NFDB
184:Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
185:If you are lying in a tent in the Congo jungle, you don't want to be reading about rainforest biology. You want to be in a distant world. ~ David Quammen, #NFDB
186:The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology -- the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically. ~ Edward Abbey, #NFDB
187:If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons. ~ James A Baldwin, #NFDB
188:You cannot fully describe what it is to be a person in the language of biology; but that does not mean a person has non-biological parts. ~ Julian Baggini, #NFDB
189:Anything that becomes digitized (biology, medicine, manufacturing, and so forth) hops on Moore’s law of increasing computational power. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
190:Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
191:Evolution makes biology make sense. And if you don't teach your students the evolutionary core of biology, you're making it harder for them. ~ Eugenie Scott, #NFDB
192:For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
193:If it squirms, it's biology; if it stinks, it's chemistry; if it doesn't work, it's physics; and if you can't understand it, it's mathematics. ~ Magnus Pyke, #NFDB
194:Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
195:The blooming of a flower is, in my mind, not a miracle. It's something that we can understand on the basis of molecular biology these days. ~ Francis Collins, #NFDB
196:I'm enjoying my life, post-menopause, so much. It's just so great to grow into yourself, and not be bothered with all that tyranny of biology. ~ Roseanne Barr, #NFDB
197:In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
198:Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture. ~ Daniel Dennett, #NFDB
199:Sex Ed - when I finally got to take it - was all about biology and birth control and nothing about anything that actually goes on between people. ~ E Lockhart, #NFDB
200:he published a manifesto with a title Darwinists have been quoting ever since: “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.”78 ~ Tom Wolfe, #NFDB
201:Last week during Life Drawing, Ms Franklin asked me if I'd ever considered majoring in art instead of biology.
I asked her for a new eraser. ~ Michael Grant,#NFDB
202:The gene provides an organizing principle for modern biology—and it tantalizes us with the prospect of controlling our bodies and fates. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
203:The separation of psychology from the premises of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
204:Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third. ~ Thomas Huxley, #NFDB
205:In polite society what you say to an attractive woman who is dressed in a way that makes you understand the power of biology is, "You look nice. ~ Joe R Lansdale, #NFDB
206:It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
207:Mechanism and function are the eternal yin and yang of biology: they interact and intertwine, yet there is no greater sin than confusing the two. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
208:My fascination is broadly with biology and the fact that our increased understanding of biology allows for breakthroughs in a broad set of diseases. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
209:Up high, biology vanishes to reveal a world shaped by the starker forces of geology and meteorology, the bare bones of the earth wrapped in sky. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
210:Computer science is to biology what calculus is to physics. It's the natural mathematical technique that best maps the character of the subject. ~ Harold Morowitz, #NFDB
211:It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous. ~ Brene Brown, #NFDB
212:The biology of empathy allows us to comprehend our connection to each other, to other living things, and to the physical world that supports life. ~ George Lakoff, #NFDB
213:Whatever prompted life to begin, it happened just once. That is the most extraordinary fact in biology, perhaps the most extraordinary fact we know. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
214:Computer science needs to be part of the core curriculum - like algebra, biology, physics, or chemistry. We need all schools to teach it, not just 10%. ~ Brad Feld, #NFDB
215:These hands are yours. You can use them
for good, or for evil. And no amount of nature, biology, or DNA determines those
decisions for you. ~ Sylvain Reynard,#NFDB
216:We must [it has been arued] go beyond reductionism to a holistic recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
217:Biology is more like history than it is like physics. You have to know the past to understand the present. And you have to know it in exquisite detail. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
218:When you have really solid biology and medical science at the core of an issue, it makes it much easier to identify what potential solutions may be. ~ James Redford, #NFDB
219:I started taking a basic biology course, and I really loved it. I started asking research questions incessantly. I was drawn very quickly to biology. ~ James Rothman, #NFDB
220:After an extensive interview he arranged for my weaknesses in foreign languages to be over-looked and so I started a Biology degree at Birmingham in 1967. ~ Paul Nurse, #NFDB
221:Databases, ontologies, and visual representations tie informatic genomes to the specific practices of computers, computational biology, and bioinformatics. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
222:I can't be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It's at that level. ~ Donald Knuth, #NFDB
223:What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
224:Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
225:The Department of Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins was founded and directed by Tom Pollard, an engaging young scientist with remarkable energy and enthusiasm. ~ Peter Agre, #NFDB
226:Whether it's in an inner-city school or a rural community, I want those students to have a chance to take A.P. biology and A.P. physics and marine biology. ~ Arne Duncan, #NFDB
227:it will explore the consequences of the evolution theory for a particular issue. My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism. Apart ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
228:To what extent is someone at fault if his brain is damaged in ways about which he has no choice? After all, we are not independent of our biology, right? ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
229:What an evolutionary approach does not involve, however, is any notion that all behaviour is genetically determined and that our biology is our destiny. ~ Robin I M Dunbar, #NFDB
230:But biology and computer science - life and computation - are related. I am confident that at their interface great discoveries await those who seek them. ~ Leonard Adleman, #NFDB
231:Every psychological explanation comes sooner or later to lean either on biology or on logic (or on sociology, but this in turn leads to the same alternatives). ~ Jean Piaget, #NFDB
232:Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind's self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind's existence is contingent upon the geological consent of the planet. ~ George Will, #NFDB
233:It's a lot like a biology study date,' I told my reflection nonchalantly. 'Only... Without the biology and studying.'
Biology studydate... ~ Becca Fitzpatrick,#NFDB
234:that nothing in biology made sense except in the light of evolution and chance, contingency. He put everything in the context of deep evolutionary time. Steve ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
235:The specific areas of science that I have explored most over the years are subatomic physics, cosmology, and biology, including neuroscience and psychology. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
236:The work of both Piaget and Kinsey suggests that while biology is always a dominant influence on behavior, environment is critical to its expression. Even ~ Tom Butler Bowdon, #NFDB
237:For nine months I grew a human being inside my belly and then I pushed it out my vagina and now I'm feeding it with my boob. Biology is so fucking weird. ~ Heather B Armstrong, #NFDB
238:It was a stunning result. Years later, long after these children had left home, this short intervention at age 11 was still dramatically affecting their biology. ~ Jo Marchant, #NFDB
239:The fact that the mind rules the body is, in spite of its neglect by biology and medicine, the most fundamental fact which we know about the process of life. ~ Franz Alexander, #NFDB
240:Thus, physics and astronomy relegated our world to a corner of the cosmos, and biology shifted our status from a simulacrum of God to a naked, upright ape. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
241:You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
242: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. ~ Thomas Cech, #NFDB
243:In the midst of chaos and death, a new family had been forged. One that as chosen as opposed to an accident of biology—and for that reason, more abiding and enduring. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
244:Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine, #NFDB
245:The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well. ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
246:We didn't stay in the caves. We haven't stayed on the planet. With biotechnology, gene sequencing, we are not going to even stay within the limitations of biology. ~ Jason Silva, #NFDB
247:But the main lesson we can extract from biology is that it’s better to cultivate a team of populations that attack the problem in different, overlapping manners. ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
248:Keep in mind that right and wrong are not matters of opinion. They are principles we must discover and apply. They are laws of biology for intelligent species ~ Richard J Maybury, #NFDB
249:The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue. ~ Stewart Brand, #NFDB
250:It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
251:I don't think biology is replacing the feeling experienced through art. Biology is capable of giving additional insights. It's a parallel, not a substitutive process. ~ Eric Kandel, #NFDB
252:we are not learning from a mere thousand days, but benefiting, thanks to evolution, from the learning of our ancestors—which found its way into our biology. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
253:Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed ~ John Maynard Smith, #NFDB
254:The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
255:With continued progress in the rapidly growing field known as pharmacogenetics, it will become possible to prescribe drugs based on each patient's own unique biology. ~ Gary F Marcus, #NFDB
256:From the sociological point of view, mankind is not an aggregation, but forms a structural whole. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, #NFDB
257:My thinking is very flexible, and I hope that it will remain flexible and creative as long as biology permits me to think and that I will remain a rebel all my life. ~ Murray Bookchin, #NFDB
258:I don't endorse deism or interventionist theism. My point is just that evolutionary biology is logically compatible with the former and with some versions of the latter. ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
259:Philosophers of biology generally recognize that evolutionary fitness (roughly, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment) is multiply realizable. ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
260:Indeed, some leading scientists, such as Dr. Thomas Seyfried, a professor of biology at Boston College, have proposed a yearly seven-day water-only fast for this very reason. ~ Jason Fung, #NFDB
261:I really wanted to be a doctor, until my freshman year of college when I realized that while I was good at chemistry and biology, I really wasn't feeling challenged by it. ~ Marissa Mayer, #NFDB
262:It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
263:So I told the lady Biology and high school were useless crap, I was going to get a job, and I was never coming back to school.
And I didn’t.
Yeah, I sure showed them. ~ Diana Rowland,#NFDB
264:We are not victims of our biology or circumstances. How we react to the events and circumstances of life can have an enormous impact on our mental and even physical health. ~ Caroline Leaf, #NFDB
265: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. ~ Jeremiah P Ostriker, #NFDB
266:Housekeeping comprises the ability to find, evaluate, and use information about nutrition, cooking, chemistry and biology, health, comfort, laundry, cleaning, and safety. ~ Cheryl Mendelson, #NFDB
267:I leaned in closer, like a fool, like someone who had not had months of survival training or ever studied biology. Someone tricked into thinking that words should be read. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
268:Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology. ~ Jonathan Sacks, #NFDB
269:Looking to biology to explain the low prevalence of eating disorders among men is like looking to genetics to explain why nonsmokers do not get lung cancer as often as smokers. ~ Susan Bordo, #NFDB
270:Of course language arose in a Darwinian biological world, because that's all there is, but that world relates only superficially to the pop-biology that circulates informally. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
271:the recent discovery that your habits and emotions can impact your biology so deeply that it causes changes in the genes that are transmitted to the next several generations. ~ Daniel G Amen, #NFDB
272:Although in principle we know the equations that govern the whole of biology, we have not been able to reduce the study of human behavior to a branch of applied mathematics. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
273:biology is usually called upon to justify a society based on selfish principles, but we should never forget that it has also produced the glue that holds communities together. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
274:It will be in the convergence of evolutionary biology, developmental biology and cancer biology that the answer to cancer will lie. Nor will this confluence be a one-way street. ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
275:Life and consciousness are no longer chance anomalies in nature; rather, we find in biology a complement to the physics of matter. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere, #NFDB
276:Consciousness properly so-called is the property specific to very large complexes; it is a result of them. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, #NFDB
277:I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism. ~ Francis Crick, #NFDB
278:The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith? ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
279:half of our happiness is determined by factors other than biology. Ten percent is connected to “life circumstances” and the other 40 percent is dependent on our life decisions. It ~ Joel Osteen, #NFDB
280:God, there's teaching biology and teaching sexuality, and it's two separate things. They mix it and make it more of a morality thing where it's like, "A man and woman have a baby." ~ Jen Kirkman, #NFDB
281:I was 12 or 13 years old. So I started to write poetry and fiction, even though I was really into biology because my dad was a science teacher. I kept writing all those years. ~ Darren Aronofsky, #NFDB
282:My first class is biology. I can't find it and get my first demerit for wandering the hall. It is 8:50 in the morning. Only 699 days and 7 class periods until graduation. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson, #NFDB
283:The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I am also indebted to The Biology of Cancer by Robert A. Weinberg, and to Josh Sundquist, Marshall Urist, and Jonneke Hollanders, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
284:I try to show the public that chemistry, biology, physics, astrophysics is life. It is not some separate subject that you have to be pulled into a corner to be taught about. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
285:man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That’s the intrinsic blueprint for our ‘ethical behavior,’” he argued. “It’s pure biology. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
286:Computer science … jobs should be way more interesting than even going to Wall Street or being a lawyer--or, I can argue, than anything but perhaps biology, and there it's just a tie. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
287:Biology has progressed tremendously due to the model that Darwin put forth. But the black boxes Darwin accepted are now being opened, and our view of the world is again being shaken. ~ Michael Behe, #NFDB
288:If you prefer an “academic life” as a retreat from reality, do not go into biology. This field is for a man or woman who wishes to get even closer to life. —Hermann Muller We ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
289:One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
290:The fact that the mind rules the body is, in spite of its neglect by biology and medicine, the most fundamental fact which we know about the process of life. — FRANZ ALEXANDER, M. D. ~ Lissa Rankin, #NFDB
291:So it seems to me there are two big unknowns at the very heart of biology today: why life evolved in the perplexing way it did, and why cells are powered in such a peculiar fashion. This ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
292:The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. ~ Rachel Carson, #NFDB
293:"Tiger is a natural kind" and "Tiger is a historical particular" are incompatible with each other, and evolutionary biology provides a reason for favoring the latter over the former. ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
294:Industry is not accidental but constitutes an event that can entail the most far-reaching spiritual consequences. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, #NFDB
295:I trained initially as a physical chemist, and then, after becoming interested in biology, I went to medical school and learned how to be a physician. So, I'm a physician scientist. ~ Francis Collins, #NFDB
296:It's funny but when young people say to me "what can I study to be a force for change, should I study law or biology or business?" My answer is music, drama, journalism, communications. ~ Paul Watson, #NFDB
297:The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences. ~ Daniel Dennett, #NFDB
298:A strong feeling of adventure is animating those who are working on bacterial viruses, a feeling that they have a small part in the great drive towards a fundamental problem in biology. ~ Max Delbruck, #NFDB
299:This overall flow of genetic information—from DNA to RNA to protein—is known as the central dogma of molecular biology, and it is the language used to communicate and express life. ~ Jennifer A Doudna, #NFDB
300:Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
301:I can see no practical application of molecular biology to human affairs... DNA is a tangled mass of linear molecules in which the informational content is quite inaccessible. ~ Frank Macfarlane Burnet, #NFDB
302:To address questions of scientific responsibility does not necessarily imply that one needs technical competence in a particular field (e.g. biology) to evaluate certain technical matters. ~ Serge Lang, #NFDB
303:Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience, ~ Andrew Solomon, #NFDB
304:What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital...the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
305:Berg to discuss the advances that were being made in gene splicing and recombinant DNA. Berg described how difficult it was to do experiments in a biology lab, where it could take weeks ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
306:Evolutionary biology is genuinely scientific, but more than that it opens the door to a world more marvellous than any Christian fundamentalist has ever read into the pages of the Bible. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
307:I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
308:There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology. ~ Israel Gelfand, #NFDB
309:To conquer your biology, stop seeing people sexually and start seeing them as family. In our day, we have really a perverted notion where it's like strangers and potential sexual objects. ~ Mark Driscoll, #NFDB
310:Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world. We can store an incredible amount of data very cheaply. ~ Sergey Brin, #NFDB
311:I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper. ~ Dave Eggers, #NFDB
312:Maybe the best we can hope for is that those we leave behind find comfort in knowing, that we’re born out of love, and not science. That biology explains the how, but love explains the why ~ Shane Koyczan, #NFDB
313:The good news was that "biology" turned out to be the magic password for working at the Museum of Natural History, just the way "art history" would at the Met or "trust fund" at the MoMA. ~ Sloane Crosley, #NFDB
314:Decades of rigorous testing of girls and boys confirm that there are few psychological differences between the sexes, and that the differences seen are heavily shaped by culture, not biology. ~ Angela Saini, #NFDB
315:Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. ~ Michael Crichton, #NFDB
316:She’s just a little faint,” I reassured Mrs. Hammond. “They’re blood typing in biology.” She nodded, understanding now. “There’s always one.” I stifled a laugh. Trust Bella to be that one. ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
317:We know from biology that new forms of organisms simulate their primitive form as closely as possible at first, even though obliged to exist under changed internal and external conditions. ~ Wilhelm Ostwald, #NFDB
318:But just like living under chronic stress is unhealthy, trying to control every aspect of your thoughts, emotions, and behavior is a toxic strategy. It is too big a burden for your biology. ~ Kelly McGonigal, #NFDB
319:We’re at a moment in human history when the marriage of our biology and our technology will transcend the brain’s limitations. We can hack our own hardware to steer a course into the future. ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
320:For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline - biology - to the design table. It's not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now. ~ Janine Benyus, #NFDB
321:Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, arguably the greatest discovery in biology in the twentieth century, famously said, “If you want to understand function, study structure. ~ David J Linden, #NFDB
322:Thoughts are an important part of your inner wisdom and they are very powerful. A thought held long enough and repeated often enough becomes a belief. A belief then becomes your biology. ~ Christiane Northrup, #NFDB
323:Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body - you thoughts, your actions, your food - the thing you feed your life. ~ Caroline Myss, #NFDB
324:All I hope for is one moment of rational thought and a shot at action before I'm lost to a great saddening madness, pithed at the hands of my own stumbling biology.
[Johnny Truant] ~ Mark Z Danielewski,#NFDB
325:And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry. ~ Michael Polanyi, #NFDB
326:The school was very supportive. The only class that I had to attend every day was biology when we were doing dissections. I would take an 8 a.m. bio class, dissect my animal, and then run to work. ~ Mila Kunis, #NFDB
327:Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. ~ Terry Eagleton, #NFDB
328:It is all too easy to accept emotions as primitive "givens" and proceed toward a superficial understanding based on words, arbitrary definitions, and the quiddities of logic rather than biology. ~ Jaak Panksepp, #NFDB
329:Although there are occasions when it is more pronounced and awful and occasions when it is actually horrific, trauma does not just happen to a few unlucky people. It is the bedrock of our biology. ~ Mark Epstein, #NFDB
330:Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
331:How do people stay in love, anyway? Is it a choice? Or is it like those plants we studied in biology that mutate into something new and totally different but are still part of the same plant family? ~ Libba Bray, #NFDB
332:This is absolutely correct and forms part of the larger concept that top-down causation is a key factor not just in the way the brain works but in broader contexts in biology and even physics. ~ George F R Ellis, #NFDB
333:This week, Georgia's board of education approved a plan that allows teachers to keep using the word Evolution when teaching biology. Though, as a compromise, dinosaurs are now called Jesus Horses. ~ Jimmy Fallon, #NFDB
334:Yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well. ~ James Hillman, #NFDB
335:I can’t be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It’s at that level. ~ Donald Knuth (1993) Computer Literacy Bookshops Interview, #NFDB
336:In biology, fungus is a kingdom unto itself, a documented land of rot and decay, a place for yeasts and molds and spores and every manner of thing that grows in the dark, a fairy tale gone wrong. ~ A S A Harrison, #NFDB
337:She’s just a little faint,” I reassured Mrs. Hammond. “They’re blood typing in biology.”
She nodded, understanding now. “There’s always one.”
I stifled a laugh. Trust Bella to be that one. ~ Stephenie Meyer,#NFDB
338:There wasn’t much there—just Macy’s school texts, various biology and anatomy and nursing tomes. Fascinating stuff, I’m sure. Especially the one on thanatochemistry, whatever the hell that was. ~ Kelley Armstrong, #NFDB
339:With my biology degree, I got this job at an environmental lab. We tested sewage runoff, we tested chemical warfare waste runoff. It's a job I'll never do again and I would never wish upon anybody. ~ Dustin Lynch, #NFDB
340:her down. She was limited by biology and her flightsuit. Dwelling on her own constraints gave Molly another crazy idea. She recognized the old Tchung ship designs they were up against. If the missiles ~ Hugh Howey, #NFDB
341:And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite, sketchy, but not entirely obliterated: free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
342:While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research. ~ Francis Crick, #NFDB
343:Usually based on an economic agenda, white working-class voters don't buy into this whole biology-chemistry-abortion-gender agenda as much as they want more take-home pay. They want affordability. ~ Kellyanne Conway, #NFDB
344:Chaitin proved that physical laws alone, for example, could not explain chemistry or biology, because the laws of physics contain drastically less information than do chemical or biological phenomena. ~ George Gilder, #NFDB
345:We poor mortals, we fellow sufferers, are such victims of biology that we fill our lives with guilt about natural acts…and that we all have the goal of extricating ourselves from the thralldom of sex. ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB
346:Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. ~ Theodosius Dobzhansky, #NFDB
347:The first thing that the boy called Smoke told Nick Waters was: “Your biology book’s in my locker. The combination is 5-3-5.” And the second thing he said was: “I didn’t do that fire, man. I’m innocent. ~ Carl Hiaasen, #NFDB
348:virus. In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. ~ Richard Preston, #NFDB
349:Biology can be divided into the study of proximate causes, the study of the physiological sciences (broadly conceived), and into the study of ultimate (evolutionary) causes, the subject of natural history. ~ Ernst Mayr, #NFDB
350:mostly I saw her efforts to induct me into adulthood much as a calf might see its mother’s explanations of veal: I was being recruited into the great death march of biology—be born, reproduce, die. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich, #NFDB
351:The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
352:At that moment, I truly was in awe - of the way Darren and I had created a person together, of the way genetics made her look like me, of the way biology works to make this moment of happiness possible. ~ Jill Santopolo, #NFDB
353:bi·sex·u·al adj. sexually attracted to both men and women. [BIOLOGY] having characteristics of both sexes. n. a person who is sexually attracted to both men and women. bi·sex·u·al·i·tyn. ~ Oxford University Press, #NFDB
354:I like to read general biology - things about the immune system and advances in that area - because it lays the foundation for my part of the dialogue at the foundation about what things we ought to pursue. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
355:It's amazing how many of the things needed for a basic biology lab are capable of blowing up, if you're willing to try very, very hard, and don't much care about possibly losing a few fingers in the process. ~ Mira Grant, #NFDB
356:Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our 'ethical behavior,'" he argued. "It's pure biology. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
357:Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That’s the intrinsic blueprint for our ‘ethical behavior,’” he argued. “It’s pure biology. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
358:The biology of emotional freedom depends on getting your endorphins flowing and turning off your stress hormones. How you achieve this? Laughter, exercise, meditation and doing anything that makes you loved. ~ Judith Orloff, #NFDB
359:If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction. ~ A Bartlett Giamatti, #NFDB
360:If you were standing in the path of the beam, you would obviously die pretty quickly. You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics. ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
361:mutations. The Baldwin effect, also known as dual inheritance theory, brings culture and biology together and seeks to explain those evolutionary changes that can’t be explained by either one on their own. ~ Daniel L Everett, #NFDB
362:The only two approaches to dealing with uncertainty are design and default. When you operate by default, your biology, which is wired for comfort, wins out and you almost always end up squarely in the gray zone. ~ Todd Henry, #NFDB
363:I cannot think of a single field in biology or medicine in which we can claim genuine understanding, and it seems to me the more we learn about living creatures, especially ourselves, the stranger life becomes. ~ Lewis Thomas, #NFDB
364:Influenced by him, and probably even more so by my brother Theodore a year older than me, I soon became interested in biology and developed a respect for the importance of science and the scientific method. ~ Frederick Sanger, #NFDB
365:Richard either didn't hear me, or chose to ignore it. Smart, handsome, junior high science teacher, degree in preternatural biology, what more could i ask for? Give me a minute and I'd think of something. ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
366:Extreme heroism springs from something that no scientific theory can fully explain; it's an illogical impulse that flies in the face of biology, psychology, actuarial statistics, and basic common sense. ~ Christopher McDougall, #NFDB
367:If you want to become a biologist, it doesn't help to go into the Harvard biology library and all the information is there for you. You have to know what to look for and the internet is the same, just magnified. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
368:High school was interesting, because I went from a public school middle school to an academy where the first year we were doing Latin, chemistry, biology. I mean, I was woefully unprepared for the type of study. ~ Kyle Chandler, #NFDB
369:I want to know where joy lives. I'd interview scientists, religious leaders and heads of state. I'd want to find out exactly what makes people happy. I'd want to look into the biology, the chemistry of the human brain. ~ Goldie, #NFDB
370:we still have a long way to go in terms of creating a rock-solid science that could match the certainty of, say, physics and biology. In the meantime, we all need a personal theory of what makes people tick. ~ Tom Butler Bowdon, #NFDB
371:We use words like sister and aunt as if they describe rigid laws of biology. But despite our genetic essentialism, these laws are really only rules of thumb. Under the right conditions, they can be readily broken. ~ Carl Zimmer, #NFDB
372:Opera stars know that biology is destiny. Sometime in their 50s or early 60s, the powerful, flexible and ultimately mysterious instrument that has been the source of their artistry frays, cracks and disappears. ~ Michael A Walsh, #NFDB
373:The brain is biology's greatest challenge. Perhaps in a sense it is the greatest challenge for science as a whole, beyond moon landings, the ultimate particles of the physicist and the depths of astronomical space. ~ Steven Rose, #NFDB
374:To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation. ~ Derrick Jensen, #NFDB
375:I have spent a lifetime running from it, trying to forget, but now I see what a waste all that was. Antoine was Julien’s father in every way that mattered. It is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
376:Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises. ~ Albert Memmi, #NFDB
377:Women of all groups were measurably more likely than their male counterparts to vote for equality, health, and education, and against violence as a way of solving conflict. It wasn't about biology, but experience. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
378:Most of us experience gender conditioning so young—research shows it begins in infancy—that we misunderstand the relationship between nature and nurture, culture and biology, fitting in and being oneself. ~ Thomas Page McBee, #NFDB
379:Success is deeply rooted in time and place. You may have the drive to read tons of books on biology. But if there are no books on biology in your library, and the library is never open, your drive is meaningless. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
380:What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
381:Altruism has always been one of biology's deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else? ~ Lewis Thomas, #NFDB
382:Herbert Read thought we would need a mystical theory to connect beauty and function. Well, it took one hundred years, but today we have that theory, one based in biology, neuroscience, and psychology, not mysticism. ~ Donald A Norman, #NFDB
383:Now we see evolutionary trends in a variety of areas ranging from atomic and molecular physics through fluid mechanics, chemistry and biology to large scale systems of relevance in environmental and economic sciences ~ Ilya Prigogine, #NFDB
384:Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
385:I think people who have all kinds of debilitating mobility issues will benefit from robotic augmentation. That is even before we get into organ replacement and organ printing and synthetic biology and so on and so forth. ~ Jason Silva, #NFDB
386:What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpretty fact of biology. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
387:It's also important that I, or [Producer] Karen Pritzker, also say that this film [ "Resilience: The Biology of Stress & the Science of Hope"] is not going to singlehandedly solve crime and poverty, or make big changes. ~ James Redford, #NFDB
388:Biology: how the physical body functions • Psychology: developmental issues and thought patterns • Social connections: social support and current life situation • Spiritual health: what life means ~ Daniel G Amen, #NFDB
389:Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
390:If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
391:Rippon, Fine, Jordan-Young, and Kaiser have argued that biology and society are “entangled”—that they work in concert with each other, through mechanisms like plasticity, to create the complicated picture we call “gender. ~ Angela Saini, #NFDB
392:If mathematics ability were rooted in biology and sex differences were fixed, then we wouldn’t expect to see these changes over time. What’s more, we would expect the differences to be the same everywhere. And they’re not. ~ Angela Saini, #NFDB
393:Our mating is chemistry and biology. My body, my blood, needs you on a fundamental level. You. Your body brings me peace, comfort. Your blood restores my immortality and humanity. But I wanted you before this, Shayla. ~ Laura Kaye, #NFDB
394:Some ... sexist evil probably predates religion and can be ascribed to our biology, but there is no question that religion promulgates and renders sacrosanct attitudes toward women that would be unseemly in a brachiating ape. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
395:The pace of progress in biology creates a foundation that naturally gets picked up by the biotech and pharmaceutical industry to solve rich-world diseases. This is attractive science. It's science that people want to work on. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
396:A 70-year-old who takes good care of herself can have the biology of a 40-year-old. Conversely, a hard-living 30-year-old who has been inattentive to his health and well-being may have the biology of a man many years older. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
397:studying biology” was our code word for visiting the brothel. We remembered there was a sign on the front of the mansion, READING CRESCENT HOTEL-RESTAURANT, and that the girls had botanical aliases—Flower, Leaf, Daphne, Rose. ~ Orhan Pamuk, #NFDB
398:The genetic code is a product of biology and is messy, illogical and inelegant. It is highly redundant, but to bewilderingly varied degrees: one amino acid (leucine) has six codons, whereas another (tryptophan) has only one. ~ Matthew Cobb, #NFDB
399:When brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to. ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
400:My undergraduate degree was in history, and I wish I had been smart enough to really excel at maths, physics, chemistry or biology because... the voyagers and adventurers and real contributors - that's where they come from. ~ Michael Moritz, #NFDB
401:Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution. ~ Daniel Dennett, #NFDB
402:Throughout history we humans have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of our human condition. Neither philosophy, nor psychology nor biology has, until now, been able to provide the truthful explanation. ~ Jeremy Griffith, #NFDB
403:Biology is destiny, and destiny is digital, and in this case binary. It was bleakly simple. No one exclaims at the moment of one’s dazzling coming-out, It’s a person! Instead: It’s a girl, It’s a boy. Pink or blue. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
404:Darwinism is still very much alive, utterly dominating biology. Despite the fact that no one has ever been able to prove the creation of a single distinct species by Darwinist means, Darwinism dominates the academy and the media. ~ Ben Stein, #NFDB
405:In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple. ~ Richard Preston, #NFDB
406:[When asked by a student if he believes in any gods]
Oh, no. Absolutely not... The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand. ~ James D Watson,#NFDB
407:The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. Officially, you owe each other nothing. ~ Tim Kreider, #NFDB
408:In Darwin's time all of biology was a black box: not only the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity, but every biological structure and function because, ultimately, no one could explain how biological processes occurred. ~ Michael Behe, #NFDB
409:It wasn’t desire, it was biology. My body was adapting to the situation. Doing what it needed to survive. That, I was certain of. Because if I had liked it, liked the hands of this monster, that would have made me a monster too. ~ A Zavarelli, #NFDB
410:Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
411:We are not victims of our biology. We are co-creators of our destiny alongside God. God leads, but we have to choose to let God lead. We have been designed to create thoughts, and from these we live out our lives (Prov. 23:7). ~ Caroline Leaf, #NFDB
412:But sometimes it's so incidental that these people are the parents. Beyond the biology of it. It's not as if they had to pass a test or unlock achievements to be the ones making the decisions. Sometimes they're actually stupid. ~ Mary H K Choi, #NFDB
413:When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to. ~ David Eagleman, #NFDB
414:There are many accidents of biology that are beyond our control. Some of us are short, some of us are tall. Some of us are weak, some of us are strong. Thankfully, though, personalities are not born ugly; they are learned ugly. ~ Philip C Stead, #NFDB
415:So what we can answer [as geneticists] is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it - the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology. ~ Spencer Wells, #NFDB
416:I have always loved marine biology and that is what I studied in school. I am hoping to build a marine sanctuary that will also be educational, an eco preserve and a school, perhaps in Costa Rica, that is one of my dreams and goals. ~ Paul Walker, #NFDB
417:Man is a being characterized by hands and a brain: he is a cerebro-manual—and cannot we recognize this character of cerebrality and manuality in global mankind? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, #NFDB
418:God is an energy, rather than an anthropomorphic being, and God's language is biology. Red blood cells, the principle of magnetic attraction, neurological synapse: each is a miracle, and in each is the presence and flow of God. ~ Guillermo del Toro, #NFDB
419:Bruce conducted some groundbreaking experiments showing that our genes do not control biology. The idea that genes control biology is a faulty scientific assumption that was debunked by the Human Genome Project around the year 2003, a ~ Louise L Hay, #NFDB
420:The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology. ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
421:We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things. ~ Richard Lewontin, #NFDB
422:Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
423:I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn't that fascinating. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich, #NFDB
424:A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
425:I think that local school districts - not the federal government - should make the decision about how they teach science, biology, economics. I want my kids to be taught about evolution; I want my kids to be taught about other theories. ~ Bobby Jindal, #NFDB
426:When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit. ~ Donald Johanson, #NFDB
427:As a student of conservation biology, I believe that characteristics with survival value will ultimately prevail. There is no survival value in pessimism. If you think failure is inevitable, that view will probably become self-fulfilling. ~ Denis Hayes, #NFDB
428:Usually that's going into biology in a certain way. There's certain strengths and weaknesses to both of the sexes. And I'm not against employing those nor am I against denying those, what I am looking for is a very large array of options. ~ Mark Morris, #NFDB
429:Though we feel we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
430:Today you meet more folks than your ancestors could imagine … some in passing. Some for a crucial instant. Others for tangled decades. Biology can’t keep up. Our overworked temporal lobes cannot “know” the face-name-reps of ten billion people! ~ David Brin, #NFDB
431:biology alone cannot provide an answer to the question that concerns us: why is woman the Other? The question is how, in her, nature has been taken on in the course of history; the question is what humanity has made of the human female. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
432:In my heart I believe that biology is the beginning and the end of everything. It's the biggest source of ideas, the biggest source of invention. Nobody can invent better than nature and so if you like nature is my biggest source of inspiration. ~ Ken Yeang, #NFDB
433:Science has proven that while your genes control your biology, a rather simple, nondrug formula of nutrient-rich food, targeted supplements to address missing precursors, and lifestyle changes can keep your genes in perpetual “repair” mode. ~ Sara Gottfried, #NFDB
434:We're not just a cosmic biology experiment that ended up working. We're part of God's much bigger plan for the whole world. Just like God's Son arrived here, so did you. And after Jesus arrived, God whispered to all of humanity...'It's your move. ~ Bob Goff, #NFDB
435:Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.' ~ Daniel Dennett, #NFDB
436:A doctorate from Oxford in biology, a second degree in education, various other accomplishments and achievements. Sadie wondered what it would feel like to go through life with proof, gold-etched and ebony-framed, that you were worth something. ~ Kate Morton, #NFDB
437:Nonconformists aren't just going against the grain; they're going against the brain. Either their brains aren't taking the easy way out to begin with, or in standing apart from their peers, these students are standing up to their biology. ~ Alexandra Robbins, #NFDB
438:I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
439:mindset impacts emotion, which alters biology, which increases performance. Thus, it seemed, by tinkering with mindset—using everything from physical to psychological to pharmacological interventions—one could significantly enhance performance. ~ Steven Kotler, #NFDB
440:There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
441:Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.' ~ Lewis Thomas, #NFDB
442:Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun. ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
443:Biology is a force to be reckoned with. An ugly child you love with all your heart and soul, you. But it's different. You're pleased with your third-floor walk-up, also, until someone invites you I've to dinner at a house with a pool in the garden. ~ Herman Koch, #NFDB
444:Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do. ~ Edsger Dijkstra, #NFDB
445:…I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon, than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information makes you think twice about who–or what–is actually in charge. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
446:When Alexis was born, I thought I'd never have a second child. How could I, when I'd already poured my love into my first? But then I had Brianna, and then Logan, and I realized something they don't teach you in biology.... The heart stretches. ~ Clare Mackintosh, #NFDB
447:Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life. ~ Rachel Carson, #NFDB
448:No one can say, "Here is Biology, here Mathematics, here Philosophy." No one can point to Physics, or show us Chemistry. In reality no dotted lines divide History from Geography or Physics from Chemistry, or Philosophy from Linguistics, and so on. These ~ John Holt, #NFDB
449:One of the seeds has split its shell and reaches a white hand upward. An apple tree growing from an apple seed growing in an apple. I show the little plantseed to Ms. Keen. She gives me extra credit. David rolls his eyes. Biology is so cool. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson, #NFDB
450:this chapter is different from the other chapters in this book, in that not only does science not (yet) know the answer, but at present we can barely conceive of how that answer might look in terms of the known laws of physics or biology or information. ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
451:Even after Sonja graduated secondary school at the top of her class and matriculated to the city university biology department, their parents found more to love in Natasha. Sonja's gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable. ~ Anthony Marra, #NFDB
452:It's high time to rescue "intelligent design" from the politics of religion. There are too many riddles not yet answered by either biology or the Bible, and by asking them honestly, without foregone conclusions, science could take a huge leap forward. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
453:a worldwide flood destroyed all life on earth about five thousand years ago requires denying an immense amount of generally accepted knowledge—from astronomy, physics, geology, paleontology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, cave paintings, and more. ~ Marcus J Borg, #NFDB
454:In explaining the importance of understanding our biology, Dawkins writes; “Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something which no other species has ever aspired to. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
455:She’d spent so much of her life seeing the world as black-and-white, separating right from wrong as confidently as she sorted plant cells from animal cells during a biology exam. But the past year had been a brutal crash course in moral relativity. Clarke ~ Kass Morgan, #NFDB
456:I suppose the marine biology was a post-teen thing. I was kind of on my way but I was one of those teenage boys who got to 13, 14 and had no idea what I was going to do. I liked natural history. I liked the outdoors. And I found the sea quite interesting. ~ Giles Deacon, #NFDB
457:MH and Leon had accepted the call to raise a child, not by railroading her into becoming a gratifying mashup of biology and dreams, but by allowing her to reveal her nature over time, in no particular order, with switchbacks and reversals along the way. ~ Kelly Corrigan, #NFDB
458:When you free women so they can choose to have or not to have, or to conceive - that's something that, for millennia, women couldn't do. Biology was, in many ways, destiny. We wouldn't be talking about gender if women could not control their pregnancies. ~ Lynne Tillman, #NFDB
459:I didn't have toys and bikes; I'd go out and pick up rocks. I was into science and nature. It was my first love. I was going to be a vet and a marine biologist. I went to university and studied biology for two weeks and I just thought: "I've been conned!" ~ Ricky Gervais, #NFDB
460:Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole. ~ Theodosius Dobzhansky, #NFDB
461:So teach Chizalum that biology is an interesting and fascinating subject, but she should never accept it as justification for any social norm. Because social norms are created by human beings, and there is no social norm that cannot be changed. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
462:The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
463:Biology has finally opened up to achieve a unifying embrace of all its disciplines. We're seeing the renaissance of what could be called scientific natural history, which makes available the groundwork - the foundation work - of what is actually on the Earth. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
464:HISTORY MAKES LITTLE SENSE WITHOUT PREHISTORY, AND PREHISTORY MAKES LITTLE SENSE WITHOUT BIOLOGY. KNOWLEDGE OF PREHISTORY AND BIOLOGY IS INCREASING RAPIDLY, BRINGING INTO FOCUS HOW HUMANITY ORIGINATED AND WHY A SPECIES LIKE OUR OWN EXISTS ON THIS PLANET. ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
465:Older women especially saw Hillary Clinton as their last and best chance to see a woman in the White House. And not just any woman:7 as one said, “This isn’t just about biology. We don’t want a Margaret Thatcher, who cut off milk for schoolchildren.” They ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
466:Rewriting the history of technology. How, in science, history is rewritten by the losers and how I saw it in my own business and how we can generalize. Does knowledge of biology hurt medicine? Hiding the role of luck. What makes a good entrepreneur? ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
467:There is another domain that we consider relevant and having good prospects - marine biology. For many years this region [Russian Far East] has been home for one of the leading institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Marine Biology. ~ Vladimir Putin, #NFDB
468:This is not to deny that there are versions of theism that do conflict with evolutionary biology. Young Earth Creationism is an example; it claims that God created life on earth within the past 10,000 to 50,000 years. But other types of theism are different. ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
469:UNTRUE. I CARE ABOUT THE FLEET. THE LIVES WITHIN IT. YOUR LIFE.” “THAT’S NOT CARING. THAT’S PROGRAMMING.” “YOUR MOTHER WAS PROGRAMMED BY BIOLOGY TO LOVE YOU THE MOMENT SHE LAID EYES ON YOU. SIMPLY BECAUSE SHE HAD NO CHOICE DOES NOT MEAN HER LOVE WAS NOT REAL. ~ Amie Kaufman, #NFDB
470:D!"#$% &'( )(*+$, '-./ +/ &'( 01&' *($&!"2, the central
focus of biology was on the gene. Now in the 3rst half of
the 21st century, the central focus of biology has shifted to
neural science and speci3cally to the biology of the mind. ~ Eric R Kandel,#NFDB
471:I don't pretend there aren't biological differences, but I don't believe the desire for leadership is hardwired biology, not the desire to win or excel. I believe that it's socialization, that we're socializing our daughters to nurture and our boys to lead. ~ Sheryl Sandberg, #NFDB
472:It's possible to understand the world from studying a leaf. You can comprehend the laws of aerodynamics, mathematics, poetry and biology through the complex beauty of such a perfect structure.
It's also possible to travel the whole globe and learn nothing. ~ Joy Harjo,#NFDB
473:A dynamic female zoology professor expanded her intellectual horizons by urging her to take the daring step of majoring in biology rather than English. In doing so, Carson discovered that science not only engaged her mind but gave her “something to write about. ~ Rachel Carson, #NFDB
474:Conceptually at least, biology is becoming technology. And physically, technology is becoming biology. The two are starting to close on each other, and indeed as we move deeper into genomics and nanotechnology, more than this, they are starting to intermingle. ~ W Brian Arthur, #NFDB
475:Where there's water on Earth, you find life as we know it. So if you find water somewhere else, it becomes a remarkable draw to look closer to see if life of any kind is there, even if it's bacterial, which would be extraordinary for the field of biology. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
476:Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience, and this is the thing with feathers at the bottom of their box of miseries. ~ Andrew Solomon, #NFDB
477:And speaking of shame−never, ever link sexuality and shame. Or nakedness and shame. Do not ever make 'virginity' a focus. Every conversation about virginity becomes a conversation about shame. Teach her to reject the linking of shame and female biology. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
478:If the story had been about anyone else, it would been dismissed as laaf, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate ---sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
479:I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
480:Constant effort to struggle against our demons—against the social and behavioral habits that are built into our biology—is one of the ennobling behaviors of which we humans as a species are capable, and which has been critical to many of our triumphs and achievements ~ David Reich, #NFDB
481:If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one. ~ George Gaylord Simpson, #NFDB
482:To function as a citizen, you need to know a little bit about a lot of different sciences—a little biology, a little geology, a little physics, and so on. But universities (and, by extension, primary and secondary schools) are set up to teach one science at a time. ~ Robert M Hazen, #NFDB
483:[Computer science] is not really about computers and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes... and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. ~ Hal Abelson, #NFDB
484:The big news in biology this week was the announcement that we’ve stopped evolving, in the biological sense. I’ll buy that. Technology has stopped us, and technology will take us on, into a new evolution, one Mr. Bush never dreamed of, and neither, I’m sure, have I. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
485:Wöhler’s experiment demolished vitalism. Organic and inorganic chemicals, he proved, were interchangeable. Biology was chemistry: perhaps even a human body was no different from a bag of busily reacting chemicals—a beaker with arms, legs, eyes, brain, and soul. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
486:An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the Dharma as a source of answers to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc. ~ Stephen Batchelor, #NFDB
487:"And then you know I can use the biological example too, which would place me outside of the postmodern realm of argument, because the postmodernists don't believe in biology but they act like they do because they all die!" ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
488:Before that I was a scientist. I did research in population biology. And that's what I always go back to, it helps me to remember that people are not the end of the world, although we may be when it comes to it. We're just one species among millions in this world. ~ Barbara Kingsolver, #NFDB
489:There's so much I'm interested in that I didn't discover in high school. For 'The Amazing Spider-Man', because Gwen is a scientist, we went to a lab in San Diego, and we were learning about biology. And I'm fascinated! Because I never went to biology class in high school. ~ Emma Stone, #NFDB
490:My conclusion is that humans evolved as obligate fat-eaters, and our biology is dependent on eating diets high in fat and moderate in protein, with carbohydrates providing only that balance of calories that cannot be obtained from readily available fat and protein sources. ~ Tim Noakes, #NFDB
491:We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more. ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
492:What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary ~ Simon Baron Cohen, #NFDB
493:"And then you know I can use the biological example too, which would place me outside of the postmodern realm of argument, because the postmodernists don't believe in biology but they act like they do because they all die!" ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
494:As Charles Darwin’s work in the nineteenth century proves, the narratives have often been shaped by the attitudes of the time. Even he, the father of evolutionary biology, was so affected by a culture of sexism that he believed women to be the intellectually inferior sex. ~ Angela Saini, #NFDB
495:Our task now is to resynthesize biology; put the organism back into its environment; connect it again to its evolutionary past; and let us feel that complex flow that is organism, evolution, and environment united. The time has come for biology to enter the nonlinear world. ~ Carl Woese, #NFDB
496:As far as I was concerned, I wrote songs; chords and beats and lyrics, verses. and bridges and hooks. But then, as we got bigger, people began to dissect the songs, like a frog from biology class until there was nothing left but guts- tiny parts, so much less than the sum. ~ Gayle Forman, #NFDB
497:Clouds lazed in the folded arms of the hills, then billowed up and drifted away. Some tendrils twisted into tight spirals and traced the warmer ravines, behaving like mist tracking the dank fens of the marsh. The same game of physics playing on a different field of biology. ~ Delia Owens, #NFDB
498:I'd always enjoyed acting at high school, and I was all lined up to do an honours degree course in biology at a Canadian university, and at the eleventh hour the drama teacher I had said, 'You know, you'll get a lot more girls if you go into acting,' and that kinda sold it. ~ Matt Frewer, #NFDB
499:Stewart Davenport conscientiously and insightfully re-creates the world of the nineteenth-century political economists, who taught that the principles of international trade manifested, like the laws of biology and physics, the intelligent design of a Divine Creator. ~ Daniel Walker Howe, #NFDB
500:We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
501:Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being." She cleared her throat again. "Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live. ~ Aidan Chambers, #NFDB
502:As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality; without art, no notion of liberty. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
503:Has man reached his ceiling? What about the future? It is here that we meet the vast phenomenon of the almost unlimited power of disposition over matter that man is beginning to acquire in his environment. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, #NFDB
504:Human beings are attracted to novelty: to probe the adjacent possible. We didnt stay in the caves. We didnt stay on the planet, and soon we wont stay within the limitations of our biology. We move forward. We transcend our limits. We go to the moon, and we create the Internet. ~ Jason Silva, #NFDB
505:A species may eat a particular bacterium, phytoplankton, smaller fish, or plant in an area. Lacking a predator, these species/populations will overgrow and alter the area's biology, overwhelming and driving to extinction dozens or hundreds or thousands of other local species. ~ Thom Hartmann, #NFDB
506:I don't agree with a core statement by most feminists, the statement by Simone de Beauvoir: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one." Even as a schoolgirl I wasn't convinced by the claim that gender has nothing to do with biology and is only shaped by one's environment. ~ Kristina Schroder, #NFDB
507:In fact, Wilson and King showed that the difference in the average protein-coding gene sequences of chimps and modern humans was about 1 percent. In other words, the proteins that we use in our day-to-day biology are nearly identical to those that chimpanzees and bonobos use. ~ Ian Tattersall, #NFDB
508:Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
509:In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. It’s how we are wired. Meaning making is in our biology, and when we’re in struggle, our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense of what’s happening and gives our brain information on how best to selfprotect. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
510:It's so funny the world we live in now. The years where you are most fertile, those are also the fertile years for career and personal growth. And so you're not encouraged to get pregnant in your 20s. But the 30s are when the biology kind of has you by the ovaries, so to speak. ~ Staceyann Chin, #NFDB
511:I wanted to be a marine biologist my whole life until I graduated high school. And even now, I'm still like, 'Maybe I'll just quit the biz and go to Santa Cruz and study marine biology and have my own research center in the Bahamas.' Yeah, I'm sure it would be just that smooth. ~ Cobie Smulders, #NFDB
512:The concept of needs and capacities is fundamental to biology and psychology alike. Biology is concerned with the needs and capacities of living organisms qua physical entities. Psychology is concerned with the needs and capacities of living organisms qua conscious entities. ~ Nathaniel Branden, #NFDB
513:The termination is not based on innocence or guilt, but on biology. The sociopath personality is fraudulent. They are impostors within the human species. Killing a sociopath is equivalent to killing God. Neither exists in reality. They are empty shells of imagination, said Chiron ~ C J Anderson, #NFDB
514:Biology
The film turns out to be about bees. It is a film about a bee center. How crap is this going to be?
An hour later
That was the best thing I have seen for ages. We made Miss Wilson rewind the bit where the two queens were having a bitch fight. ~ Louise Rennison,#NFDB
515:I grew up in England at a time when England was winning Nobel Prizes right and left. I mean it was amazing how many Nobel Prizes England was winning in chemistry and physics and biology and all the sciences and at that time the teaching of science in the schools was really lousy. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
516:Well, biology is not only about genes and environment, but also cells and the constraints of their physical structure, which we shall see have little to do with either genes or environment directly. The predictions that arise from these disparate world views are strikingly different. ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
517:Once they had been equal in their separate freedoms. They had set out to have children as lightly as if they were playing house, and now her necessarily domestic life bored him, and she was bound to it in her body and imagination. This imbalance was fated, built into their biology. ~ Tessa Hadley, #NFDB
518:Free as a bird' was the expression, and yet they weren't free at all, not as far as Saffy could tell: they were bound to one another by their habits, their seasonal needs, their biology, their nature, their birth. No freer than anyone else. Still, they knew the exhilaration of flight. ~ Kate Morton, #NFDB
519:Josh Greene and Jonathan Cohen of Princeton wrote an extremely clearheaded piece on this, “For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything.” Where neuroscience and the rest of biology change nothing is in the continued need to protect the endangered from the dangerous.30 ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
520:One thought spectra are marvellous, but it is not possible to make progress there. Just as if you have the wing of a butterfly then certainly it is very regular with the colors and so on, but nobody thought one could get the basis of biology from the coloring of the wing of a butterfly. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
521:God simply is,” Bick said. “Humanity embraced It. They gave It color and gender, shape and form. They put words in Its mouth. They always have, and they still do, perhaps they always will. I always experience God as a 'He,' but God is too vast to be held prisoner by language of biology. ~ R S Belcher, #NFDB
522:People who believe in evolution in biology often believe in creationism in government. In other words, they believe that the universe and all the creatures in it could have evolved spontaneously, but that the economy is too complicated to operate without being directed by politicians. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
523:When emotions are expressed...all systems are united and made whole. When emotions are repressed, denied, not allowed to be whatever they may be, our network pathways get blocked, stopping the flow of the vital feel-good, unifying chemicals that run both our biology and our behavior. ~ Candace B Pert, #NFDB
524: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, #NFDB
525:When I drink a Glass of water, it's thick and crawling with life. My mouth leads to the interior of my body - a caldron of disease, germs, and perversions of biology. I don't exist individually. I'm made of millions of living creatures, eating each other, decomposing, eating each other. ~ Michael Gira, #NFDB
526:In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times! ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
527:Many differences are rooted in biology and reinforced through culture, so it's important to acknowledge that. Because if you say men and women are the same and if male behaviour is the norm, and women are always expected to act like men, we will never be as good at being men as men are. ~ Dee Dee Myers, #NFDB
528:There’s a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech,” said Purves. “That’s the reason we like music. Music is far more complex than [the ratios of] Pythagoras. The reason doesn’t have to do with mathematics, it has to do with biology. ~ David Byrne, #NFDB
529:I couldn't think. The basics of my life seemed altered and thrown into question. After all, our families--our ancestors--are our identities. Biology is destiny.
I'm not who you think I am, I had said to T.J. the last time I'd seen him. Maybe I wasn't who I'd thought I was either. ~ Aimee Friedman,#NFDB
530:I originally envisioned myself doing something with the suffix 'ology' at the end of it, like marine biology or entomology. But after I started to do some acting gigs, I thought it wasn't a bad thing... I said to myself, 'I might as well keep riding this bus until the wheels fall off. ~ Callan McAuliffe, #NFDB
531:Some powers come more easily to others, but Matthew rocks at reading energies.”
“What?” I set my fork back down. “Our biology teacher is an alien? Holy crap…all I can think of is that movie The Faculty.” Dee choked on her orange juice. “We don’t snatch bodies.”
I hoped not. ~ Jennifer L Armentrout,#NFDB
532:The upshot is that most philosophers of biology now hold that biological properties supervene on physical properties (where supervenience is taken to include some kind of "in virtue of" relation), and that fitness and other biological properties are not identical with physical properties. ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
533:I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness. ~ Lois Lowry, #NFDB
534:On bad days, I think I'd like to be a plastic surgeon who goes to Third World countries and operates on children in villages with airlifts, and then I think, 'Yeah, right, I'm going to go back to undergraduate school and take all the biology I missed and then go to medical school.' No. No. ~ Tama Janowitz, #NFDB
535:The advent of strong AI is the most important transformation this century will see. Indeed, it’s comparable in importance to the advent of biology itself. It will mean that a creation of biology has finally mastered its own intelligence and discovered means to overcome its limitations. Once ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
536:When the judge calls the criminal's name out he stands up, and they are immediately linked by a strange biology that makes them both opposite and complementary. The one cannot exist without the other. Which is the sun and which is the shadow? It's well known some criminals have been great men. ~ Jean Genet, #NFDB
537:In entirely unrelated news, there's a new proposal to mandate coverage for gay infertility. The problem is that gay infertility is just biology. Two men and two women are not infertile. They're just not capable of impregnating each other. This isn't a medical problem. It's a mental problem. ~ David Horowitz, #NFDB
538:The quest for knowledge is the essence of science. The science of biology is a quest to gain a knowledge of living things, the science of physics is an attempt to gain knowledge about physical things, and the science of theology is an attempt to gain a coherent, consistent knowledge of God. All ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
539:The social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables. ~ Friedrich August von Hayek, #NFDB
540:You know, I have a lot of books on my iPad, but when I try to read them, I find myself wandering off to play games. Those are books I'm interested in. I can't imagine what would have happened to me in college if my biology class had been on the same computer as "Words With Friends" and "Doom." ~ Gail Collins, #NFDB
541:Before we begin to describe the technical side of neural networks, it would be useful to briefly discuss the biology of neural networks and the cognition of living organisms – the reader may skip the following chapter without missing any technical information. On the other hand I recommend to read ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
542:I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
543:We reject creationism because there is no evidence to support it. By contrast, the notion that biology is at least partially the basis of gender is an empirically supportable, and even well-supported, proposition. The gender scholars reject it on ideological, not evidentiary, grounds. ~ Christina Hoff Sommers, #NFDB
544:We're wired for story. In a culture of scarcity and perfectionism, there's a surprisingly simple reason we want to own, integrate, and share our stories of struggle. We do this because we feel the most alive when we're connecting with others and being brave with our stories - it's in our biology. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
545:The thought that babies would become children, and children would become people, never occurred to them. The concept that perhaps biology was not destiny, and that not all little girls would be pretty princesses, and not all all little boys would be brave soldiers, also never occurred to them. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
546:One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together. ~ Francis Crick, #NFDB
547:It's roughly the case that if systems become too complex to study in sufficient depth, physics hands them over to chemistry, then to biology, then experimental psychology, and finally on to history. Roughly. These are tendencies, and they tend to distinguish roughly between hard and soft sciences. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
548:Of course, language evolution is also about biology, not only semiotics or culture. It is biology that underlies human language abilities. Acknowledging this obvious fact, it is perhaps surprising and counterintuitive to some to discover that there is nothing in the body dedicated to language. ~ Daniel L Everett, #NFDB
549:about the biology of stress and recovery, stress seems to have an effect on the brain similar to that of vaccines on the immune system. In limited doses, it causes brain cells to overcompensate and thus gird themselves against future demands. Neuroscientists call this phenomenon stress inoculation. ~ John J Ratey, #NFDB
550:Biology is only the best hint as to what was functional in the past but not
necessarily about what will be in the future. The most empowering question
we can ask about the future is not “What is the future and how do we adapt?”
but “How do we want our future to be and how do we adapt? ~ Warren Farrell,#NFDB
551:if unexpected skateboarder, and a tireless advocate for microbes since well before “microbiome” became a fashionable buzzword. “She talks about “the New Biology”, and that’s all caps when Margaret says it,” one biologist told me. She didn’t always think like this. It was the squid that changed her mind. ~ Ed Yong, #NFDB
552:I think women assess time passage much better than men - because of their biological clocks - and they are much more realistic about measuring out time, whereas men tend to hang onto things. Women acknowledge the biology of their time, and dance through the beat of that drum...whereas men just drum. ~ Danny Boyle, #NFDB
553:We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created---civilization, courtesy, decency---is a mesh that comes from those drives and also contains and tames them. Whatever feels good is not necessarily good. But what I learn is whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or to you. ~ Charles Bowden, #NFDB
554:But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
555:I didn't study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters. ~ Barbara Kingsolver, #NFDB
556:I need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of all sound speculation in dynamical science. The only contribution of dynamics to theoretical biology is absolute negation of automatic commencement or automatic maintenance of life. ~ Lord Kelvin, #NFDB
557:The second half of the 20th century was a golden age of molecular biology, and it was one of the golden ages of the history of science. Molecular biology was so successful and made such a powerful alliance with the medical scientists that the two together just flourished. And they continue to flourish. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
558:These days vampires gravitated toward particle accelerators, projects to decode the genome, and molecular biology. Once they had flocked to alchemy, anatomy, and electricity. If it went bang, involved blood, or promised to unlock the secrets of the universe, there was sure to be a vampire around. ~ Deborah Harkness, #NFDB
559:We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created -- civilization, courtesy, decency -- is a mesh that comes from those drives and also contains and tames them. Whatever feels good is not necessarily good. But what I learn is whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or to you. ~ Charles Bowden, #NFDB
560:The classic example from biology is the huge, towerlike structure that is built by some ant and termite species. These structures only emerge when the ant colony reaches a certain size (more is different) and could never be predicted by studying the behavior of single insects in small colonies. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga, #NFDB
561:The interrelationship of the self-organization dynamics of material and energetic processes from chemistry through biology to sociobiology and beyond seems to point to the existence of a general dynamic system theory which is valid in a very wide domain of natural systems. ~ Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe, #NFDB
562:My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity of the wonder of innumerable forms of life has always thrilled me beyond anything else. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
563:But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. Booker ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, #NFDB
564:Admittedly, what he had seen only the day before in this very room was just as intellectually stupefying as these later events—but the emotional impact was something else. A mouse was as much a miracle of biology as was an elephant; nevertheless there was an important difference—an elephant was bigger. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
565:Some believe what separates men from animals is our ability to reason. Others say it’s language or romantic love, or opposable thumbs. Living here in this lost world, I’ve come to believe it is more than our biology. What truly makes us human is our unending search, our abiding desire for immortality. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
566:Another reason that shame is so difficult to talk about is vocabulary. We often use the terms embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, and shame interchangeably, when in reality these experiences are very different in terms of biology, biography, behavior, and self-talk, and they lead to radically different outcomes. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
567:In all my lives, the only thing I've seen save people from themselves is hope. Hope beyond logic. Hope beyond what the eye can see. Filled with hope, the human spirit is an insatiable force of energy, transcending biology to embrace something eternal. Without hope, the spirit dies and nothing awaits but death. ~ Terry Moore, #NFDB
568:We are no more than our biology, our genetic programming. Nature is harsh and cruel and unsentimental. When you get down to it, boys are predators and girls are prey, and what people call love or even simple attraction is just the drug of hormones, evolved to make the survival of our species slightly less painful. ~ Amy Reed, #NFDB
569:In other words, the best way to win the war against fat is to give up the fight. Turn over control to your body and you will settle at a healthy weight. And regardless of whether you do lose weight, your health and well-being will markedly improve. You will find that biology is much more powerful than willpower. ~ Linda Bacon, #NFDB
570:Most right-handed people end up walking wide counterclockwise circles, because most right-handed people have left legs fractionally shorter than their right legs. Basic biology and geometry. I avoided that particular peril by stepping to the right of every tenth tree I came to, whether I thought I needed to or not. ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
571:When I was in high school, my biology teacher told me that my value as a person was $24.37. He was adding up the value of all the minerals in the body—zinc, copper, potassium, etc. Today, thanks to inflation, that total would be around $160. That’s still a paltry sum. But it is one way to take the measure of a man. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
572:Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they already knew that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken. ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
573:I was not falling in love; I was certainly not falling in love. Love was a fiction, written by Nature to disguise her real purpose. This sick, breathless sensation in my belly was only biology. This heat on my nerves. Only the instinct to procreate. Or something else, maybe. The recognition of imminent danger. ~ Beatriz Williams, #NFDB
574:Parenthood wasn’t about blood or biology, he found; it was about a joyful willingness to give yourself over, to subordinate your own needs for someone else’s. When you loved your kids, you’d give up everything to keep them safe and make them happy, and you didn’t care about the other things, the ones that went away. ~ Lisa Unger, #NFDB
575:What we're starting to see is a quantum biology, it being applied in biology and cosmology and a host of other sciences, because it does really pertain to how we know. It really helps bring epistemology, which is how do we know what we know, out of the realm of philosophy and brings it into the realm of science. ~ Edgar Mitchell, #NFDB
576:Human beings appear to be sufficiently selfish and calculating to be capable of indefinitely greater harmony and social homeostasis. This statement is not self-contradictory. True selfishness, if obedient to the other constraints of mammalian biology, is the key to a more nearly perfect social contract. - pg. 157 ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
577:If she hadn’t been so driven to succeed in her career, had settled for a more sedate life of teaching marine biology at the university level, she wouldn’t be half-way around the world being chased by giant lizard-men and mutant crustaceans that could melt you with one sting and suck you up like a spilled milk-shake. ~ J F Gonzalez, #NFDB
578:Our knowledge of… molecular defects in cancer has come from a dedicated twenty years of the best molecular biology research. Yet this information does not translate to any effective treatments nor to any understanding of why many of the current treatments succeed or why others fail. It is a frustrating time. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
579:I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing. So what I know about writing, I know from my own instincts, and whatever the narrative voice is in my own head. ~ Khaled Hosseini, #NFDB
580:I have this amateur side attraction to, and interest in, the sciences and biology and physics and evolution. Paleontology is of interest to me. I'm interested in the way these fields have helped us understand how we are human and why we are human. I'm also from the area that is considered to be the cradle of mankind. ~ Wangechi Mutu, #NFDB
581:a general study undertaken by Nature found that 70 per cent of scientists had failed to replicate the findings of other researchers.14 Across the board, from medicine to psychology, biology to environmental sciences, researchers are coming to the realisation that many of the foundations of their research may be flawed. ~ James Bridle, #NFDB
582:I mean, it's just sex. It's simple biology, right? You build up tension and stress-- you need to open a valve somewhere and let it out, or you'll explode. Nothing deep and emotional about it, just a bodily function. Like sneezing.'
'Sure,' Kane said, nodding sagely. 'Coed naked sneezing. The next wave in porn. ~ Louisa Edwards,#NFDB
583:In the increasingly mechanized, automated, cybernated environment of the modern world a cold, bodiless world of wheels, smooth plastic surfaces, tubes, pushbuttons, transistors, computers, jet propulsion, rockets to the moon, atomic energy man's need for affirmation of his biology has become that much more intense. ~ Eldridge Cleaver, #NFDB
584:It’s in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced, and Photoshopped world very dangerous. If we want to cultivate a resilient spirit and stop falling prey to comparing our ordinary lives with manufactured images, we need to know how to reality-check what we see. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
585:Science has nothing in common with religion. Facts and miracles never did, and never will agree. They are not in the least related. They are deadly foes. What has religion to do with facts? Nothing. Can there be Methodist mathematics, Catholic astronomy, Presbyterian geology, Baptist biology, or Episcopal botany? ~ Robert G Ingersoll, #NFDB
586:The price of these failures has been a loss of moral consensus, a greater sense of helplessness about the human condition. ... The intellectual solution to the first dilemma can be achieved by a deeper and more courageous examination of human nature that combines the findings of biology with those of the social sciences. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
587:Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. He meant physics, of course. There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology. ~ Israel Gelfand, #NFDB
588:Our brains are designed to arrive at an accurate picture of the world, and to use that accurate picture to act on the world effectively, at least overall and in the long run. The same computational and neurological capacities that let us make discoveries about physics or biology also let us make discoveries about love. ~ Alison Gopnik, #NFDB
589:A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. ~ Fred Hoyle, #NFDB
590:Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually, as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology. ~ Jacques Monod, #NFDB
591:Heredity is to-day the central problem of biology. This problem may be approached from many sides - that of the breeder, the experimenter, the statistician, the physiologist, the embryologist, the cytologist - but the mechanism of heredity can be studied best by the investigation of the germ cells and their development. ~ Edwin Conklin, #NFDB
592:Like many great ideas in biology, the idea implicating infectious causation in chronic diseases, though simple, has far-reaching implications. It is so simple and so significant, that one would think it would have been recognized by many and would be the starting point for any discussion on the causes of disease. Not yet. ~ Paul W Ewald, #NFDB
593:the “law” of the struggle for existence that Darwin observed in the domain of biology will one day cede its place to the law of cooperation for existence which exists already in the cooperation of flowering plants and bees, in the cooperation of different cells in an organism, and in cooperation in the human social organism. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
594:To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our Earth is not the center of the universe, but merely one of nine planets circling one of billions of stars. From biology we learned that humans were not specially created by God but evolved along with tens of millions of other species. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
595:Your beliefs and thoughts are wired into your biology. They become your cells, tissues, and organs. There’s no supplement, no diet, no medicine, and no exercise regimen that can compare with the power of your thoughts and beliefs. That’s the very first place you need to look when anything goes wrong with your body. ~ Christiane Northrup, #NFDB
596:A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
597:Oh golly, Brer Fox, your forthright assertion—that evolutionary biology disproves the idea of a creator God—jeopardises the teaching of biology in science class, since teaching that would violate the separation of church and state!' Right. You also ought to soft-pedal physiology, since it declares virgin birth impossible ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
598:The purpose of the Scripture is for instruction in righteousness. It was not written to teach you geology or biology. It was written to show man’s relationship to God and God’s requirements for man and what man must do to be saved. You can write this over the first part of the book of Genesis: “What must I do to be saved? ~ J Vernon McGee, #NFDB
599:Look at systematic patterns of cultural variation as they pertain to the best and worst of our behaviors. Explore how different types of brains produce different culture and different types of culture produce different brains. In other words, how culture and biology coevolve.3 See the role of ecology in shaping culture. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
600:There's no huge mystery. If you dig up huge amounts of carbon, huge amounts of ancient biology, hundreds of millions of year's worth of ancient biology, and flush it into the atmosphere in a matter of decades, then it stands to reason that we're going to have enormous effects, and now we can see those effects all around us. ~ Bill McKibben, #NFDB
601:Dragons, you know, we have a good deal of biology and zoology about the dragon; we know their habits. The dragon tends to guard things, and he usually has these guarded in a cave... Now dragons don't know what to do either with beautiful girls or gold, but they just hang on. There are people like this. We call them creeps. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
602:Science in the past (and partly in the present), was dominated by one-sided empiricism. Only a collection of data and experiments were considered as being ‘scientific’ in biology (and psychology); forgetting that a mere accumulation of data, although steadily piling up, does not make a science. ~ Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory, #NFDB
603:Consciousness, when its unburdened by the body, is something thats ecstatic; we use the mind to watch the mind, and thats the meta-nature of our consciousness; we know that we know that we know, and thats such a delicious feeling, but when its unburdened by biology and entropy, it becomes more than delicious: it becomes magical. ~ Jason Silva, #NFDB
604:It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable. ~ Ronald Fisher, #NFDB
605:There is no monopoly of common sense
On either side of the political fence
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too
[...]
There's no such thing as a winnable war
It's a lie we don't believe anymore ..."
(The Russians) ~ Sting,#NFDB
606:The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology. ~ Lewis Thomas, #NFDB
607:The world of biology is more like a wild playing field with anarchic elements, where the rules of creative togetherness are constantly being renegotiated, where gang wars break out between little groups of co-conspirators and schemers, but also where one finds acts of magnanimous sharing, heroic dedication, and dreamlike bliss. ~ Andreas Weber, #NFDB
608:Great literature remains great when it says new things to new generations, and the loops of a knot quite nicely parallel the contours and convolutions of Carroll’s plot anyway.What’s more, he probably would have been delighted at how this whimsical branch of math invaded the real world and became crucial to understanding our biology. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
609:There were letters for her at the bureau-one from her brother, full of athletics and biology; one from her mother, delightful as only mother's letters could be. She had read in it of the crocuses which had been bought for yellow and were coming up puce, of the new parlour-maid, who had watered the ferns with essence of lemonade... ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
610:Many focus on what they perceive as a loss of some vital aspect of our humanity. To me, the sessence of being human is not in our limitations. It is our ability to reach beyond our limitations. We did not stay on the ground. We did not even stay on the planet. And we are already not settling for the limitations of our biology. ~ Brooke Gladstone, #NFDB
611:I can’t really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we’ll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters—when we judge others harshly. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
612:I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
613:I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, “homeostasis,” i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
614:If you believe that your depression is due solely to a broken brain, you don’t have to think about your life, or about what anyone might have done to you. The belief that it all comes down to biology protects you, in a way, for a while. If you absorb this different story, though, you have to think about those things. And that hurts. ~ Johann Hari, #NFDB
615:In famine, a focus on women and children highlights biology: here is a mother who cannot feed her child, a breakdown in the natural order of life. This focus obscures who and what is to blame for the famine, politically and economically, and can lead to the belief that a biological response, more food, will solve the problem. ~ Sharman Apt Russell, #NFDB
616:In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. In fact, the need to make up a story, especially when we are hurt, is part of our most primitive survival wiring. Mean making is in our biology, and our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense, feels familiar, and offers us insight into how best to self-protect. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
617:I think that there are non-physical laws all right: genuine (if not strict) laws written in the language of biology, economics, and so on. But I don't regard that as a contentious issue. Even reductionists about chemistry will think that there are special chemical laws whose formulation makes essential use of chemical terminology. ~ David Papineau, #NFDB
618:There is economics in biology, nothing is free, everything has to be paid for, there are costs as well as benefits to everything in life, for example, there was never sufficient natural selection pressure to develop better eyes, individuals could earn other things like smiley smiles rather than waste energy & time on better eyes. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
619:apparently it is ungraceful of me
to mention my period in public
cause the actual biology
of my body is too real
it is okay to sell what’s
between a woman’s legs
more than it is okay to
mention its inner workings
the recreational use of
this body is seen as
beautiful while
its nature is
seen as ugly ~ Rupi Kaur,#NFDB
620:Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
621:It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say. ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious. ~ Jean Piaget, #NFDB
622:What psychology failed to appreciate, Frankl believed, is the multidimensional nature of human beings. He did not deny that biology or conditioning shapes us, but he also insisted that there is room for free will—to choose to develop certain values or a particular course in life, or to retain our dignity in difficult situations. ~ Tom Butler Bowdon, #NFDB
623:Older women especially saw Hillary Clinton as their last and best chance to see a woman in the White House. And not just any woman:7 as one said, “This isn’t just about biology. We don’t want a Margaret Thatcher, who cut off milk for schoolchildren.” They wanted Hillary Clinton because she supported the majority interests of women. On ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
624:For humans-trapped in biology-there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing-to break bonds stronger than the temporal-was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
625:For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing—to break bonds stronger than the temporal—was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
626:In decoupling gender from biology and denying any given or “natural” meaning to male and female sexuality, gender ideology directly repudiates reality. People don’t need to be “religious” to notice that men and women are different. The evidence is obvious. And the only way to ignore it is through a kind of intellectual self-hypnosis. ~ Charles J Chaput, #NFDB
627:I will argue that energy has constrained the evolution of life on earth; that the same forces ought to apply elsewhere in the universe; and that a synthesis of energy and evolution could be the basis for a more predictive biology, helping us understand why life is the way it is, not only on earth, but wherever it might exist in the universe. ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
628:Men's ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most advantage their masters, as well as justify men's rule over them. They do not represent 'truth' but have been promoted as if they were, with the backing of science and patriarchal views of biology. ~ Sheila Jeffreys, #NFDB
629:What is surprising is that almost all the trends that developed within the sciences, Aristotelianism and an extreme Platonism included, produced results, not only in special domains, but everywhere; there exist highly theoretical branches of biology and highly empirical parts of astrophysics. The world is a complex an many-sided thing. ~ Paul Feyerabend, #NFDB
630:apparently it is ungraceful of me
to mention my period in public
cause the actual biology
of my body is too real
it is okay to sell what's
between a woman's legs
more than it is okay to
mention its inner workings
the recreational use of
this body is seen as
beautiful while
its nature is
seen as ugly ~ Rupi Kaur,#NFDB
631:Currently, the disciplines of biology, physics, cosmology, and all their sub-branches are generally practiced by those with little knowledge of the others. It may take a multidisciplinary approach to achieve tangible results that incorporate biocentrism. The authors are optimistic that this will happen in time. And what, after all, is time? ~ Robert Lanza, #NFDB
632:For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing—to break bonds stronger than the temporal—was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair. My ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
633:traumatic experiences do leave traces, whether on a large scale (on our histories and cultures) or close to home, on our families, with dark secrets being imperceptibly passed down through generations. They also leave traces on our minds and emotions, on our capacity for joy and intimacy, and even on our biology and immune systems. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
634:Biology is a way of approaching the truth about the mind. In biology most people don't tackle problems at the level of complexity that psychoanalysis does. But psychoanalysis has a degree of uncertainty about it. A psychoanalyst may have some deep insights, but cannot, at the moment, run experiments to establish whether it's really the truth. ~ Eric Kandel, #NFDB
635:So what's your major? Have you figured it out yet?"
Yeah, biology. I'm hoping to go to med school. How about you?"
Elementary education."
She could have told me she was majoring in shit-eating with a minor in injecting guys with AIDS blood while they slept, and I would have thought it was the greatest, most noble thing in the world. ~ Chad Kultgen,#NFDB
636:But as a human being, I have no predefined nature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. Of course I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background, but none of this adds up to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along. ~ Sarah Bakewell, #NFDB
637:What differed were conditions of climate and geography that, operating on the biology of otherwise indistinguishable individuals, produced systematic differences in political behavior. Slavery for him was not natural and needed to be explained in terms of the ability of certain societies to better organize themselves for war and conquest. ~ Francis Fukuyama, #NFDB
638:Be there, or Mal will find you,” he said to his squat little lab partner, Le Fou Deux, as they both dissected a frog that would never turn into a prince in Unnatural Biology class. “Be there, or Mal will find you and ban you from the city streets,” he whispered to the Gastons as they took turns stuffing each other in doomball nets in PE. ~ Melissa de la Cruz, #NFDB
639:Many couples in the room merely watched the proceedings in wonderment, and to them the visit to Sandstone was a learning experience, a biology class, an opportunity to become increasingly knowledgeable about sex in the way that people traditionally learned about almost everything except sex, through the observation and imitation of other people. ~ Gay Talese, #NFDB
640:The great merit of Stephen Gould's account of the disastrous history of phychometrics is that he shifts the argument from a sterile contest between environmentalists and hereditarians and turns it into an argument between those who are impressed with what our biology stops us doing and those who are impressed with what it allows us to do. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
641:They have me in a bunk next to this guy, Bilal. He’s just a year older than me. He—this is nuts—he studied plant biology in Helsinki. He worked in a bar to pay for school. There’s nothing special about him. Not his DNA. He’s not even Muslim. He’s a Hindu, but he was born in Pakistan, so…It’s pathetic. These people can’t even do racist right. ~ Sylvain Neuvel, #NFDB
642:It was war. You’re better off winning a war than losing it. History teaches us that. And biology. You’re better off beating someone to death, than being beaten to death. From time immemorial, the man has guarded the entrance to the cave. Intruders are sent packing. People. Animals. A persistent intruder can’t say later that he hasn’t been warned. ~ Herman Koch, #NFDB
643:I believe that all centers that appear in space - whether they originate in biology, in physical forces, in pure geometry, in color - are alike simply in that they all animate space. It is this animated space that has its functional effect upon the world, that determines the way things work, that governs the presence of harmony and life. ~ Christopher Alexander, #NFDB
644:Mitsuru and Yuriko and Kazue didn’t mutate; they simply decayed. A biology professor certainly ought to be able to recognize the signs of fermentation and decay. Isn’t he the one who taught us all about these processes in organisms? In order to induce the process of decay, water is necessary. I think that, in the case of women, men are the water. ~ Natsuo Kirino, #NFDB
645:If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
646:Is not something, itself analogous to a brain, being produced within the totality of human brains? When we think about means of communication, we notice most of all their commercial side; but the psychological side is much more important, and brings with it far-reaching effects. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, #NFDB
647:This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes. In its own way, matter obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of "complexification." ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
648:Through millions of years of evolution, nature has caged you within certain boundaries—this is the human predicament. But this imprisonment is only on the level of biology. On the level of human consciousness, you are like a bird in a cage without a door. What a tragic irony! It is only out of long aeons of habit that you are refusing to fly free. Life ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
649:...Why is it that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, the only disorder that you will ever diagnose with a physics textbook is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The laws of thermodynamics are always true, the energy balance equation is irrelevant... ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
650:Twentieth-century developments in science support a new animism. Developments in physics have led to a world of energetic events which seem to be self-moving and to behave in unpredictable ways. And recent studies in biology seem to demonstrate that bacteria and macromolecules have elemental forms of perception, memory, choice, and self-motion. ~ David Ray Griffin, #NFDB
651:voles make up 85 percent of the diet. (One feature of vole biology that inadvertently helps out hawks is that these rodents mark their territories with urine, which Scandinavian researchers recently discovered reflects ultraviolet light. Hawks can see UV light—and may well use the voles’ territorial markings as signposts to the nearest restaurant.) ~ Sy Montgomery, #NFDB
652:in the minds of many genetic engineers at the time—there was no difference between cells and computers. Computers use a software code of 1s and 0s, whereas biology uses a code of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs. Computers use compilers and storage registries; biology uses RNA (ribonucleic acid) and ribosomes. Computers use peripherals; biology uses proteins. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
653:Bailey had profoundly changed the conversation around sexual identity away from the 1960s rhetoric of “choice” and “personal preference” toward biology, genetics, and inheritance. If we did not think of variations in height or the development of dyslexia or type 1 diabetes as choices, then we could not think of sexual identity as a choice. But ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
654:Psychiatry is NOT Science, it is just a game like Gematria. It is induced and applied by man and only exists in his domain while he remains alive. Since man is NO god, he possesses NOT the power over his mechanics – including Psychology, and hence, his Biology is subjugated to the Laws of Science as an exterior influence whether he likes it or not. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
655:...Why is it, that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, that the only disorder you will ever diagnosis with a physics book - is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The law of thermodynamics is always true, [but] the energy balance equation is irrelevant... ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
656:Religion and science, for example, are often though to be opponents, but as I have shown, the insights of ancient religions and of modern science are both needed to reach a full understanding of human nature and the conditions of human satisfaction. The ancients may have known little about biology, chemistry, physics, but many were good psychologists. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
657:This simple fact explains an awful lot about the biology and conservation of bumblebees. They have to eat almost continually to keep warm; a bumblebee with a full stomach is only ever about forty minutes from starvation. If a bumblebee runs out of energy, she cannot fly, and if she cannot fly, she cannot get to flowers to get more food, so she is doomed ~ Dave Goulson, #NFDB
658:For this knowledge of right living, we have sought a new name... . As theology is the science of religious life, and biology the science of [physical] life ... so let Oekology be henceforth the science of [our] normal lives ... the worthiest of all the applied sciences which teaches the principles on which to found... healthy... and happy life. ~ Ellen Swallow Richards, #NFDB
659:It seems to me trivially true that particle physics does in fact deal with the simplest objects in the entire universe: atoms and their constituents. At the opposite extreme, biology takes on the most complex things known to humanity: organisms made of billions of cells, and ecosystems whose properties are affected by tens of thousands of variables. ~ Massimo Pigliucci, #NFDB
660:There is beauty in the world. There is no reason for it to be here. If it’s all biology, all eating and getting eaten and the strongest devouring the weakest, then it’s madness. Nothing more than madness. It’s dying and drowning, and all love is illusion. But there is love, you see. Poor, weak, and broken love—a sign of something from a distant land. ~ Michael D O Brien, #NFDB
661:A key aspect of a probabilistic fractal is that it enables the generation of a great deal of apparent complexity, including extensive varying detail, from a relatively small amount of design information. Biology uses this same principle. Genes supply the design information, but the detail in an organism is vastly greater than the genetic design information. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
662:The theory that the biosphere was created without evolution, a few thousand years ago, is ruled out by overwhelming scientific evidence. To claim that there are 'alternative (always better) Biblical explanations of the same data', which make creationism a reasonable alternative to our best theories of biology and physics, is appalling intellectual dishonesty. ~ David Deutsch, #NFDB
663:What disturbs or assures us about race has very little to do with blood or biology. Race is about how you use language, understand your heritage, interpret your history, identify with your kin, figure out what your meaning and worth to a society that places values on you beyond your control. And it's also about what people see you as - or take you to be. ~ Michael Eric Dyson, #NFDB
664:Even mistaken hypotheses and theories are of use in leading to discoveries. This remark is true in all the sciences. The alchemists founded chemistry by pursuing chimerical problems and theories which are false. In physical science, which is more advanced than biology, we might still cite men of science who make great discoveries by relying on false theories. ~ Claude Bernard, #NFDB
665:The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
666:A renaissance in cellular biology has recently revealed the molecular mechanisms by which thoughts and perceptions directly influence gene activity and cell behavior...Energy psychology, through its ability to rapidly identify and reprogram limiting misconceptions, represents the most powerful and effective process to enhance physical and emotional well being. ~ Bruce H Lipton, #NFDB
667:It is ... a sign of the times-though our brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so-that biology is now a science in which theories can be devised: theories which lead to predictions and predictions which sometimes turn out to be correct. These facts confirm me in a belief I hold most passionately-that biology is the heir of all the sciences. ~ Peter Medawar, #NFDB
668:Being human in our world is synonymous with being included into the framework of society. Humanity entitles one to certain rights and privileges, but also implies voluntary acceptance of laws and rules of conduct. It transcends mere biology. It's a choice and therefore belongs solely to the individual. In essence, if a person feels they are human, then they are. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
669:It can be said that we are built by many things. Biology and lineage. Grit and moonlight and ocean stone. By fire and water and air. By the lessons of the grandmothers and the pounding of blood through veins and the very first break. The way it felt when you learned the truth of boundary and by the day you stood there and knew nothing could every be the same. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc, #NFDB
670:We're presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today’s third revolution, were coming to realize that even minds and societies emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations. Everything is a computation. ~ Rudy Rucker, #NFDB
671:...judgement had no place here. Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the participants. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light. Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick & the tock of life carried on. She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. ~ Delia Owens, #NFDB
672:What politicians do not understand is that [Ian] Wilmut discovered not so much a technical trick as a new law of nature. We now know that an adult mammalian cell can fire up all the dormant genetic instructions that shut down as it divides and specializes and ages, and thus can become a source of new life. You can outlaw technique; you cannot repeal biology. ~ Charles Krauthammer, #NFDB
673:Everything we do understand about the universe - the periodic table of elements, Einstein's laws, Newton's laws, all of chemistry, all of biology - that's 4 percent of the universe. We got to the moon on the 4 percent we do understand. We landed on Mars on the 4 percent we do understand. So the day we crack the nut of the rest of that 95 percent... Oh my gosh. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
674:In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple. This emerging virus was ike a bat crossing the sky at evening. Just when you thought you saw it flicker through your field of view, it was gone. ~ Richard Preston, #NFDB
675:Instead of being assembled by genes, the worm was assembled by “memes,” a word coined by British scientist and polemicist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are original ideas. Dawkins argued that they play the same role in cultural evolution as genes play in biology, getting passed along from person to person, surviving and adapting as they move. ~ Mark Bowden, #NFDB
676:Those new disciplines are neuroscience, the study of how the brain supports mental processes; developmental psychopathology, the study of the impact of adverse experiences on the development of mind and brain; and interpersonal neurobiology, the study of how our behavior influences the emotions, biology, and mind-sets of those around us. Research from these new ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
677:Whatever the nature of organizing relations may be,' J. Needham wrote in 1932, 'they form the central problem of biology, and biology will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognized. The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
678:They (animals) are not just living things; they are beings with lives... that makes all the difference in the world...next time you are outside...notice the first bird you see…you are beholding a unique individual with personality traits, an emotional profile, and a library of knowledge built on experience…what you are witnessing is not just biology, but a biography. ~ Jonathan Balcombe, #NFDB
679:Pulling a gun's trigger can be an appalling act. But if it is suicidal drawing fire to save someone, it has an utterly different meaning. Placing your hand on someone's arm can be an act of deep compassion or the first step of betrayal. The punch line? It's all about context, and the biology of context is vastly more complicated than the biology of the behavior itself. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
680:We can construct, deconstruct and reconstruct our sexuality any way we want: it is our privilege as thinking creatures. However, human sexuality has a specific nature, regardless of what we believe or say about it. We are more likely to be satisfied with the outcome, if we work with our biology rather than against it. We will be happier if we face reality on its own terms. ~ Jennifer Morse, #NFDB
681:Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
682:Every generation of humans will produce variants and mutants; it is an inextricable part of our biology. A mutation is only “abnormal” in a statistical sense: it is the less common variant. The desire to homogenize and “normalize” humans must be counterbalanced against biological imperatives to maintain diversity and abnormalcy. Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
683:Actually, said Molly, it’s no harder for girls to pee than boys, the problem isn’t biology, it’s men’s fear of women’s bodies. If we were allowed to pull our knickers down and squat by a wall the way you’re allowed to get your dick out and piss up the wall there wouldn’t be a problem, it’s just the way you all act as if a vagina will come and eat you if it’s out without a muzzle. ~ Sarah Moss, #NFDB
684:Nothing's immortal on a road trip of a billion years. The universe runs down in stop-motion around you, your backups' backups' backups need backups. Not even the error-correcting replication strategies cadged from biology can keep the mutations at bay forever. It was true for us meatsicles cycling through mayfly moments every thousand years; it was just as true for the hardware. ~ Peter Watts, #NFDB
685:The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
686:The more evolutionary theory gets called an atheistic theory, the greater the risk that it will lose its place in public school biology courses in the United States. If the theory is thought of in this way, one should not be surprised if a judge at some point decides that teaching evolutionary theory violates the Constitutional principle of neutrality with respect to religion. ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
687:This missing science of heredity, this unworked mine of knowledge on the borderland of biology and anthropology, which for all practical purposes is as unworked now as it was in the days of Plato, is, in simple truth, ten times more important to humanity than all the chemistry and physics, all the technical and indsutrial science that ever has been or ever will be discovered. ~ George Herbert, #NFDB
688:When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society, and other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role. We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complementary relationships in nuclear families, and it’s tearing us apart. ~ Erick Erickson, #NFDB
689:It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
690:We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
691:Dad. I knew that was it. No more holding my hand. No more sitting in my lap. No more throwing your arms around my waist when I walked through the front door or standing on my shoes while we danced around the kitchen. I would be the bank now. The ride to your friend’s house. The critic of your biology homework. The signature on the check mailed away with your college application. ~ Karin Slaughter, #NFDB
692:The battle over the validity of evolution has been publicly posed as a scientific one. However, you will find little sign of it in scientific journals, where such quarrels as exist are over details, not the basic concept... Evolution has proved so useful as a paradigm for the origin and structure of life that it constitutes the foundation of the sciences of biology and medicine. ~ Victor J Stenger, #NFDB
693:Through the discovery of Buchner, Biology was relieved of another fragment of mysticism. The splitting up of sugar into CO2 and alcohol is no more the effect of a 'vital principle' than the splitting up of cane sugar by invertase. The history of this problem is instructive, as it warns us against considering problems as beyond our reach because they have not yet found their solution. ~ Jacques Loeb, #NFDB
694:In my biology class, we’d talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don’t; trees do, plastic doesn’t. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. ~ Dan Wells, #NFDB
695:Dent recognized it; the intermezzo before the last movement of De Bruik’s Human Biology. The finale of the symphony was a standard concert opener in the outer worlds. Soon the crackling of superamplified muscle contractions and the rush of adrenaline into the bloodstream announced the shift to the finale, and the crowd cheered wildly; Dent could feel his blood surging through him— ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
696:FROM A CONVERSATION WITH THE CENSOR—Who will go to fight after such books? You humiliate women with a primitive naturalism. Heroic women. You dethrone them. You make them into ordinary women, females. But our women are saints.—Our heroism is sterile, it leaves no room for physiology or biology. It’s not believable. War tested not only the spirit but the body, too. The material shell. ~ Svetlana Alexievich, #NFDB
697:I'll say that this is probably the best time for poetry since the T'ang dynasty. All the rest of the world is going to school on American poetry in the twentieth century, from Ezra Pound to W. S. Merwin, and for very good reason. We have soaked up influence in the last century like a sponge. It's cross-pollination, first law of biology, that the more variety you have the more health you have. ~ Sam Hamill, #NFDB
698:I used to be pro-choice."..."I was once pro-choice and the thing that changed my mind was, I read my husband's biology books, medical books, and what I learned . . . At the moment of conception, a life starts. And this life has its own unique set of DNA, which contains a blueprint for the whole genetic makeup. The sex is determined. We know there's a life because it's growing and changing. ~ Kathy Ireland, #NFDB
699:So there is a consistent finding. Our two unrelated compounds, which control growth of cancer cells in culture and which have now been licensed for use in human treatment, inhibit epigenetic enzymes. In doing so, they both drive up gene expression which raises the obvious question of why this is useful for treating cancer. To understand this, we need to get to grips with some cancer biology. ~ Nessa Carey, #NFDB
700:The biology majors among them would someday come to learn this fact: certain parasites can bend the behavior of their hosts to serve their own purposes. If viruses could do it, here is how it would look: seventeen people crowded into one small room, seventeen pairs of lungs breathing the same air, seventeen mouths drinking from the same two shot glasses, again and again, for hours. ~ Karen Thompson Walker, #NFDB
701:I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life - past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives. ~ Rachel Carson, #NFDB
702:I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives. ~ Rachel Carson, #NFDB
703:Since consciousness is the basis of all reality, any shift in consciousness changes every aspect of our reality. Reality is created by consciousness differentiating into cognition, moods, emotions, perceptions, behavior, speech, social interactions, environment, interaction with the forces of nature, and biology. As consciousness evolves, these different aspects of consciousness also change. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
704:Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing. ~ Michael Crichton, #NFDB
705:If we do not take this road of dialogue and understanding then I fear for the next generation. There are enough people preaching hatred, which encourages violence. We are living in times when technology, biology and chemistry have created the possibility of killing in large numbers. And, unfortunately, the cruelty and killing are often justified through a distorted interpretation of religion. ~ Akbar S Ahmed, #NFDB
706:The students of biodiversity, the ones we most need in science today, have an enormous task ahead of molecular biology and the medical scientists. Studying model species is a great idea, but we need to combine that with biodiversity studies and have those properly supported because of the contribution they can make to conservation biology, to agrobiology, to the attainment of a sustainable world. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
707:This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
708:I decided to forgive you after reading The Little Flowers of Saint Francis,” María began. “You remember the wolf I talked about? Well, he was a monster who terrorized everybody until Saint Francis gave him a talking-to. He was sweet as a lamb and never ate anything but vegetables after that.” “I didn’t know wolves could digest vegetables,” said Matt, who had studied biology. “That’s not the point. ~ Nancy Farmer, #NFDB
709:When World War II came along, which was when I was a teenager, we all expected we would have anthrax bombs and this kind of stuff. We thought it would be a biological war. Fortunately it wasn't and, but it's because the danger is still there and by some miracle we escaped all that, so you never can tell what it going to happen, but biology certainly could be even worse than physics and chemistry. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
710:People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope. ~ Michael Robotham, #NFDB
711:Poor, poor books. Lonely pages bound in lonely leather, their only company the occasional louse. They exist only t be read, and yet with no one there to read them, they might as well not have been bornt at all. I run my fingers along the spines of the books I can reach. I do it to affirm them. To let them know I'm a lover of stories even stories about alchematics or biology and other true things. ~ Rivers Solomon, #NFDB
712:Scientific practice is above all a story-telling practice. ... Biology is inherently historical, and its form of discourse is inherently narrative. ... Biology as a way of knowing the world is kin to Romantic literature, with its discourse about organic form and function. Biology is the fiction appropriate to objects called organisms; biology fashions the facts "discovered" about organic beings. ~ Donna J Haraway, #NFDB
713:My research has shown me that when emotions are expressed-which is to say that the biochemicals that are the substrate of emotion are flowing freely-all systems are united and made whole. When emotions are repressed, denied, not allowed to be whatever they may be, our network pathways get blocked, stopping the flow of the vital feel-good, unifying chemicals that run both our biology and our behavior. ~ Candace Pert, #NFDB
714:By the time Nixon reached office the environmental cause had grown stronger than ever, thanks in part to media attention given to Malthusian prophets of doom. Paul Ehrlich, a professor of biology at Stanford, published The Population Bomb (1968), which foresaw the starvation of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world during the 1970s and 1980s if population growth were not controlled. ~ James T Patterson, #NFDB
715:The evidence that much of what divides us is rooted in our biology was compiled by the evolutionary anthropologist (and Peruvian political adviser) Avi Tuschman, in his transdisciplinary work Our Political Nature, in which he identifies three primary and relatively permanent personality traits running throughout political beliefs: tribalism, tolerance for inequality, and one’s view of human nature. ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
716:I think of mythology as a function of biology; the energies of the body are the energies that move the imagination. These energies are the source, then, of mythological imagery; in a mythological organization of symbols, the conflicts between the different organic impulses within the body are resolved and harmonized. You might say mythology is a formula for the harmonization of the energies of life. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
717:futurism” as a new academic discipline. It’s an interdisciplinary field combining mathematics, engineering, art, technology, economics, design, history, geography, biology, theology, physics, and philosophy. As a futurist, my job is not to spread prophecies, but rather to collect data, identify emerging trends, develop strategies, and calculate the probabilities of various scenarios occurring in the future. ~ Amy Webb, #NFDB
718:It must be said that almost all primitive people think themselves divinely wrought, singled out and special. Often their names translate simply as "the people" or, like the San bushmen of the Kalahari, the first people. But this is a symptom of primitiveness; attempting to prove divine biology in the nineteenth century is the anthropological equivalent of a society regressing to sleeping with the lights on. ~ A A Gill, #NFDB
719:my point being, what if my attacks are enterly unrelated attributable in fact to something entirely else, perhaps for instance just warning shocks brought on by my own crumbling biology, tiny flakes of unknown chemical origin already burning holes through the fabric of my mind, dismantling memories, undoing even the strongest powers of imagination and reason?
how then do you fly from that path? ~ Mark Z Danielewski,#NFDB
720:Roman emperors and their advisors never solved the problem of succession. They were defeated in part by biology, in part by lingering uncertainties and disagreements about how inheritance should best operate. Succession always came down to some combination of luck, improvisation, plotting, violence and secret deals. The moment when Roman power was handed on was always the moment when it was most vulnerable. ~ Mary Beard, #NFDB
721:The intensive studies of the Qur'an and Hadith in the last
four years have revealed a system of classifying human
embryos that is amazing since it was recorded in the seventh century
A.D... the descriptions in the Qur'an cannot be based on scientific
knowledge in the seventh century...288 (Dr. Keith L. Moore, Professor
Emeritus, Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of
Toronto) ~ Harun Yahya,#NFDB
722:We only recently figured out the origin of our own moon. And we have some idea of how the Sun and Earth formed, but that's only because modern telescopes empower us to see other stars and planets freshly hatched within gas clouds across the galaxy. As for the origin of life itself, the transition from inanimate molecules to what any of us would call life remains one of the great frontiers of biology. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
723:Soul" is a barrier against reduction, against human life reduced to biology and genitals, culture and utility, race and ethnicity. It signals an interiority that permeates all exteriority, an invisibility that everywhere inhabits visibility. "Soul" carries with it resonances of God-created, God-sustained, and God-blessed. It is our most comprehensive term for designating the core being of men and women. ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
724:I took biology in high school and didn't like it at all. It was focused on memorization. ... I didn't appreciate that biology also had principles and logic ... [rather than dealing with a] messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense. I wish I had learned sooner that biology could be fun as well. ~ Francis Collins, #NFDB
725:Maybe everyone else thinks your aversion to food is cute- but not me. I've watched you watch Jill. Here's some tough love: you will never, ever have her body. Ever. It's impossible. She's Moroi. You're human. That's biology. You have a great one, one that most humans would kill for- and you'd look even better if you put on a little weight. Five pounds would be a good start. Hide the ribs. Get a bigger bra size ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
726:Everything we learn—economics, philosophy, biology, mathematics—has to be understood in light of the overarching reality of the character of God. That is why, in the Middle Ages, theology was called “the queen of the sciences” and philosophy “her handmaiden.” Today the queen has been deposed from her throne and, in many cases, driven into exile, and a supplanter now reigns. We have replaced theology with religion. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
727:nine of every ten cells in our bodies belong not to us, but to these microbial species (most of them residents of our gut), and that 99 percent of the DNA we’re carrying around belongs to those microbes. Some scientists, trained in evolutionary biology, began looking at the human individual in a humbling new light: as a kind of superorganism, a community of several hundred coevolved and interdependent species. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
728:...she could express her soul with that voice, whenver I listened to her I felt my life meant more than mere biology...she could really hear, she understood structure and she could analyze exactly what it was about a piece of music that had to be rendered just so...she was a very emotional person, Annette. She brought that out in other people. After she died I don't think I ever really felt anything again. ~ Audrey Niffenegger, #NFDB
729:We live in a society where we're not taught how to deal with our weaknesses and frailties as human beings. We're not taught how to speak to our difficulties and challenges. We're taught the Pythagorean theorem and chemistry and biology and history. We're not taught anger management. We're not taught dissolution of fear and how to process shame and guilt. I've never in my life ever used the Pythagorean theorem! ~ Iyanla Vanzant, #NFDB
730:The use of cross-membrane proton gradients to power cells was utterly unanticipated. First proposed in 1961 and developed over the ensuing three decades by one of the most original scientists of the twentieth century, Peter Mitchell, this conception has been called the most counterintuitive idea in biology since Darwin, and the only one that compares with the ideas of Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger in physics. ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
731:neither we nor our planet enjoys a privileged position in Nature. This insight has since been applied upward to the stars, and sideways to many subsets of the human family, with great success and invariable opposition. It has been responsible for major advances in astronomy, physics, biology, anthropology, economics and politics. I wonder if its social extrapolation is a major reason for attempts at its suppression. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
732:As a matter of fact, we are wired for connection. It’s in our biology. From the time we are born, we need connection to thrive emotionally, physically, spiritually, and intellectually. A decade ago, the idea that we’re “wired for connection” might have been perceived as touchy-feely or New Age. Today, we know that the need for connection is more than a feeling or a hunch. It’s hard science. Neuroscience, to be exact. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
733:Biology doesn't matter, the Christians argued, because this body we live in is not ultimately real; history doesn't matter, they said, because God's time is different and superior to man's anyhow; and forget cause and effect, forget what you've been told about the physical world, because there is heaven and there is hell and there is this green earth in between, and you are always alive in one of the three places. ~ Russell Banks, #NFDB
734:Every branch of science likes to think it’s important, and of course, they all are. But they’re specializations. Much of biology, for example, is biochemistry, which is a specialization of organic chemistry, which is a specialization of chemistry, which is a specialization of physics, and physics is practical mathematics. No matter which set of matryoshka dolls you open in science, the innermost is always math. ~ Jonathan L Howard, #NFDB
735:Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient in our long retreat from an initial belief in our own cosmic importance. Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among millions; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
736:...I think there's only one [thing] that anybody teaches, and this is character. And I think that whether you are teaching history, math, or biology, or music, what you are really doing is, you are helping to shape the character of that person who is your student... Music is such a wonderful teaching tool, because while you are developing musical skills, that student can learn a lot about discipline [and] cooperation. ~ Rich Mullins, #NFDB
737:There are so many examples of human misuse of the Earth that even phrasing this question chills me. If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes. The existence of an independent biology on a nearby planet is a treasure beyond assessing, and the preservation of that life must, I think, supersede any other possible use of Mars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
738:The existing and long-standing use of the word 'evolution' in our state's textbooks has not adversely affected Georgians' belief in the omnipotence of God as creator of the universe, There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy. There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith. ~ Jimmy Carter, #NFDB
739:Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated children never offered excuses—certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology, and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to better discipline the body, ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
740:It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology- and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. And I suppose it's possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
741:A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional - a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure. ~ Ilana Mercer, #NFDB
742:Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
743:Thus far it has become clear that the biblical creation narratives represent another way of speaking about reality than that with which we are familiar from physics and biology. They do not depict the process of becoming or the mathematical structure of matter; instead, they say in different ways that there is only one God and that the universe is not the scene of a struggle among dark forces but rather the creation of his Word. ~ Benedict XVI, #NFDB
744:Missoula has a culture uniquely its own, however, thanks to the fusion of its gritty frontier heritage with the university’s myriad impacts. UM has nationally distinguished programs in biology and ecology and is perhaps even more renowned for its literary bona fides. The faculty of the university’s Creative Writing Program, founded in 1920, has included such influential authors as Richard Hugo, James Crumley, and William Kittredge. ~ Jon Krakauer, #NFDB
745:When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!" "Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
746:To doubt that life evolved, even if some of the details described in this book may yet prove wrong, is to doubt the convergence of evidence, from molecules to men, from bacteria to planetary systems. It is to doubt the evidence of biology, and its concordance with physics and chemistry, geology and astronomy. It is to doubt the veracity of experiment and observation, to doubt the testing in reality. It is, in the end, to doubt reality. ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
747:These pups are not damaged goods; they are not defective. If they can get a safe, stable, and nurturing environment at an early age, the biology says that this sets them up to develop a healthy stress-response system in adulthood. As we’ve mentioned, the key to keeping a tolerable stress response from tipping over into the toxic stress zone is the presence of a buffering adult to adequately mitigate the impact of the stressor. ~ Nadine Burke Harris, #NFDB
748:Yellow noodles of fat spilled out of Ms. Ribbit’s gut. It wasn’t what I was expecting. The textbook featured a precisely drawn diagram of internal organs, clearly defined and colored in neatly between the lines. There wasn’t supposed to be any fat. Ms. Ribbit either needed liposuction or someone had stuffed her with Ramen noodles before a shipping error diverted her from the nearest French restaurant to Mrs. Anderson’s biology class. ~ Jennette Fulda, #NFDB
749:The big idea we start with is: "How is the genome interpreted, and how are stable decisions that affect gene expression inherited from one cell to the next?" This is one of the most competitive areas of molecular biology at the moment, and the students are reading papers that in some instances were published this past year. As a consequence, one of the most common answers I have to give to their questions is, "We just don't know." ~ Shirley M Tilghman, #NFDB
750:Women do not decide at some time in adulthood that they would like other people to understand them to be women, because being a woman is not an ‘identity’. Women’s experience does not resemble that of men who adopt the ‘gender identity’ of being female or being women in any respect. The idea of ‘gender identity’ disappears biology and all the experiences that those with female biology have of being reared in a caste system based on sex. ~ Sheila Jeffreys, #NFDB
751:According to the dictionary entry on extracellular matrix in the Biology Online resource, biologists have recently become aware of the fact that an organism’s environment or substrate (e.g. extracellular matrix) can influence the behavior of cells quite markedly, possibly even more significantly than DNA in the development of complex organisms. The removal of cells from their usual environment to another environment can have far-reaching effects. ~ Max More, #NFDB
752:Mr. Lockery—my biology teacher—says if dinosaurs were magically brought forward in time today, we’d have nothing to worry about. Dogs, wolves, and bears would make short work of tyrannosaurs.” She nodded at Schrödinger, who was now padding across the floor in the opposite direction. “Big cats, too. They’re faster, tougher, and brighter than anything that existed seventy million years ago. Everything is always ramping up, always escalating. ~ Robert J Sawyer, #NFDB
753:Views of women, on one side, as inwardly directed toward home and family and notions of men, on the other, as outwardly striving toward fame and fortune have resounded throughout literature and in the texts of history, biology, and psychology until they seem uncontestable. Such dichotomous views defy the complexities of individuals and stifle the potential for people to reveal different dimensions of themselves in various settings. ~ Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, #NFDB
754:Your body, which is very physical, is under the influence of your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your dreams, your fantasies, your desires, your instincts, your drives, your imagination. All these things orchestrate themselves - all these internal activities that are in the invisible domain that we call consciousness actually have very precise physical effects both in our biology, but they also influence our perception of the world. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
755:A new vision and understanding of something demands a new way of talking about it, for the old terminology gets in the way of this effort. Stubbornly entrenched behind the words coined by a particular conceptual orientation are its secrete prejudices. Any attempt to open out an adequately human vista onto the phenomena of undisturbed existence must include a critique of the most important idea of traditional biology, physiology, and psychology. ~ Medard Boss, #NFDB
756:He was thirteen then, Elijah almost seven. Now, ten years later, Elijah realizes he’s older than Danny was. That all of those changes have happened to him, too. The changes that nobody has any say over. The biology—“growing” and “up” as a physical matter. The changes after—Elijah has to believe they’re a matter of choice. Looking at Danny used to be like looking at the future. Now looking at Danny is like looking at a future he doesn’t want. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
757:Having studied biology really helped me a lot because I quickly understand how biological systems work, and how they fail, and the tragedy of when they fail, because we are dealing with life systems, and when we hear that a species has become extinct, or is threatened, you realize that this could mean that this species will disappear from the face of the earth forever! So that understanding really gives you energy to do something to save it. ~ Wangari Maathai, #NFDB
758:Franz Boas, argued vigorously (and with copious evidence from studies in the field) that the key to understanding the significant differences between peoples lay not in biology—or, at least, not in biology alone—but in culture. Indeed, this tradition of thought, which Du Bois himself soon took up vigorously, argued not only that culture was the central issue but also that the races that mattered for social life were not, in fact, biological at all. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
759:I did become homesick, and whenever that happened, I'd hide away in the school library, where the books filled rows and rows of shelves. I'd find a chair and study my lesson books in geography, social studies, biology, and math. I'd lose myself in American and African history, and within the colorful maps of the world. No matter how foreign and lonely the world was outside, the books always reminded me of home, sitting under the mango tree. ~ William Kamkwamba, #NFDB
760:Imagine that while scuba diving, you suddenly see a shark glide into view. Your heart starts to pound and your anxiety skyrockets. You’re terrified, which is a perfectly rational and understandable feeling. Now imagine that your marine biology training enables you to identify it as a Reef Shark, which you know doesn’t prey on anything as large as you. Your anxiety disappears. Instead you feel excited and curious to observe the shark’s behavior. ~ Douglas Stone, #NFDB
761:Perhaps the biggest of these unsolved problems is to establish human history as a historical science, on a par with recognized historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, geology, and climatology. The study of human history does pose real difficulties, but those recognized historical sciences encounter some of the same challenges. Hence the methods developed in some of these other fields may also prove useful in the field of human history. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
762:A paradigm shift is the best a scientist can hope for. Whenever I smell an opportunity like that, I go after it. You have a new discovery that something's working in a different way than you thought. And this is particularly true in molecular and cell biology, which is structural biology and has the least potential for controversy and partisanship among the biological scientists. You're dealing with a concrete object that's either there or not there. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
763:Now, traveling about twice as far back again in Earth time, back to 542 million years ago, we encounter another sudden massive wave of extinction instigated by runaway biology: The Cambrian substrate revolution, when the texture and chemistry of the seafloor (at that time, the entire habitable surface of the planet) was rapidly remade by a spurt of biological innovation that caused both mass death and fantastic new evolutionary opportunity. This ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
764:Realizing how often ingenious speculation in the complex biological world has led nowhere and how often the real advances in biology as well as in chemistry, physics and astronomy have kept within the bounds of mechanistic interpretation, we geneticists should rejoice, even with our noses on the grindstone (which means both eyes on the objectives), that we have at command an additional means of testing whatever original ideas pop into our heads. ~ Thomas Hunt Morgan, #NFDB
765:When I was in eighth grade, I used a self-timing camera to take nude pictures of myself in various stages of erection. I then exchanged my biology teacher’s slides with the images. The teacher, in a state of panic, kept rapidly pressing the ‘next’ button. It was like a pornographic flip-book. That was the last straw in a very heavy pile of straws. I was expelled, and I ended up transferring mid-year from boarding school to a public school near home. ~ Dani Alexander, #NFDB
766:... Because the staging of human embryos is complex,
owing to the continuous process of change during development,
it is proposed that a new system of classification could be developed
using the terms mentioned in the Qur'an and Sunnah. The proposed
system is simple, comprehensive, and conforms with present
embryological knowledge.287 (Dr. Keith L. Moore, Professor Emeritus,
Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of Toronto) ~ Harun Yahya,#NFDB
767:If it is true that an influx of doubt and uncertainty actually marks periods of healthy growth in a science, then evolutionary biology is flourishing today as it seldom has flourished in the past. For biologists collectively are less agreed upon the details of evolutionary mechanics than they were a scant decade ago. Superficially, it seems as if we know less about evolution than we did in 1959, the centennial year of Darwin's on the Origin of Species. ~ Niles Eldredge, #NFDB
768:All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake. As I said, pure biology. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
769:Feminism can be a friend to science. It not only improves how science is done by pushing researchers to include the female perspective, but science in turn can also show us that we're not as different as we seem. Research to date suggests that humans survived, thrived and spread across the globe through the efforts of everyone equally sharing the same work and responsibilities. For most of our history, we lived hand in hand. And our biology reflects this. ~ Angela Saini, #NFDB
770:I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, “homeostasis,” i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
771:Society thinks of violent acts as manifestations of evil or immorality. We're told we have ultimate control over our own behavior, that each and every one of us has the free will to choose not to hurt another human being. But it's not just morality that guides us. Biology does as well. Our frontal lobs helps us integrate thoughts and actions. They help us weight the consequences of those actions. Without such control, we'd give in to every wild impulse. ~ Tess Gerritsen, #NFDB
772:I know that the body is smart, and the body is adaptable, and the body will always try to find a way, but we are smarter. We are smarter than our bodies and science has figured out a method, a clumsy method full of hacking and stitching back up, to undo biology and remake it. A messy sewing project that’s designed to circumvent nature, bypass evolution, fix everything that went wrong with your guts somewhere along the way. Because that’s the overall message. ~ Jen Larsen, #NFDB
773:Despite all of our technology, our bodies are just not ready for a world so completely tamed by our desire for comfort. Without stimulation, the responses that were designed to fight environmental challenges don’t always lie dormant. Sometimes they turn inward and wreak havoc on our insides. An entire field of medical research on autoimmune diseases suggests they originate from fundamental disconnect between the outside world and an understimulated biology. ~ Scott Carney, #NFDB
774:The question of surrender is political, it is not a question of love. And relationship is not love at all; it means love has ended and relationship has begun. It begins very soon after the honeymoon - mostly in the middle of the honeymoon. It is not easy to live with another person whose life-style is different, whose likings are different, whose education and culture is different, and above all the other happens to be a woman - even their biology is different. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
775:Paleontologist Niles Eldredge, a prominent evolutionist, said: 'The doubt that has infiltrated the previous, smugly confident certitude of evolutionary biology’s last twenty years has inflamed passions.' He spoke of the 'lack of total agreement even within the warring camps,' and added, 'things really are in an uproar these days . . . Sometimes it seems as though there are as many variations on each [evolutionary] theme as there are individual biologists.' ~ Niles Eldredge, #NFDB
776:The real excitement of being a girl - of being, that is, a woman in embryo - was that life was such a wonderful gamble. You didn't know what was going to happen to you. That was what made being a woman so exciting. No worry about what you should be or do - Biology would decide. You were waiting for The Man, and when the man came, he would change your entire life, you can say what you like, that is an exciting point of view to hold at the threshold of life. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
777:When I was very young, biology, the diversity of life, was one of my main interests. I know there's this image people have that I'm this spoiled, cocky punk of an actor. Honestly, that's not who I am. I really care that so many species have been wiped out, like genocide of entire races. I believe in the divine right of all species to survive on this planet. So I decided I want to be active as an environmentalist. I learned. I asked experts. I got active. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio, #NFDB
778:I shall argue that the distinction between a ‘living planet’ – one that is geologically active – and a living cell is only a matter of definition. There is no hard and fast dividing line. Geochemistry gives rise seamlessly to biochemistry. From this point of view, the fact that we can’t distinguish between geology and biology in these old rocks is fitting. Here is a living planet giving rise to life, and the two can’t be separated without splitting a continuum. Move ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
779:The student of biology is often struck with the feeling that historians, when dealing with the rise and fall of nations, do not generally view the phenomena from a sufficiently high biological standpoint. To me, at least, they seem to attach too much importance to individual rulers and soldiers, and to particular wars, policies, religions, and customs; while at the same time they make little attempt to extract the fundamental causes of national success or failure. ~ Ronald Ross, #NFDB
780:If the students don't want to learn about evolution, they shouldn't be in the course. A biology course that teaches creationism is not a science course, it's a religion course. So the students demanding that creationism be given credence in that course are out of line and are denying the academic freedom of the professor. They are calling into question the scientific basis of the material that's being presented. And students are not in a position to do that. ~ Joan Wallach Scott, #NFDB
781:To see," the poet Paul Valery once wrote, "is to forget the name of the things that one sees." To see DNA is to forget its name or its chemical formula. Like the simplest of human tools-hammer, scythe, bellows, ladder, scissors-the function of the molecule can be entirely comprehended from its structure. To "see" DNA is to immediately perceive its function as a repository of information. The most important molecule in biology needs no name to be understood. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
782:When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
783:A word on the display of emotions. Almost no one can conceal his emotions. Behavioral scientists believe that one of the main reasons why people become leaders is not from what skills they seem to possess, but rather from what extremely superficial impression they make on others through hardly perceptible physical signals—what we call today “charisma,” for example. The biology of the phenomenon is now well studied under the subject heading “social emotions. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
784:long ago gave up a number of beekeeping practices conceived with the notion of making bees do certain things that seemed good from a human standpoint but which usually involved radically disrupting the hive. Instead, I watch the bees more, try to understand what they are doing and then see if I can work in a way that will be in keeping with their biology and behavior. I try to create conditions that will make them happy, and then leave them alone as much as possible. ~ Sue Hubbell, #NFDB
785:Our title as mother isn't defined, by biology or science. It can't be measured in centimeters or the arc of a curve. Mothering is the thing all women do, with the small and big kids under our care, the neighbor boys up the street, our students, our grown nieces, the children we can only hold in our hearts, , and the ones we don't even know yet to hope for. What I'm trying to say is that none of us is off the hook here.
Humanity is crying out to be nurtured. ~ Shannan Martin,#NFDB
786:Biology occupies a position among the sciences at once marginal and central. Marginal because-the living world constituting but a tiny and very "special" part of the universe-it does not seem likely that the study of living beings will ever uncover general laws applicable outside the biosphere. But if the ultimate aim of the whole of science is indeed, as I believe, to clarify man's relationship to the universe, then biology must be accorded a central position . . . ~ Jacques Monod, #NFDB
787:That the fundamental aspects of heredity should have turned out to be so extraordinarily simple supports us in the hope that nature may, after all, be entirely approachable. Her much-advertised inscrutability has once more been found to be an illusion due to our ignorance. This is encouraging, for, if the world in which we live were as complicated as some of our friends would have us believe we might well despair that biology could ever become an exact science. ~ Thomas Hunt Morgan, #NFDB
788:Defriending isn’t just unrecognized by some social oversight; it’s protected by its own protocol, a code of silence. Demanding an explanation wouldn’t just be undignified; it would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. Officially, you owe each other nothing. ~ Tim Kreider, #NFDB
789:The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry — is not even a ”subject " — but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning. ~ Neil Postman, #NFDB
790:This process of error correction is so fundamental to our biology that distinct circuits of the brain appear to coordinate learning that results from error. One of these error correction pathways involves the cerebellum.3 The cerebellum receives electrical information from a part of the brain stem called the inferior olive when a sensory prediction error occurs. The cerebellum uses these error signals to predict and correct for errors that might occur in the future. ~ David J Linden, #NFDB
791:Metaphysical ghosts cannot be killed, because they cannot be touched; but they may be dispelled by dispelling the twilight in which shadows and solidities are easily confounded. The Vital Principle is an entity of this ghostly kind; and although the daylight has dissipated it, and positive Biology is no longer vexed with its visitations, it nevertheless reappears in another shape in the shadowy region of mystery which surrounds biological and all other questions. ~ George Henry Lewes, #NFDB
792:it is an old sin of biology to confuse the definition of a feature with the feature itself. If we define “beauty” as having blue eyes (and only blue eyes), then we will, indeed, find a “gene for beauty.” If we define “intelligence” as the performance on only one kind of problem in only one kind of test, then we will, indeed, find a “gene for intelligence.” The genome is only a mirror for the breadth or narrowness of human imagination. It is Narcissus, reflected. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
793:We would be mistaken in regarding the totality of human brains as forming no more than an added sum. There is something more: these united brains build up a sort of dome, from which each brain can see, with the assistance of the others, what would escape it if it had to rely solely on its own field of vision. The view so obtained goes beyond anything the individual can compass, nor can he exhaust it. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, #NFDB
794:From 1979 to 1988, it concluded, Harvard admitted only 13.2 percent of Asian Americans, compared with 17.4 percent of whites. Applicants from California and those intending to study biology—two disproportionately Asian American groups—had lower admission rates as well. Accounting for most of the admissions gap between white and Asian applicants, federal investigators concluded, was “preference given to legacies and recruited athletes—groups that are predominantly white. ~ Daniel Golden, #NFDB
795:In the Germany of the l920s, the Weimar Republic, both organismic biology and Gestalt psychology were part of a larger intellectual trend that saw itself as a protest movement against the increasing fragmentation and alienation of human nature. The entire Weimar culture was characterized by an antimechanistic outlook, a "hunger for wholeness". Organismic biology, Gestalt psychology, ecology, and, later on, general systems theory all grew out of this holistic zeitgeist. ~ Fritjof Capra, #NFDB
796:Art Levinson, who was on Apple’s board, was chairing the board meeting of his own company, Genentech, when his cell phone rang and Jobs’s name appeared on the screen. As soon as there was a break, Levinson called him back and heard the news of the tumor. He had a background in cancer biology, and his firm made cancer treatment drugs, so he became an advisor. So did Andy Grove of Intel, who had fought and beaten prostate cancer. Jobs called him that Sunday, and he drove ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
797:So, we see that the ground of intelligence must be in the undetermined and unknown flux, that is also the ground of all definable forms of matter. Intelligence is thus not deducible or explainable on the basis of any branch of knowledge (e.g. physics or biology). Its origin is deeper and more inward than any knowable order that could describe it. (Indeed, it has to comprehend the very order of definable forms of matter through which we would hope to comprehend intelligence. ~ David Bohm, #NFDB
798:An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more. A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of “something else”—a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise. And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
799:Proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressors are the molecular pivots of the cell. They are the gatekeepers of cell division, and the division of cells is so central to our physiology that genes and pathways that coordinate this process intersect with nearly every other aspect of our biology. In the laboratory, we call this the six-degrees-of-separation-from-cancer rule: you can ask any biological question, no matter how seemingly distant—what makes the heart fail, or why ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
800:The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes.
Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry--is not even a "subject"--but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning. ~ Neil Postman,#NFDB
801:We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
802:What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally 'inherit' tradition. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
803:Seen from outside and materially, the best we can say at the moment is that life properly speaking begins with the cell. For a century science has concentrated its attention on this chemically and structurally ultra-complex unit, and the longer it continues to do so the more evident it becomes that in it lies the secret of which we have as yet no more than an inkling—the secret of the connection between the two worlds of physics and biology. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, #NFDB
804:So I think a humanities major who also did a lot of computer science, economics, psychology, or other sciences can be quite valuable and have great career flexibility,’’ Katz said. ‘‘But you need both, in my view, to maximize your potential. And an economics major or computer science major or biology or engineering or physics major who takes serious courses in the humanities and history also will be a much more valuable scientist, financial professional, economist or entrepreneur. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
805:The contemporary design argument does not rest, however, on gaps in our knowledge but rather on the growth in our knowledge due to the revolution in molecular biology. Information theory has taught us that nature exhibits two types of order. The first type is produced by natural causes-shiny crystals, hexagonal patterns in oil, whirlpools in the bathtub. But the second type-the complex structure of the DNA molecule-is not produced by any natural processes known to experience. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
806:And at that moment—at the peak of my high, at the peak of her greedy triumph—our eyes locked and we surged past every barrier—stranger and stranger, priest and penitent, Tyler and Poppy. We were simply male and female, as God had made us, Adam and Eve, in the most elemental and fundamental form. We were biology, we were creation incarnate, and I saw the moment she felt it too—that we were fused somehow. Irrevocably and undeniably fused together into something singular and whole. ~ Sierra Simone, #NFDB
807:The theory of natural selection is the centerpiece of The Origin of Species and of evolutionary theory. It is this theory that accounts for the adaptations of organisms, those innumerable features that so wonderfully equip them for survival and reproduction; it is this theory that accounts for the divergence of species from common ancestors and thus for the endless diversity of life. Natural selection is a simple concept, but it is perhaps the most important idea in biology. ~ Douglas J Futuyma, #NFDB
808:FROM TIME TO TIME, there was talk among the astronauts that it might be nice to have a drink with dinner. Beer is a no-fly, because without gravity, carbonation bubbles don’t rise to the surface. “You just get a foamy froth,” says Bourland. He says Coke spent $450,000 developing a zero-gravity dispenser, only to be undone by biology. Since bubbles also don’t rise to the top of a stomach, the astronauts had trouble burping. “Often a burp is accompanied by a liquid spray,” Bourland adds. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
809:In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture. ~ Jerry A Coyne, #NFDB
810:Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. The key to our being here now is time, 4.54 billion (Earth) years of time. Nuclear fission wasn't discovered until long after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace published their original books and papers, for example. Our ability to measure atomic masses wasn't developed until long after their deaths. These features of nature enabled us to reckon the age of the Earth and compare it with speciation rates here. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
811:The thought that babies would become children, and children would become people, never occurred to them. The concept that perhaps biology was not destiny, and that not all little girls would be pretty princesses, and not all little boys would be brave soldiers, also never occurred to them. Things might have been easier if those ideas had ever slithered into their heads, unwanted but undeniably important. Alas, their minds were made up, and left no room for such revolutionary opinions. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
812:Life, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama. The primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. For the very strong reason that the whole of biology is quite definitely only a chapter in certain biographies, it is what biologists do in the portion of their lives open to biography. ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset, #NFDB
813:"Methodological naturalism" and "metaphysical naturalism" are terms that often surface in the continuing battle between evolutionary biology and creationism/intelligent design. The methodological thesis says that scientific theories shouldn't postulate supernatural entities; the metaphysical thesis says that no such entities exist. In this debate, God is the supernatural entity at issue; the question isn't whether science gets to talk about mathematical entities if Platonism is correct. ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
814:Technology has a role that is biological in the strict sense of the word: it has every right to be included in the scheme of nature. From this point of view, which agrees with that of Bergson, there ceases to be any distinction between the artificial and the natural, between technology and life, since all organisms are the result of invention; if there is any difference, the advantage is on the side of the artificial. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, #NFDB
815:The thought that babies would become children, and children would become people, never occurred to them. The concept that perhaps biology was not destiny, and that not all little girls would be pretty princesses, and not all little boys would be brave soldiers, also never occurred to them. Things might have been easier if those ideas had never slithered into their heads, unwanted but undeniably important. Alas, their minds were made up, and left no room for such revolutionary opinions. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
816:Recent studies have considered the detection of a spaceship visiting our parish of the galaxy. In my opinion that last thought should bring a blush to every human cheek... Fecklessness might be the main theme of the aliens' report on the new-found source of radio pollution ... that emanates from beings who have mastered a lot of physics, chemistry and biology and yet let their children starve-while all around their planet the energy of their mother star runs to waste in a desert of space. ~ Nigel Calder, #NFDB
817:Paranormal activity cannot be replicated in a laboratory environment and therefore cannot be studied as closely as a natural science, like chemistry or biology. So the inability to replicate the phenomena makes verification and categorization of paranormal events very difficult and erodes the credibility of the science. After all, if we could summon spirits of the departed consistently and reliably in order to study them, there would be a whole new market in trans-dimensional communications. ~ Zak Bagans, #NFDB
818:Why do any of us act the way we do? Is it our beliefs or our biology that shapes us? Lauren Grodstein considers this eternal question through the story of Andrew Waite, scientist, father, widower, struggling to raise two daughters, living with the ghost of his wife, facing a test of his faith in science. There are no easy answers here, just the honest complexity of human beings trying their best to be good people. The Explanation for Everything is moving, beautiful, and wonderfully funny. ~ Victor LaValle, #NFDB
819:Coach McConaughy grabbed the whistle swinging from a chain around his neck and blew it. “Seats,
team!” Coach considered teaching tenthgrade
biology a side assignment to his job as varsity basketball
coach, and we all knew it.
“It may not have occurred to you kids that sex is more than a fifteenminute
trip to the backseat of a car.
It’s science. And what is science?”
“Boring,” some kid in the back of the room called out.
“The only class I’m failing,” said another. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick,#NFDB
820:It is now widely realized that nearly all the 'classical' problems of molecular biology have either been solved or will be solved in the next decade. The entry of large numbers of American and other biochemists into the field will ensure that all the chemical details of replication and transcription will be elucidated. Because of this, I have long felt that the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other fields of biology, notably development and the nervous system. ~ Sydney Brenner, #NFDB
821:We shall have to stop thinking of technology as something invulnerable that is merely used by humans, and view it as part of a greater cybernetic ecology all around us. The key distinction in an environment is not between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, but between semantic and dynamic: intention and behaviour. Biology has already drawn these lines, and through us, it will integrate the inanimate with the animate in information systems, until we no longer see a pertinent difference between the two. ~ Mark Burgess, #NFDB
822:Over a century ago, scientists first began to argue that the patent system and scientific data should be opened up. Back then, it was popular for conservatives to claim that putting geneng into the hands of the public would result in mega-viruses or total species collapse. Open data would be the gateway to a runaway synthetic biology apocalypse. But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property. ~ Annalee Newitz, #NFDB
823:As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones. There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside. The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'. ~ Bruce Chatwin, #NFDB
824:Reba hesitated. He could see it. A primal reaction—more a reflex. He was, after all, a stranger. We are trained by both biology and society to fear the stranger. But evolution has given us societal niceties too. They were in a public parking lot and he seemed like a nice man, a dad and all, and he had a car seat and, well, it would be rude to say no, wouldn’t it? These calculations all took mere seconds, no more than two or three, and in the end, politeness beat out survival. It often did. “Sure. ~ Harlan Coben, #NFDB
825:We teach our children the mathematics of certainty—geometry and trigonometry—but not the mathematics of uncertainty, statistical thinking. And we teach our children biology but not the psychology that shapes their fears and desires. Even experts, shockingly, are not trained how to communicate risks to the public in an understandable way. And there can be positive interest in scaring people: to get an article on the front page, to persuade people to relinquish civil rights, or to sell a product. ~ Gerd Gigerenzer, #NFDB
826:In the next century, we will be inventing radical new technologies - machine intelligence, perhaps nanotech, great advances in synthetic biology and other things we haven't even thought of yet. And those new powers will unlock wonderful opportunities, but they might also bring with them certain risks. And we have no track record of surviving those risks. So if there are big existential risks, I think they are going to come from our own activities and mostly from our own inventiveness and creativity. ~ Nick Bostrom, #NFDB
827:The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories. ~ Jacques Monod, #NFDB
828:What is self and what is other may be a question of the person's 'biology,' but it is equally a question of the person's 'philosophy': what is the subject-object relationship the person has become in the world?
That question suggests at least two things...First, subject-object relations become; they are not static; their study is the study of a motion. Second, subject-object relations live in the world; they are not simply abstractions, but take form in actual human relations and social contexts. ~ Robert Kegan,#NFDB
829:Natural history is not taught in seminary. This is curious, as most people in pastoral ministry are about 567 times more likely to be asked about cosmology or sub-nuclear physics or human biology or evolution than they are to be asked about irregular Greek verbs or the danger of the patripassionist heresy. If we monotheists are going to go around claiming that our "God made the heaven and the earth," it is not unreasonable to expect us to know something about what that heaven and earth actually are. ~ Sara Maitland, #NFDB
830:The past three decades have witnessed unprecedented growth in what researchers now term ultimate human performance. This is not the same as optimal human performance, and the difference is in the consequences. Optimal performance is about being your best; ultimate performance is about being your best when any mistake could kill. Both common sense and evolutionary biology tell us that progress under these “ultimate” conditions should be a laggard’s game, but that’s not exactly what the data suggests. ~ Steven Kotler, #NFDB
831:Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
832:Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically but politically incorrect. But for a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works. The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes.2 ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
833:As an adult I discovered that I was a pretty good autodidact, and can teach myself all kind of things. And developed a great interest in a number of different things from how to build a street hot rod from the ground up to quantum mechanics, and those two different kinds of mechanics, and it was really in the sciences, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, I would begin looking at these things looking for ideas, but in fact you don't read it for ideas you read it for curiosity and interest in the subject. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
834:There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occur but once in their detailed glory. And for those kinds of sciences, be it cosmology, or evolutionary biology, or geology, or palaeontology, the experimental methods, simplification, quantification, prediction and repetition of the experimental sciences don't always work. You have to go with the narrative, the descriptive methods of what? Of historians. ~ Richard Lewontin, #NFDB
835:The biological universe was full of molecules picking out their partners like clever locks designed to fit a key: toxins clinging inseparably to antitoxins, dyes that highlighted only particular parts of cells, chemical stains that could nimbly pick out one class of germs from a mixture of microbes. If biology was an elaborate mix-and-match game of chemicals, Ehrlich reasoned, what if some chemical could discriminate bacterial cells from animal cells--and kill the former without touching the host? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
836:there are a couple of problems with being twenty-two but you don't know about them yet, because you can only find out about the problems sometime after you are no longer twenty-two. anyway, one of the problems with being twenty-two is you start to get afraid that maybe you're horrible at everything, mostly because you're not really good at anything yet, so you decide to stay the course with biology until a sign appears, even though being stoned drunk all the time doesn't register as a sign. ~ Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, #NFDB
837:We should not be too quick to dismiss our own [ocular] arrangement. As so often in biology, the situation is more complex.....we have the advantage that our own light-sensitive cells are embedded directly in their support cells (the retinal pigment epithelium) with an excellent blood supply immediately underneath. Such an arrangement supports the continuous turnover of photosensitive pigments. The human retina consumes even more oxygen than the brain, per gram, making it the most energetic organ in the body. ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
838:Biology is a science of three dimensions. The first is the study of each species across all levels of biological organization, molecule to cell to organism to population to ecosystem. The second dimension is the diversity of all species in the biosphere. The third dimension is the history of each species in turn, comprising both its genetic evolution and the environmental change that drove the evolution. Biology, by growing in all three dimensions, is progressing toward unification and will continue to do so. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
839:I do sense, as compared with let's say the early '50s, there's somewhat more of a careerism. I don't think it's anything special to economics; it's equally true with physics or biology. A graduate education has become a more career-oriented thing, and part of that is because of the need for funding. In fact, that's a much worse problem in the natural sciences than it is in economics. So you can't even do your work in the natural sciences, particularly, and even to some extent in economics, without funding. ~ Kenneth Arrow, #NFDB
840:The foundations of population genetics were laid chiefly by mathematical deduction from basic premises contained in the works of Mendel and Morgan and their followers. Haldane, Wright, and Fisher are the pioneers of population genetics whose main research equipment was paper and ink rather than microscopes, experimental fields, Drosophila bottles, or mouse cages. Theirs is theoretical biology at its best, and it has provided a guiding light for rigorous quantitative experimentation and observation. ~ Theodosius Dobzhansky, #NFDB
841:When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science? When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
842:Of all the different kinds of art, you see, poetry is the one most attuned to man's condition, and therefore the most noble and the most demanding of them all. Just as men struggle to transcend the inherent limits of geography, history, and biology to find the meaning of life, so poets strive to transcend the inherent limits of language, meter, and structure to find beauty and truth. And just as life wouldn't have meaning without death, so poetry wouldn't have its sublime power outside the prison of its form. ~ Olga Grushin, #NFDB
843:As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.
There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.
The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'. ~ Bruce Chatwin,#NFDB
844:A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them—not one—has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They've never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me. ~ Peter Watts, #NFDB
845:I am a physicist, not a biologist.… But I am very much excited by your article in May 30th Nature, and think that brings Biology over into the group of “exact” sciences.… If your point of view is correct each organism will be characterized by a long number written in quadrucal (?) system with figures 1, 2, 3, 4 standing for different bases.… This would open a very exciting possibility of theoretical research based on combinatorix and the theory of numbers!… I have a feeling this can be done. What do you think? ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
846:The Anthropocene represents a braiding together of these into one inseparable narrative. This is “the end of history,” and of biology and geology—at least as separate stories. Have they become irreversibly entwined? It’s conceivable that there may never again be geological change without human influence. We are witnessing, and manifesting, something unprecedented and still completely unpredictable: the advent of self-aware geological change. As an astrobiologist, I study the possible evolutionary relationships ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
847:One of the most robust sex differences in personality research is the finding that women are higher in Agreeableness than men are. The difference is over half a standard deviation, which means that although there is plenty of overlap between the sexes, the average man scores lower than 70 per cent of women. Women have an advantage on theory of mind tasks too. Moreover, there is evidence that the difference is deep in our biology. When women are given testosterone experimentally, it reduces empathetic behaviour.19 ~ Daniel Nettle, #NFDB
848:Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens - ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
849:The major credit I think Jim and I deserve ... is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene. ... We could not see what the answer was, but we considered it so important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any relevant point of view. ~ Francis Crick, #NFDB
850:The question is: exactly how did life get here? Was it by natural selection and random mutation or was it by something else? Everybody - even Richard Dawkins - sees design in biology. You see this design when you see co-ordinated parts coming together to perform a function - like in a hand. And so it's the appearance of design that everybody's trying to explain. So that if Darwin's theory doesn't explain it we're left with no other explanation than maybe it really was designed. That's essentially the design argument. ~ Michael Behe, #NFDB
851:A sound Physics of the Earth should include all the primary considerations of the earth's atmosphere, of the characteristics and continual changes of the earth's external crust, and finally of the origin and development of living organisms. These considerations naturally divide the physics of the earth into three essential parts, the first being a theory of the atmosphere, or Meteorology, the second, a theory of the earth's external crust, or Hydrogeology, and the third, a theory of living organisms, or Biology. ~ Jean Baptiste Lamarck, #NFDB
852:We may, I believe, anticipate that the chemist of the future who is interested in the structure of proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides, and other complex substances with high molecular weight will come to rely upon a new structural chemistry, involving precise geometrical relationships among the atoms in the molecules and the rigorous application of the new structural principles, and that great progress will be made, through this technique, in the attack, by chemical methods, on the problems of biology and medicine. ~ Linus Pauling, #NFDB
853:Morgan had discovered an important modification to Mendel's laws. Genes did not travel separately; instead, they moved in packs. Packets of information were themselves packaged-into chromosomes, and ultimately in cells. But the discovery had a more important consequence: conceptually, Morgan had not just linked genes; he had linked two disciplines-cell biology and genetics. The gene was not a "purely theoretical unit." It was a material thing that lived in a particular location, and a particular form, within a cell. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
854:To be motherly is a totally different phenomenon. It is something absolutely human; it transcends animality. It has nothing to do with biology. It is love, pure love, unconditional love. When a mother loves unconditionally - and only a mother can love unconditionally - the child learns the joy of unconditional love. The child becomes capable of loving unconditionally. And to be able to love unconditionally is to be religious. And it is the easiest thing for a woman to do. It is easy for her because naturally she is ready for it. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
855:Many people believe that gender identity...is rooted in biology...Many other people understand that gender is more like language than like biology; that is, while they understand us humans to have a biological capacity to use language, they point out we are not born with a hard-wired language "preinstalled" in our brains. Likewise, while we have a biological capacity to identify with and learn to "speak" from a particular location in a cultural gender system, we don't come into the world with a predetermined gender identity. ~ Susan Stryker, #NFDB
856:Homo sapiens, she once told me, is an unusually successful species. And it is the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out—that is the way things work in biology. By “wipe itself out” Margulis didn’t necessarily mean extinction—just that something comprehensively bad would happen, wrecking the human enterprise. Borlaug and Vogt might have wanted to stop us from destroying ourselves, she would have said, but they were kidding themselves. Neither conservation nor technology has anything to do with biological reality. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
857:It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It's pure biology. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
858:Religion and science, for example, are often thought to be opponents, but as I have shown, the insights of ancient religions and of modern science are both needed to reach a full understanding of human nature and the conditions of human satisfaction. The ancients may have known little about biology, chemistry, and physics, but many were good psychologists. Psychology and religion can benefit by taking each other seriously, or at least by agreeing to learn from each other while overlooking the areas of irreconcilable difference. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
859:It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects. ~ Colin McGinn, #NFDB
860:Shame comes from outside of us—from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from the inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate. We are wired for connection. It’s in our biology. As infants, our need for connection is about survival. As we grow older, connection means thriving—emotionally, physically, spiritually and intellectually. Connection is critical because we all have the basic need to feel accepted and to believe that we belong and are valued for who we are. Shame unravels our connection to others. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
861:From the vantage point of the brain, doing well in school and at work involves one and the same state, the brain’s sweet spot for performance. The biology of anxiety casts us out of that zone for excellence. “Banish fear” was a slogan of the late quality-control guru W. Edwards Deming. He saw that fear froze a workplace: workers were reluctant to speak up, to share new ideas, or to coordinate well, let alone to improve the quality of their output. The same slogan applies to the classroom—fear frazzles the mind, disrupting learning. ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
862:I don't believe, for instance, that evolutionary biology or any scientific endeavor has much to say about love. I'm sure a lot can be learned about the importance of hormones and their effects on our feelings. But do the bleak implications of evolution have any impact on the love I feel for my family? Do they make me more likely to break the law of flaunt society's expectations of me? No. I simply does not follow that human relationships are meaningless just because we live in a godless universe subject to the natural laws of biology. ~ Greg Graffin, #NFDB
863:I think one of the both liberating and terrifying prospects from synthetic biology for example is that you are going to have all of these do it yourself biosynthetic labs where people are going to be playing with the software of life. We are going to have a new generation of artists that are going to be playing with genomes the way that Blake and Byron used to play with poetry. And when genomes are the new canvas for the artist, we might be able to radically upgrade the human species and the software of the biology of the human species. ~ Jason Silva, #NFDB
864:Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world. ~ Michael Denton, #NFDB
865:We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations - a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
866:Let's admit that feminism came from liberalism and it was very positive. But then it went dark. It went into a bad place. When feminism replaced biology with social construct, they started to say that everything about a human being was created by your environment or by your - by environmental cues as opposed to innate traits... Like you didn't achieve what you could get because it was your fault. They denied traits that are applied across all cultures. And that's where feminism went wrong is it denied biology and makes them look foolish. ~ Greg Gutfeld, #NFDB
867:It is part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to the aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means - be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our own lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our own limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way, and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defence mechanism. It's pure biology. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
868:Synthetic biology56 is built around the idea that DNA is essentially software—nothing more than a four-letter code arranged in a specific order. Much like with computers, the code drives the machine. In biology, the order of the code governs the cell’s manufacturing processes, instructing it to make specific proteins and such. But, as with all software, DNA can be reprogrammed. Nature’s original code can be swapped out for new, human-written code. We can co-opt the machinery of life, telling it to produce—well, whatever we can think of. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
869:With this, in a powerful sense, our Question has been answered. The world, insofar as we speak of the world of Chemistry, biology, astrophysics, engineering, and everyday life, does embody beautiful ideas. The Core, which governs those domains, is profoundly rooted in concepts of symmetry and geometry, as we have seen. And it works its will, in quantum theory, through music-like rules. Symmetry really does determine structure. A pure and perfect Music of the Spheres really does animate the soul of reality. Plato and Pythagoras: We salute you! ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
870:Her theory of endosymbiosis, controversial at first and now enshrined in biology textbooks, showed that in evolution, radical cooperation is just as potent a force as deathly competition. One great example involves mitochondria, the tiny micron-size power plants inside our cells. According to endosymbiotic theory, these used to be freely living bacteria that joined our ancestral cells in a mutually beneficial, symbiotic, relationship. The association became so tight that eventually the partners joined together to form a new kind of organism. ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
871:There is a great deal more to evolutionary biology than survival of the fittest—although that’s all anyone seems to remember. One of Darwin’s contemporaries was Alfred Russel Wallace, who had even more profound lessons about evolution—that humans are social creatures. That we coevolve with other species as part of a fabric of interwoven and interdependent life-forms. The world isn’t entirely about competition and dominance. And species that cooperate with others succeed better than those who do not. That’s what civilization is, cooperation.” “And ~ Daniel Suarez, #NFDB
872:Natural scientists denied that the races observed in social life were natural biological groupings, and social scientists proposed that the human units of moral and political significance were those based on shared culture rather than shared biology. It helped that Darwin’s point had been strengthened by the development of Mendelian population genetics, which showed that the differences found between the geographic populations of the human species were statistical differences in gene frequencies rather than differences in some putative racial essence. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
873:Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did,as conquest, as adventure--in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically then men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically. ~ Marge Piercy, #NFDB
874:Men are biological. Women are biological. We pretend our minds are in control, but that’s a very tenuous control at best, and a civilized society can’t be built on uncontrolled biology. I see it in my work: intelligence betrayed by lust, by jealousy, by macho ownership; otherwise trustworthy men who can’t be trusted at all around women, or vice versa. Hell, look at Congress. Well-intentioned, progressive, admired law-makers who end up losing it all because they can’t control how they react to women! And I certainly don’t trust most women around men ~ Sheri S Tepper, #NFDB
875:Supposing we divide the world into two parts—on the one side, matter which has no roots in mass consciousness, and on the other side the living being. Would we not be justified then in saying, “But—interiority, the rudiment of consciousness, exists everywhere; it is only that if the particle is extremely simple, the consciousness is so small that we cannot perceive it; if there is an increase in complexity, this consciousness comes out into the open and we have the world of life?” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, #NFDB
876:As a result of his insistence that the individual should
bow before the eternity of the species and should submerge himself in the great cycle of time, race has
been turned into a special aspect of the species, and the individual has been made to bow before this
sordid god. The life of which he spoke with fear and trembling has been degraded to a sort of biology for
domestic use. Finally, a race of vulgar overlords, with a blundering desire for power, adopted, in his
name, the "anti-Semitic deformity" on which he never ceased to pour scorn. ~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
877:We have to create a sustainable environment, worldwide, and we're not doing it. The best thing we can do with the rest of this century is aggressively acquire - and put aside - the richest natural reserves that we can, and then do our best to manage the needs and desires of the 11 billion people we expect to have by the end of the century. This is where biology is headed. For that reason, the sooner we get on with mapping biodiversity on Earth, the better off biology will be - not to mention the whole subject of saving it before we carelessly throw it away. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
878:For me, it's really easy to be kind to others when I remember that none of us came into this world with a manual about how to get it all right. We are ultimately a product of our biology and environment. Consequently, I choose to be compassionate with others when I consider how much painful emotional baggage we are biologically programmed to carry around. I recognize that mistakes will be made, but this does not mean that I need to either victimize myself or take your actions and mistakes personally. Your stuff is your stuff, and my stuff is my stuff. ~ Jill Bolte Taylor, #NFDB
879:It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology. ~ Niels Kaj Jerne, #NFDB
880:Maybe her current state was the simple matter of her biological clock kicking into gear, and Zeke just happened to be the closest appropriate male. She’d read about the biology of attraction, analyzed it. Men liked women with big breasts because that meant they could feed all the babies. Women, on a cellular level, went for a man who could take care of the saber-tooth tiger that was trying to get into their cave. When it came to simple genetics, Zeke was rather caveman like. He hadn’t yet grunted at her, but she was certain he would, sooner or later. ~ Linda Howard, #NFDB
881:My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics--a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification. Such a world view is not a necessary condition of the practice of any of those sciences, and its acceptance or nonacceptance would have no effect on most scientific research. ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
882:Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think. ~ Marlene van Niekerk, #NFDB
883:Andrew thought that it was strange that humans would choose the day of coming forth from the womb as the significant thing to commemorate. He knew something of human biology, and it seemed to him that it would be much more important to focus on the moment of the actual creation of the organism, when the sperm cell entered the ovum and the process of cell division began. Surely that was the real point of origin of any person!
Certainly the new person was already alive - if not capable of independent functioning - during the nine months spent within the womb. ~ Isaac Asimov,#NFDB
884:The stark division between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics is not in accord with our scientific worldview. When non-locality is factored into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, the mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos." An emergent phenomenon is one whose characteristics or behaviors cannot be explained in terms of the sum of its parts; if mind is emergent, then it cannot be wholly explained by brain. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
885:This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. It is an increasingly influential idea in evolutionary theory, and one that will recur throughout the book. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. Life is a chess tournament in which if you win a game, you start the next game with the handicap of a missing pawn. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
886:To Learn is to create. Learning- whether it is programming, mathematics, art, music, poetry, biology, or chemistry- is all about breaking down walls and freeing the one thing that kept us alive: knowledge.
Knowledge expands freedom in all its forms. Knowledge breaks down walls. It liberates the oppressed. We are committed to knowledge. Knowledge as a hammer against classism, against sexism, against racism, against gender discrimination, against slavery, against bigotry, against war, against hatred. If there is darkness in the world, we will light it up. ~ Leopoldo Gout,#NFDB
887:A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks semipopular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general. these have not been found-yet the optimism has died hard and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks. ~ David M Raup, #NFDB
888:Scientists who study human motivation have lately learned that after basic survival needs have been met, the combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore, and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers—the three things that motivate us most. All three are deeply woven through the fabric of flow. Thus toying with flow involves tinkering with primal biology: addictive neurochemistry, potent psychology, and hardwired evolutionary behaviors. ~ Steven Kotler, #NFDB
889:The most devastating thing though that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation there is no need of a Savior. And I submit that puts Jesus, historical or otherwise, into the ranks of the unemployed. I think that evolution is absolutely the death knell of Christianity. ~ Frank Zindler, #NFDB
890:Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. ~ Donna J Haraway, #NFDB
891:If it's true there's a beginning to the universe, as modern cosmologists now agree, then this implies a cause that transcends the universe. If the laws of physics are fine-tuned to permit life, as contemporary physicists are discovering, then perhaps there's a designer who fine-tuned them. If there's information in the cell, as molecular biology shows, then this suggests intelligent design. To get life going in the first place would have required biological information; the implications point beyond the material realm to a prior intelligent cause. -Stephen C Meyer, PHD ~ Lee Strobel, #NFDB
892:The scientific world of the time was in the midst of a terrible ferment, with discoveries and realizations coming at an unseemly rate. To many in the ranks of the conservative and the devout, the new theories of geology and biology were delivering a series of hammer blows to mankind's self-regard. Geologists in particular seemed to have gone berserk, to have thrown off all sense of proper obeisance to their Maker... Mankind, it seemed, was now suddenly rather – dare one say it? – insignificant. He may not have been, as he had eternally supposed, specially created. ~ Simon Winchester, #NFDB
893:By asking why, by seeking meaning (not in any final sense, but in the immediate sense of use or purpose), Darwin found in his botanical work the strongest evidence for evolution and natural selection. And in doing so, he transformed botany itself from a purely descriptive discipline into an evolutionary science. Botany, indeed, was the first evolutionary science, and Darwin’s botanical work was to lead the way to all the other evolutionary sciences—and to the insight, as Theodosius Dobzhansky put it, that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
894:What is Life?
(1) Tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
(2) Dictionary definition in biology (chemical process within organic entities involving metabolism etc.)
(3) Mrs Woolf: ‘Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’
(4) Series of actual and hypothetical behavioural data which differ in certain assignable ways from data defining dead or inanimate entities.
(5) That which the Lord infused into Adam. See Genesis 1. 4 [sc. 2. 7].
Which?
Mental Cramp. ~ Isaiah Berlin,#NFDB
895:I haven't a clue about the biology or the psychology involved when a person dissolves into tears, but it is quite fascinating to note what turns them on. There are wives who can cascade over a late husband or a burned dinner, and equally pour tears of joy over a new bonnet or a renovated bathroom.... A while ago I took a ship back from Europe. Amid the tumbling confetti ... I found myself misty-eyed watching a young lady waving a tearful farewell to her boyfriend on the dock. I couldn't figure out if I was crying at her plight, or in delight that he wasn't coming along with us. ~ Malcolm Forbes, #NFDB
896:The advances of science and technology will bring us to the greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham: how much to retrofit the human genotype. Shall it be a lot, a little bit, or none at all? The choice will be forced on us because our species has begun to cross what is the most important yet still least examined threshold in the technoscientific era. We are about to abandon natural selection, the process that created us, in order to direct our own evolution by volitional selection—the process of redesigning our biology and human nature as we wish them to be. ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
897:Only the neurosurgeon dares to improve upon five billion years of evolution in a few hours.
The human brain. A trillion nerve cells storing electrical patterns more numerous than the water molecules of the world’s oceans. The soul’s tapestry lies woven in the brain’s nerve threads. Delicate, inviolate, the brain floats serenely in a bone vault like the crown jewel of biology. What motivated the vast leap in intellectual horsepower between chimp and man? Between tree dweller and moon walker? Is the brain a gift from God, or simply the jackpot of a trillion rolls of DNA dice? ~ Frank T Vertosick Jr,#NFDB
898:Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, was to simulate the conditions on Earth in primordial times, three or four billion years ago, when life appeared for the first time. The experiments were intended to see if they could make something come alive using nothing but nonliving chemicals. Do you know what emerged? Not life, but something fascinating all the same. The chemicals gave rise to significant chemical compounds: a handful of amino acids, essential components in the chemistry of life. Amino acids are molecules that hook together to form the proteins that run almost every aspect of biology. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
899:Too often, the notion of progress is used as a code word for perfection, the chain of being in a different guise. The term should be employed with caution. Some see an arrow of time in biology, as in physics, but in the opposite direction- a relentless tendency to improve, just as a universe has a built-in trend towards chaos and disorder. That is too optimistic. Some lineages get more complicated, some simpler, and much of life has to struggle to stay in the same place. If everyone is evolving, nobody can afford to stop, and there may be constant change with no overall advance at all. ~ Steve Jones, #NFDB
900:Man… is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has… a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a creature of love… ~ Lionel Trilling, #NFDB
901:Have you not understood yet that whatever’s causing this can manipulate the genome, works miracles of mimicry and biology? Knows what to do with molecules and membranes, can peer through things, can surveil, and then withdraw. That, to it, a smartphone, say, is as basic as a flint arrowhead, that it’s operating off of such refined and intricate senses that the tools we’ve bound ourselves with, the ways we record the universe, are probably evidence of our own primitive nature. Perhaps it doesn’t even think that we have consciousness or free will—not in the ways it measures such things. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
902:Today the human race is a single twig on the tree of life, a single species on a single planet. Our condition can thus only be described as extremely fragile, endangered by forces of nature currently beyond our control, our own mistakes, and other branches of the wildly blossoming tree itself. Looked at this way, we can then pose the question of the future of humanity on Earth, in the solar system, and in the galaxy from the standpoint of both evolutionary biology and human nature. The conclusion is straightforward: Our choice is to grow, branch, spread and develop, or stagnate and die. ~ Robert Zubrin, #NFDB
903:Yet a man assumes that a woman’s refusal is just part of a game. Or, at any rate, a lot of men assume that. When a man says no, it’s no. When a woman says no, it’s yes, or at least maybe. There is even a joke to that effect. And little by little, women begin to believe in this view of themselves. Finally, after centuries of living under the shadow of such assumptions, they no longer know what they want and can never make up their minds about anything. And men, of course, compound the problem by mocking them for their indecisiveness and blaming it on biology, hormones, premenstrual tension. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
904:The existence of life must be considered as an elementary fact that cannot be explained, but must be taken as a starting point in biology, in a similar way as the quantum of action, which appears as an irrational element from the point of view of classical mechanical physics, taken together with the existence of elementary particles, forms the foundation of atomic physics. The asserted impossibility of a physical or chemical explanation of the function peculiar to life would be . . . analogous to the insufficiency of the mechanical analysis for the understanding of the stability of atoms. ~ John Gribbin, #NFDB
905:If it were possible to transfer the methods of physical or of biological science directly to the study of man, the transfer would long ago have been made ... We have failed not for lack of hypotheses which equate man with the rest of the universe, but for lack of a hypothesis (short of animism) which provides for the peculiar divergence of man ... Let me now state my belief that the peculiar factor in man which forbids our explaining his actions upon the ordinary plane of biology is a highly specialized and unstable biological complex, and that this factor is none other than language. ~ Leonard Bloomfield, #NFDB
906:Many quantum physics are realizing or hypothesizing that consciousness is not a byproduct of evolution as has been suggested. Or for that matter, an expression of our brains, although it expresses itself through our brains. But consciousness is the common ground of existence that ultimately differentiates into space, time, energy, information and matter. And the same consciousness is responsible for our thoughts, for our emotions and feelings, for our behaviors, for our personal relationships, for our social interactions, for the environments that we find ourselves in, and for our biology. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
907:The greatest existential risks over the coming decades or century arise from certain, anticipated technological breakthroughs that we might make in particular, machine super intelligence, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Each of these has an enormous potential for improving the human condition by helping cure disease, poverty, etc. But one could imagine them being misused, used to create powerful weapon systems, or even some kind of accidental destructive scenario, where we suddenly are in possession of some technology that's far more powerful than we are able to control or use wisely. ~ Nick Bostrom, #NFDB
908:A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood... How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all! ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
909:It is an undeniable fact of biology that our brains are strictly limited, like the brains of all other creatures. Every brain must suffer from cognitive closure with regard to a host of issues that are simply beyond it, unimaginable and unfathomable. We don't have a miraculous res cognitans between our ears, but just lots of brain tissue subjects to the laws of physics and biology.
It would be profoundly unbiological-wouldn't it?-to suppose that our human brains were somewhat exempt from these natural limits. Such delusions of grandeur are obsolete relics from our prescientific past. ~ Noam Chomsky,#NFDB
910:It felt to me as if the individual strands of biology, morality, life, and death were finally beginning to weave themselves into, if not a perfect moral system, a coherent worldview and a sense of my place in it. Doctors in highly charged fields met patients at inflected moments, the most authentic moments, where life and identity were under threat; their duty included learning what made that particular patient’s life worth living, and planning to save those things if possible—or to allow the peace of death if not. Such power required deep responsibility, sharing in guilt and recrimination. ~ Paul Kalanithi, #NFDB
911:It was Pharaoh who forestalled access to God's Scripture from all other Caesars after him by his disobedience to The Lord. Such divine measure against disobedience is irreversible - as with Adam's banishment out of Paradise. And hadn't it been for God's original choice of mercy, His anger would have obliterated man already. This is why the business of the Prophets and Messengers were cleansed away from that of Caesar's and the latter were left as a mere slave to his own biology. Therefore, the Message of God lodges not with Caesar and the rich, it was granted to another kind of Capitalists. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
912:Dunbar’s research suggests one vaguely reassuring thought: even with all the advanced technology of a leading molecular biology lab, the most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop. The lab meeting creates an environment where new combinations can occur, where information can spill over from one project to another. When you work alone in an office, peering into a microscope, your ideas can get trapped in place, stuck in your own initial biases. The social flow of the group conversation turns that private solid state into a liquid network. ~ Steven Johnson, #NFDB
913:Recently, researchers captured an unbelievable picture of a small group of photons as waves and another group behaving as particles at the same time.14 Although the idea of complementarity is now established in physics, it is not widely seen as a possible foundational idea for thinking about the mind/brain explanatory gap. I think it should be, and first want to look at how physics came to accept its seemingly puzzling reality. Following its acceptance in physics, the idea of complementarity may prove itself to be key to thinking about biology, and about the mind/brain gap in particular. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga, #NFDB
914:Synthetic biology was the transistor of the twenty-first century. Yet political realities in America made it increasingly unfeasible for entrepreneurs there to tinker with the building blocks of life. Every cluster of human cells was viewed as a baby in America. A quarter of the population wasn’t vaccinated. A majority of Americans didn’t believe in evolution. Social-media-powered opinions carried more influence than peer-reviewed scientific research. In this virulently anti-science atmosphere, synbio research was hounded offshore before it had really begun. Activists crowed over their victory. ~ Daniel Suarez, #NFDB
915:It is an old saying, abundantly justified, that where sciences meet there growth occurs. It is true moreover to say that in scientific borderlands not only are facts gathered that [are] often new in kind, but it is in these regions that wholly new concepts arise. It is my own faith that just as the older biology from its faithful studies of external forms provided a new concept in the doctrine of evolution, so the new biology is yet fated to furnish entirely new fundamental concepts of science, at which physics and chemistry when concerned with the non-living alone could never arrive. ~ Frederick Gowland Hopkins, #NFDB
916:It has a special biological character. Let us take one simple, down-to-earth criterion for that: we are the only species in which the female has orgasms. That is remarkable, but it is so. It is a mark of the fact that in general there is much less difference between men and women (in the biological sense and in sexual behaviour) than there is in other species. That may seem a strange thing to say. But to the gorilla and the chimpanzee, where there are enormous differences between male and female, it would be obvious. In the language of biology, sexual dimorphism is small in the human species. So ~ Jacob Bronowski, #NFDB
917:The basic sciences of anatomy, physiology, biology, and chemistry are linked to a patient at the bedside through very specific stories that doctors learn and eventually create. These stories, what researchers now call illness scripts, contain key characteristics of a disease to form an iconic version, an idealized model of that particular disease. … It is the story that every doctor puts together for herself with the knowledge she gains from books and patients. The more experience a doctor has with any of these illnesses, the richer and more detailed the illness script she has of the disease becomes. ~ Lisa Sanders, #NFDB
918:Forty years ago, at the dawn of molecular biology, the French biologist Jacques Monod wrote his famous book Chance and Necessity, which argues bleakly that the origin of life on earth was a freak accident, and that we are alone in an empty universe. The final lines of his book are close to poetry, an amalgam of science and metaphysics: The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose. Since ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
919:We see Nature combining molecules and cells in the living body to construct separate individuals, and the same Nature, stubbornly pursuing the same course but on a higher level, combining individuals in social organisms to obtain a higher order of psychic results. The processes of chemistry and biology are continued without a break in the social sphere. This accounts for the tendency, which has been insufficiently noted, of every living phylum (insect and vertebrate) to group itself towards its latter end in socialized communities. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Great Event Foreshadowed - The Planetization of Mankind, #NFDB
920:If, through technology, evolution is making a fresh bound, at the same time it is becoming reflective. Huxley has said that man is evolution become conscious of itself. Evolution has now to make its own choice. So long as true freedom did not exist life seemed to grope its way forward; now that man has become conscious, reflective, and responsible for dispositions on which the rest of the process is based, a direction must be found: life can no longer proceed at random—technology brings with it the inescapable necessity of an ideology. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, #NFDB
921:Look at any randomly selected piece of your world. Encoded deep in the biology of every cell in every blade of grass, in every insect’s wing, in every bacterium cell, is the history of the third planet from the Sun in a Solar System making its way lethargically around a galaxy called the Milky Way. Its shape, form, function, colour, smell, taste, molecular structure, arrangement of atoms, sequence of bases, and possibilities for the future are all absolutely unique. There is nowhere else in the observable Universe where you will see precisely that little clump of emergent, living complexity. It is wonderful. ~ Brian Cox, #NFDB
922:were identified “as located within individuals” and overlooked the “undeniable social causation of many such problems.” 30 This was in addition to a flood of protest from American professionals, including leaders of the American Psychological Association and the American Counseling Association. Why are relationships or social conditions left out? 31 If you pay attention only to faulty biology and defective genes as the cause of mental problems and ignore abandonment, abuse, and deprivation, you are likely to run into as many dead ends as previous generations did blaming it all on terrible mothers. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
923:the groundbreakers in many sciences were devout believers. Witness the accomplishments of Nicolaus Copernicus (a priest) in astronomy, Blaise Pascal (a lay apologist) in mathematics, Gregor Mendel (a monk) in genetics, Louis Pasteur in biology, Antoine Lavoisier in chemistry, John von Neumann in computer science, and Enrico Fermi and Erwin Schrodinger in physics. That’s a short list, and it includes only Roman Catholics; a long list could continue for pages. A roster that included other believers—Protestants, Jews, and unconventional theists like Albert Einstein, Fred Hoyle, and Paul Davies—could fill a book. ~ Scott Hahn, #NFDB
924:The rise of the beauty myth was just one of several emerging social fictions that masqueraded as natural components of the feminine sphere, the better to enclose those women inside it. Other such fictions arose contemporaneously: a version of childhood that required continual maternal supervision; a concept of female biology that required middle-class women to act out the roles of hysterics and hypochondriacs; a conviction that respectable women were sexually anesthetic; and a definition of women’s work that occupied them with repetitive, time-consuming, and painstaking tasks such as needlepoint and lacemaking. ~ Naomi Wolf, #NFDB
925:I know some very intelligent philosophers, not at all dogmatic, who believe that “science” cannot introduce the concept of finality in the analysis and explanation of vital processes, but that “philosophy” equally cannot arrive at an adequate concept of organic life without introducing finality. It is not a question here of moral or other values, but rather of a concept peculiar to philosophical biology as opposed to biology. Indeed, one such philosopher concluded, drawing inspiration from Merleau-Ponty, that science can “never” give an adequate explanation of the concept of the “whole structure” of the organism. ~ Jean Piaget, #NFDB
926:Then she turned away before anybody caught her slack-jawed with admiration. He was not the one, that was her DNA talking, looking for a high-class sperm donor. Every woman in the room with a working ovary probably looked at him and thought, This one. Well, biology was not destiny. The amount of damage somebody that beautiful could do to a woman like her was too much to contemplate. She took another drink to cushion the thought, and said, "He's pretty."
"No," Liza said. "That's the point. He's not pretty. David is pretty. That guy looks like an adult."
"Okay, he's full of testosterone," Min said. ~ Jennifer Crusie,#NFDB
927:She leaned back against the step, smoothing her hands over her stomach. Though she wasn't showing yet, just in the last week she'd started to look different. It wasn't something I could describe easily. It was like those stop-action films of flowers blooming that we watched in Biology. Every frame something is happening, something little that would be missed in real time - the sprout pushing, bit by bit, from the ground, the petals slowly moving outward. To the naked eye, it's just suddenly blooming, color today where there was none before. But in real time, it's always building, working to show itself, to become. ~ Sarah Dessen, #NFDB
928:Arrogant worship is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Yet we see it throughout Scripture. The gospel was given to Adam and Eve. As redemptive history unfolded, the people of Israel continued to recite the promise and to demonstrate it with their liturgy, their signs, their sacraments, and their cultic worship. But the judgment of the prophets that came upon the house of Israel was this: “Your worship has become idololatria. You are not putting your faith in God; you are putting it in Baal, in the temple, in the rituals you are doing, in your heritage, in your biology. You are trusting in everything else but God. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
929:The Saudis may be teaching that Jews are pigs, but in our country, by means of a one-sided biology curriculum, we teach kids that there’s really no difference between any human being and a pig. After all, if we’re merely the product of blind naturalistic forces—if no deity created us with any special significance—then we are nothing more than pigs with big brains. Does this religious (atheistic) “truth” matter? It does when kids carry out its implications. Instead of good citizens who see people made in the image of God, we are producing criminals who see no meaning or value in human life. Ideas have consequences. ~ Norman L Geisler, #NFDB
930:The actual operation of intelligence is thus beyond the possibility of being determined or conditioned by factors that can be included in any knowable law. So, we see that the ground of intelligence must be in the undetermined and unknown flux, that is also the ground of all definable forms of matter. Intelligence is thus not deducible or explainable on the basis of any branch of knowledge (e.g., physics or biology). Its origin is deeper and more inward than any knowable order that could describe it. (Indeed, it has to comprehend the very order of definable forms of matter through which we would hope to comprehend intelligence.) ~ David Bohm, #NFDB
931:Charles Munger, right-hand adviser to Warren Buffett, the richest man on the planet, is known for his unparalleled clear thinking and near-failure-proof track record. How did he refine his thinking to help build a $3 trillion business in Berkshire Hathaway? The answer is “mental models,” or analytical rules-of-thumb4 pulled from disciplines outside of investing, ranging from physics to evolutionary biology. Eighty to 90 models have helped Charles Munger develop, in Warren Buffett’s words, “the best 30-second mind in the world. He goes from A to Z in one move. He sees the essence of everything before you even finish the sentence. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
932:Still, if history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure. ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
933:History of Medicine: The Biology and Genetics of Obesity — A Century of Inquiries Chin Jou, Ph.D. | 1515 words Volume 370:1874-1877 Number 20 May 15, 2014 The obese lack willpower; they overeat and underexercise — or so believe a majority of Americans. A 2012 online poll of 1143 adults conducted by Reuters and the market research firm Ipsos found that 61% of U.S. adults believed that “personal choices about eating and exercise” were responsible for the obesity epidemic. 1 A majority of Americans, it seems, remain unaware of or unconvinced by scientific research suggesting that “personal choices” may not account for all cases of obesity. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
934:A man described by authorities as one evolutionary step above a banana slug has recently admitted to having been locked in the Sacajawea Junior High biology lab over a long weekend nearly sixteen years ago when he fell asleep and was mistaken as a cadaver. Though the man is incapable of human speech, he was able, over a period of weeks, to chisel out his story in hieroglyphics on the bathroom wall of the insane asylum where he now resides. He claims that toward the end of the second day of his accidental captivity, he got downright lonely and sought companionship at his own intellectual level. He found that companionship in a petri dish. ~ Chris Crutcher, #NFDB
935:About twenty-five years ago the body channel received a tremendous boost from the discovery of mirror neurons in a laboratory in Parma, Italy. These neurons are activated when we perform an action, such as reaching for a cup, but also when we see someone else reach for a cup. These neurons don’t distinguish between our own behavior and that of someone else, so they allow one individual to get under another’s skin. Their actions become our own. This discovery has been hailed as being of equal importance to psychology as the discovery of DNA was for biology, because of its profound implications for imitation and other forms of bodily fusion. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
936:The administrative and hierarchic aspects seem to be crucial in the evolution of belief systems. The truth is first revealed to all men, but very quickly individuals appear claiming sole authority and a duty to interpret, administer and, if need be, alter this truth in the name of the common good. To this end they establish a powerful and potentially repressive organisation. This phenomenon, which biology shows us is common to any social group, soon transforms the doctrine into a means of achieving control and political power. Divisions, wars and break-ups become inevitable. Sooner or later, the word becomes flesh and the flesh bleeds. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n, #NFDB
937:Before you can ask 'Is Darwinian theory correct or not?', You have to ask the preliminary question 'Is it clear enough so that it could be correct?'. That's a very different question. One of my prevailing doctrines about Darwinian theory is 'Man, that thing is just a mess. It's like looking into a room full of smoke.' Nothing in the theory is precisely, clearly, carefully defined or delineated. It lacks all of the rigor one expects from mathematical physics, and mathematical physics lacks all the rigor one expects from mathematics. So we're talking about a gradual descent down the level of intelligibility until we reach evolutionary biology. ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
938:God addresses linguistic symbolism and declares in Qur'an that there are people among humanity that worship Him only based on one single letter. However The Lord further reveals to man that this dependency could easily send him/her into perdition, because this system of belief and tradition was not ordained by God and hence it has an input leak through which evil trickles - causing man to lose faith as a consequence thereof. It is certainly preposterous that man cares of his/her biology by varying the multitudes and types of his/her nutrition while dismissing his/her soul by constraining its spiritual intakes with one single type of worship. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
939:The truth is that science started its modern career by taking over ideas derived from the weakest side of the philosophies of Aristotle's successors. In some respects it was a happy choice. It enabled the knowledge of the seventeenth century to be formularised so far as physics and chemistry were concerned, with a completeness which has lasted to the present time. But the progress of biology and psychology has probably been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths. If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypothesis, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
940:We are very lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is like the discovery of America – you only discover it once. The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never come again. It is very exciting, it is marvellous, but this excitement will have to go. Of course in the future there will be other interests. There will be the interest of the connection of one level of phenomena to another – phenomena in biology and so on, or, if you are talking about exploration, exploring other planets, but there will not still be the same things that we are doing now. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
941:Sciences reach a point where they become mathematized..the central issues in the field become sufficiently understood that they can be thought about mathematically..[by the early 1990s] biology was no longer the science of things that smelled funny in refrigerators (my view from undergraduate days in the 1960s)..The field was undergoing a revolution and was rapidly acquiring the depth and power previously associated exclusively with the physical sciences. Biology was now the study of information stored in DNA - strings of four letters: A, T, G, and C..and the transformations that information undergoes in the cell. There was mathematics here! ~ Leonard Adleman, #NFDB
942:We have no certainty we’ll contact extraterrestrial beings from one of the billion earthlike planets in the sky in the next 200 years, but we have almost 100 percent certainty that we’ll manufacture an alien intelligence by then. When we face these synthetic aliens, we’ll encounter the same benefits and challenges that we expect from contact with ET. They will force us to reevaluate our roles, our beliefs, our goals, our identity. What are humans for? I believe our first answer will be: Humans are for inventing new kinds of intelligences that biology could not evolve. Our job is to make machines that think different—to create alien intelligences. ~ Kevin Kelly, #NFDB
943:cult of cosmic pessimism. Cosmic pessimism is the belief that nature has no purpose and that whatever meaning exists in the world is our own human creation. This belief is taken for granted by most scientific thinkers today, but with the aid of the new idea of an unfinished universe, theology may point out that cosmic pessimism, which is usually taken as the epitome of hard-nosed realism, is not as self-evidently justifiable as it seems to most contemporary intellectuals. Geology, evolutionary biology, and cosmology now situate Earth, life, and human existence within the framework of an immense cosmic drama of transformation that is still going on. ~ Ilia Delio, #NFDB
944:Do you want to know how your chemistry partner is holding up?”
I shake my head. “Nope. Don’t care.” The words almost get stuck in my throat.
She sighs in frustration, then walks over to the window ledge and picks up the chemistry book. “Should I take this back with me, or leave it here?”
I don’t answer.
She puts the book back on the ledge and heads for the door.
“I wish I’d chosen biology instead of chemistry,” I say as she opens the door to leave.
She winks at me knowingly. “No, you don’t. And just so you know, Dr. Aguirre will be coming to visit later today. I’d advise against throwing things at him as he walks through the door. ~ Simone Elkeles,#NFDB
945:Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object. Other things merely sit in place, waiting to be pushed or pulled around. Even non-human animals mostly follow the instincts and behaviours that characterise their species, Sartre believed. But as a human being, I have no predefined nature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. Of course I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background, but none of this adds up to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along. Sartre ~ Sarah Bakewell, #NFDB
946:I laughed. 'You almighty Andalites. There is no limit to your arrogance, is there? Well, let me tell you something: we may be simple people. But we don't use biology to invent monsters. And we don't enslave other species. And we don't unleash a plague of parasites on the galaxy, endangering every other free species, and then go swaggering around like the lords of the universe. No, we're too simple for that. We're too stupid to lie and manipulate. We're too stupid to be ruthless. We're too stupid to know how to build powerful weapons designed to annihilate our enemies. Until you came, Andalite, we were too stupid to know how to kill.' -Dak Hamee ~ Katherine Applegate, #NFDB
947:The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular biology lab on eBay. A mere $1,000 will get you a set of precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX (two of my favorites) may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA. If you can’t afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months—the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time. Links to sought-after reagents and protocols can be found at DNAHack. And, of course, Google is no end of help. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
948:Eating should be an enjoyable and worry-free experience, and shouldn’t rely on deprivation. Keeping it simple is essential if we are to enjoy our food. One of the most fortunate findings from the mountain of nutritional research we’ve encountered is that good food and good health is simple. The biology of the relationship of food and health is exceptionally complex, but the message is still simple. The recommendations coming from the published literature are so simple that we can state them in one sentence: eat a whole foods, plant-based diet, while minimizing the consumption of refined foods, added salt, and added fats. (See table on the next page.) ~ T Colin Campbell, #NFDB
949:what is this word “logos”? It’s a term that is always difficult to translate in Greek philosophical texts; in this case, it’s even harder. Basically logos means “word,” but it expands to mean many other things too, like “account” and “reason,” or even “proportion” or “measure.” It’s where we get all those English words that end in “-ology.” For example, “theology” is giving an “account,” a logos, of “god,” theos; “anthropology” is giving an “account,” a logos, of “man,” anthropos; and we just saw that bios means “life,” hence our word “biology.” So, quite an important word, and it’s here in Heraclitus that it first becomes really crucial in philosophical Greek. ~ Peter Adamson, #NFDB
950:Americans tend to shake their heads in astonishment at the Soviet experience. The idea that some state-endorsed ideology or popular prejudice would hog-tie scientific progress seems unthinkable. For 200 years Americans have prided themselves on being a practical, pragmatic, nonideological people. And yet anthropological and psychological pseudoscience has flourished in the United States—on race, for example. Under the guise of “creationism,” a serious effort continues to be made to prevent evolutionary theory—the most powerful integrating idea in all of biology, and essential for other sciences ranging from astronomy to anthropology—from being taught in the schools. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
951:Paul Davies comments . . . To date biology is rooted in the old physics, the physics of the nineteenth century. Newtonian mechanics and theromodynamics play the central role. More recent developments, such as field theory and quantum mechanics, are largely ignored. In spite of the fact that the molecular basis for life is so crucial, and that molecular processes are quantum mechanical, atoms are treated like classical building blocks to be fitted together. Distinctively quantum effects, such as nonlocal correlations, coherence, and phase information, let alone possible exotic departures from quantum mechanics as suggested above, are not considered relevant.21 ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner, #NFDB
952:Finally, I would hug 2004 Jen, understanding that discipleship is a journey, and each stage is a necessary precursor to the following one. God was right in Proverbs: our light is the dimmest at the beginning of salvation, but it grows brighter and brighter as we go. There is no wasted scene, no futile season. God gives us what we can handle, when we can handle it. We are drawn more and more deeply into the knowledge of Jesus. A baby can’t handle a steak before she has teeth. The steak will come, but for today milk is on the menu. That’s not an insult; it’s biology. The baby will get there. Be patient. Do the best with what you know. When you know more, adjust the trajectory. ~ Jen Hatmaker, #NFDB
953:It is not biology alone but heroism too that drives women to find the will and grit and creativity to put one’s own impulses aside to serve the needs of a tiny creature around the clock—especially in an environment in which that heroic choice is only casually acknowledged, much less honored, cherished, or assisted. I believe the myth about the ease and naturalness of mothering—the ideal of the effortlessly ever-giving mother—is propped up, polished, and promoted as a way to keep women from thinking clearly and negotiating forcefully about what they need from their partners and from society at large in order to mother well, without having to sacrifice themselves in the process. ~ Naomi Wolf, #NFDB
954:We should be far more worried about "genetic enhancement"- efforts to artificially construct "improved humans." Here I side with Fukuyama: Although the technology for improvement is close at hand, it comes with great risks, and some of the greatest risks stem from the complexity of the underlying biology. As we have seen, the basic logic by which genes operate-the regulatory IF conjoined with protein template THEN- is straightforward- which is why genetic enhancement might be possible, in principle. But the combined effects of 30,000 genes far exceed our comprehension; if we know the general principles, we don't know the details, and what we don't know really could hurt us. ~ Gary F Marcus, #NFDB
955:When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn't be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
956:Contents Introduction: Why Start with Why? PART 1: A WORLD THAT DOESN’T START WITH WHY 1. Assume You Know 2. Carrots and Sticks PART 2: AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE 3. The Golden Circle 4. This Is Not Opinion, This Is Biology 5. Clarity, Discipline and Consistency PART 3: LEADERS NEED A FOLLOWING 6. The Emergence of Trust 7. How a Tipping Point Tips PART 4: HOW TO RALLY THOSE WHO BELIEVE 8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW 9. Know WHY. Know HOW. Then WHAT? 10. Communication Is Not About Speaking, It’s About Listening PART 5: THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IS SUCCESS 11. When WHY Goes Fuzzy 12. Split Happens PART 6: DISCOVER WHY 13. The Origins of a WHY 14. The New Competition ~ Simon Sinek, #NFDB
957:In the jungle of modern permissiveness the meaning and purpose of sex is missed, and its glory is lost. Our benighted society urgently needs recalling to the noble and ennobling view of sex that Scripture implies and the seventh commandment assumes: namely, that sex is for fully and permanently committed relationships that, by being the blend of affection, loyalty, and biology that they are, prepare us for and help us into that which is their archetype—“the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united” to God, men, and angels “in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water” (C. S. Lewis). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
958:People had no sense of history, they learned about chemistry and biology and astronomy and thought that these matters had always been the proper meat of science, that they had never been mysterious. The stars had once been mysteries. Lord Kelvin had once called the nature of life and biology - the response of muscles to human will and the generation of trees from seeds - a mystery "infinitely beyond" the reach of science. (Not just a little beyond, mind you, but infinitely beyond. Lord Kelvin certainly had felt a huge emotional charge from not knowing something.) Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB
959:The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience. (Humans are not alone in this endeavor; species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.) ~ Sy Montgomery, #NFDB
960:Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to black people. Anyone who has studied the genetic phase of biology knows that white is considered recessive and black is considered dominant. When you want strong coffee, you ask for black coffee. If you want it light, you want it weak, integrated with white milk. Just like these Negroes who weaken themselves and their race by this integrating and intermixing with whites. If you want bread with no nutritional value, you ask for white bread. All the good that was in it has been bleached out of it, and it will constipate you. If you want pure flour, you ask for dark flour, whole-wheat flour. If you want pure sugar, you want dark sugar. ~ Malcolm X, #NFDB
961:[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use. ~ Harold Abelson, Introductory lecture to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, #NFDB
962:My dick reacted. Biology is powerful. But it wasn’t just my dick. My brain decided it was time to shatter a solid brick wall wrapped in corrugated steel behind a hard-earned filter that separated the appropriate from the inappropriate. My plan to make her laugh was breaking down and I had no control over it. None. I was my own worst enemy. Everything I’d been bottling up came out all at once. “Your neck’s broken out in spots.” I leaned forward so I could speak softly. “You’re fondling your fork like it’s a kitten.” Shut up, asshole. “Your legs are crossed, but I bet in another place—” No, really, shut up. “—another time—” There’s no going back from this. “—I could get you to open them. ~ C D Reiss, #NFDB
963:It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe--until recently--have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all of our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning...I do not believe that culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
964:They're ghosts, surely, and Rabbit absolutely believes in them. There are things in the world, strange machinations of physics and chemistry,queer intersections of biology and theology, that Rabbit hasn't the slightest interest in assuming he'll ever understand or be able to solve. They're simply there to be believed in, and Rabbit is a born believer. He wants to believe. He has always thought of life as pregnant with possibility-- a freak twister or wardrobe the only thing separating him from another world-- so ghosts, spirits, aliens and supreme beings coexist within Rabbit with ease. There's a kind of beauty in accepting the possibility, if not the plausibility, of everything imaginable. ~ Kate Racculia, #NFDB
965:Despite this apparent variety of extraterrestrials, the UFO abduction syndrome portrays, it seems to be, a banal Universe. The form of the supposed aliens is marked by a failure of the imagination and a preoccupation with human concerns. Not a single being presented in all these accounts is as astonishing as a cockatoo would be if you had never before seen a bird. Any protozoology or bacteriology or mycology textbook is filled with wonders that far outshine the most exotic descriptions of the alien abductionists. The believers take the common elements in their stories as tokens of verisimilitude, rather than as evidence that they have contrived their stories out of a shared culture and biology. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
966:I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call "noö-dynamics," i.e. the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
967:I have a feeling that if Darwin turns out to be right, the Christian faith won’t fall apart after all. Faith is more resilient than that. Like a living organism, it has a remarkable ability to adapt to change. At our best, Christians embrace this quality, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then. At our worst, we kick and scream our way through each and every change, burning books and bridges and even people along the way. But if we can adjust to Galileo’s universe, we can adjust to Darwin’s biology — even the part about the monkeys. If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that faith can survive just about anything, so long as it’s able to evolve. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
968:Tell me one thing, Father. Suppose I hadn't been your son, suppose you just knew me, knew the same about me you know now, would you have looked forward to seeing me, to having me live under your roof?'
'Naturally, it wouldn't have been the same.'
'No. And if you had just been a fellow human and not my father, then I wouldn't have come to see you. But doesn't that mean it's nothing but a convention that binds us together? We are father and son, and so we have to show affection for each other, and if we don't we feel guilty. But why? Is there any reasonable basis for believing that affection hinges on biology? We don't feel obligated to be fond of a neighbor or a colleague, do we? ~ Kjell Askildsen,#NFDB
969:No civilization can possibly survive to an interstellar spacefaring phase unless it limits its numbers.
Any society with a marked population explosion will be forced to devote all its energies and technological skills to feeding and caring for the population on its home planet. This is a very powerful conclusion and is in no way based on the idiosyncrasies of a particular civilization. On any planet, no matter what its biology or social system, an exponential increase in population will swallow every resource. Conversely, any civilization that engages in serious interstellar exploration and colonization must have exercised zero population growth or something very close to it for many generations. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
970:Based on the young people I know best, more and more of them identify as spiritual but not religious because it is easier than trying to reconcile the teachings of their faith with their affection for their non-Christian friends. According to the teachings they have received in church, their friends are not all right they way they are. Unless they become Christian, God will not allow them to enter heaven. Instead, they will roast in hell for all eternity for refusing to accept Jesus as their Lord. This does not make any more sense to some young people than the teaching that they must choose between the account of creation in the Bible and the one their biology teacher has laid out for them. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor, #NFDB
971:I propose that English poetry and biology should be taught as usual, but that at irregular intervals, poetry students should find dogfishes on their desks and biology students should find Shakespeare sonnets on their dissecting boards. I am serious in declaring that a Sarah Lawrence English major who began poking about in a dogfish with a bobby pin would learn more in thirty minutes than a biology major in a whole semester; and that the latter upon reading on her dissecting board That time of year Thou may’st in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold— Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang. might catch fire at the beauty of it. ~ Walker Percy, #NFDB
972:The curious fact is that biology tells us nothing about desire. And, when you think about it, culture -- novels, movies, opera, and quite a lot of painting -- is about desire, how we manage desire, how we suffer from it, and how it brings us joy when we get things right. A story without desire -- and that means without the insistence of desire -- will be empty, dry, and more or less aimless. That is one reason we read novels, to see how people fall into awkward moral situations and then try to extricate themselves. This is why there is so much anguish in the world: frustrated desire is every bit as miserable as poverty, because desire is no respecter of one’s position in life: everyone goes through it. ~ Peter Watson, #NFDB
973:It’s in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced, and Photoshopped world very dangerous. If we want to cultivate a resilient spirit and stop falling prey to comparing our ordinary lives with manufactured images, we need to know how to reality-check what we see. We need to be able to ask and answer these questions: Is what I’m seeing real? Do these images convey real life or fantasy? Do these images reflect healthy, Wholehearted living, or do they turn my life, my body, my family, and my relationships into objects and commodities? Who benefits by my seeing these images and feeling bad about myself? Hint: This is ALWAYS about money and/or control. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
974:Only too often the works of such authors have been deliberately neglected or suppressed. A case in point is the work by D. Dewar called the Transformist Illusion, Murfreesboro, 1957, which has assembled a vast amount of palaeontological and biological evidence against evolution. The author who was an evolutionist in his youth wrote many monographs which exist in the libraries of comparative zoology and biology everywhere. But his last work, The Transformist Illusion , had to be published in Murfreesboro, Tennessee(!) and is not easy to find even in libraries that have all his earlier works. There is hardly any other field of science where such obscurantist practices are prevalent.
(note 21, p140) ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr,#NFDB
975:Neoclassical economics has effectively insulated itself from the great advances made in science and engineering over the last 40 years. This self-imposed isolation must come to an end. For while the concepts of neoclassical economics appear difficult, they are actually quaint in comparison to the sophistication evident in today's mathematics, engineering, computing, evolutionary biology and physics. In order to advance, economics must humbly submit to learning from disciplines that it has studiously ignored for so long. Some researchers in outside fields have called for the wholesale replacement of standard economics curricula, using at least the building blocks of modern thought inherent in other disciplines. ~ Steve Keen, #NFDB
976:[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use." ~ Hal Abelson (1986) Introduction of video of lectures on the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (source)., #NFDB
977:For all the tantalizing and provocative character of the Viking results, I know a hundred places on Mars which are far more interesting than our landing sites. The ideal tool is a roving vehicle carrying on advanced experiments, particularly in imaging, chemistry and biology. Prototypes of such rovers are under development by NASA. They know on their own how to go over rocks, how not to fall down ravines, how to get out of tight spots. It is within our capability to land a rover on Mars that could scan its surroundings, see the most interesting place in its field of view and, by the same time tomorrow, be there. Every day a new place, a complex, winding traverse over the varied topography of this appealing planet. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
978:The survival instinct, however, is self-conscious in human beings; and when it consciously motivates our behavior, it defines us as radically self-centered creatures. Our self-centered drive to survive is a universal reality rooted in our biology. It was this aspect of our humanity that led our ancient religious mythmakers to try to describe its origins. “Original sin” was their answer to the question of the source of our universal human self-centeredness. No one understood that survival was an involuntary biological drive in life. Instead it was understood as the result of sinfulness and of disobedience. Atonement theology was born as a way to address this universal flaw in our understanding of human life. ~ John Shelby Spong, #NFDB
979:In times of dramatic change, the large and slow cannot compete with the small and nimble. But being small and nimble requires a whole lot more than just understanding the Six Ds of exponentials and their expanding scale of impact. You’ll also need to understand the technologies and tools driving this change. These include exponential technologies like infinite computing, sensors and networks, 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and synthetic biology and exponential organizational tools such as crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, incentive competitions, and the potency of a properly built community. These exponential advantages empower entrepreneurs like never before. Welcome to the age of exponentials. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
980:Classical science in its diverse disciplines, be it chemistry, biology, psychology or the social sciences, tried to isolate the elements of the observed universe - chemical compounds and enzymes, cells, elementary sensations, freely competing individuals, what not -- expecting that, by putting them together again, conceptually or experimentally, the whole or system - cell, mind, society - would result and be intelligible. Now we have learned that for an understanding not only the elements but their interrelations as well are required: say, the interplay of enzymes in a cell, of many mental processes conscious and unconscious, the structure and dynamics of social systems and the like. ~ Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory, #NFDB
981:But today it’s possible to wonder whether the genuine difficulty of biology has become an excuse for biotech startups’ indefinite approach to business in general. Most of the people involved expect some things to work eventually, but few want to commit to a specific company with the level of intensity necessary for success. It starts with the professors who often become part-time consultants instead of full-time employees—even for the biotech startups that begin from their own research. Then everyone else imitates the professors’ indefinite attitude. It’s easy for libertarians to claim that heavy regulation holds biotech back—and it does—but indefinite optimism may pose an even greater challenge for the future of biotech ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
982:Though it's still not right. I have other best friends, and this is different. Besides, Mike is my absolute best friend."
"Yeah, I was going to say..." Mike nodded...
"That's right, honey. Felix, you're...something different."
"Amen," Mike said.
"You're not like a good neighbor or a companion for Saturday shopping, and certainly not like my husband. But you are something more than what the word 'friend' can contain. Mike has my heart, completely, eternally, no second thoughts." She grabbed Mike's hand. "But you have my...say, my liver."
Felix frowned, pondering that. "Livers are good. Positively essential, from what I remember of biology. And good eating, if the need arises. Very well. I will be your liver... ~ Shannon Hale,#NFDB
983:It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construct, not as an inherent difference. And religion - whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
984:As more and more norms disappear from social praxis, literature faces ever-growing difficulties. Its predicament is beginning to resemble that of a child who has discovered that his incredibly understanding parents will let him break with impunity all his toys, indeed everything in the house. The artist cannot create specific prohibitions for himself in order to attack them later in his work; the prohibitions must be real, and hence independent of the writer's choices. And since the relativization of cultural norms has not so far been able to disturb the given characteristics of human biology, that is where writers today seek the still perceptible points of resistance--which is why literature is preoccupied with the theme of sex. ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
985:humankind, though “apt to forget it, is a creature of the earth. ‘Dust thou art’ and ‘All flesh is grass’ were not said by scientists, but they are sound biology.” When lower creatures exhaust their resources, Vogt argued, bad things happen. Exactly the same is true for Homo sapiens. The article tallied example after example of overreaching, most drawn from Vogt’s travels in Latin America. But then, provocatively, he switched to the United States’ current enemy, Japan: “Many explanations have been offered for Japanese aggression,” he argued. But, he asked, “can anyone deny that population pressures set off the explosion?” Unless humankind controlled its appetites for procreation and consumption, Vogt said, “there can be no peace. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
986:It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the difference between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion-whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most if the conflict in the world comes from that. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
987:Natural selection almost always builds on what went before…. It is the resulting complexity that makes biological organisms so hard to unscramble. The basic laws of physics can usually be expressed in simple mathematical form, and they are probably the same throughout the universe. The laws of biology, by contrast, are often only broad generalizations, since they describe rather elaborate (chemical) mechanisms that natural selection has evolved over millions of years…. I myself knew very little biology, except in a rather general way, till I was over thirty…my first degree was in physics. It took me a little time to adjust to the rather different way of thinking necessary in biology. It was almost as if one had to be born again. By ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
988:It’s only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren’t a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion—whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that’s different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
989:The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity. ~ Gabor Mat, #NFDB
990:Put bluntly, the struggle that so many companies have to differentiate or communicate their true value to the outside world is not a business problem, it's a biology problem. And just like a person struggling to put her emotions into words, we rely on metaphors, imagery and analogies in an attempt to communicate how we feel. Absent the proper language to share our deep emotions, our purpose, cause or belief, we tell stories. We use symbols. We create tangible things for those who believe what we believe to point to and say, "That's why I'm inspired." If done properly, that's what marketing, branding and products and services become; a way for organizations to communicate to the outside world. Communicate clearly and you shall be understood. ~ Simon Sinek, #NFDB
991:Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our understanding of the life sciences, which scaffold our understanding of the human sciences, which scaffold the humanities, which scaffold the arts: and here we stand. What then is the totality? What do we call it? Can there be a study of the totality? Do history, philosophy, cosmology, science, and literature each claim to constitute the totality, an unexpandable horizon beyond which we cannot think? Could a strong discipline be defined as one that has a vision of totality and claims to encompass all the rest? And are they all wrong to do so? ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
992:Perhaps, in that eerily instinctive way in which he always grasped the difference between the essential and the peripheral, he literally felt in his bones that another term as president meant that he would die in office. By retiring when he did, he avoided that fate, which would have established a precedent that smacked of monarchical longevity by permitting biology to set the terminus of his tenure. Our obsession with the two-term precedent obscures the more elemental principle established by Washington’s voluntary retirement—namely, that the office would routinely outlive the occupant, that the American presidency was fundamentally different from a European monarchy, that presidents, no matter how indispensable, were inherently disposable. ~ Joseph J Ellis, #NFDB
993:Today, many “conservatives” and “Christians” openly embrace gay marriage, when just a few years ago those same people were repulsed by the very thought. What changed? Not the Christian faith or the Bible. Not common sense and basic morality. Not the core realities of biology and pathology. What changed is that for several decades the American public has been subjected to relentless pressure to embrace homosexuality and same-sex marriage. In fact, here’s the whole sad tale in just two words: pressure converts. Or as Sargant put it, applying pressure in a sufficiently “strong and prolonged enough” way will eventually “bring about the desired collapse.” In the age of Obama, of course, the “collapse” is better known as “fundamental transformation. ~ David Kupelian, #NFDB
994:For more than two hundred years, on the topic of human population, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, basing itself on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale. When I began researching this book I thought of Malthusian theory, eugenics, Nazi genocide and modern population control as separate and distinct episodes in human history. I am no longer so sure. I think there is some persuasive evidence that a direct, if meandering, intellectual thread links the Poor Laws, the Irish famine, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the one-child policies of Beijing. In all cases, cruelty as policy, based on faulty logic, sprang from a belief that those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
995:Cooking, according to the hypothesis, is not merely a metaphor for the creation of culture, as Lévi-Strauss proposed; it is its evolutionary prerequisite and biological foundation. Had our protohuman ancestors not seized control of fire and used it to cook their food, they would never have evolved into Homo sapiens. We think of cooking as a cultural innovation that lifts us up out of nature, a manifestation of human transcendence. But the reality is much more interesting: Cooking is by now baked into our biology (as it were), something that we have no choice but to do, if we are to feed our big, energy-guzzling brains. For our species, cooking is not a turn away from nature—it is our nature, by now as obligatory as nest building is for the birds. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
996:Metaphysics would distinguish carefully between facts assembled diligently by scientists and hypotheses, many unproven, which are used to integrate these facts into some meaningful pattern. A total and complete science of things would be able to judge these hypotheses and their implications. It would stand as a standard with respect to which modern science would be compared and judged . It would criticize the vulgarizations of science and the popular philosophies based upon them as well as the contradictions within the sciences themselves. Moreover, this would be carried out not only in physics but in all sciences such as biology and psychology where even more than in physics wild conjectures are often paraded as scientifically proven facts. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
997:What makes this particularly ironic for someone like me, who started his academic career as a scientist (evolutionary biology) and eventually moved to philosophy after a constructive midlife crisis, is that a good number of scientists nowadays – and especially physicists – don’t seem to hold philosophy in particularly high regard. Just in the last few years Stephen Hawking has declared philosophy dead, Lawrence Krauss has quipped that philosophy reminds him of that old Woody Allen joke, ‘those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach gym,’ and science popularisers Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye have both wondered loudly why any young man would decide to ‘waste’ his time studying philosophy in college.
[Must science be testable?] ~ Massimo Pigliucci,#NFDB
998:If there is a future for mankind, it can only be imagined in terms of a harmonious conciliation of what is free with what is planned and totalised. Points involved are: the distribution of the resources of the globe; the control of the trek towards unpopulated areas; the optimum use of the powers set free by mechanisation; the physiology of nations and races; geo-economy, geo-politics, geo-demography; the organisation of research developing into a seasoned organisation of the earth. Whether we like it or not, all the signs and all our needs converge in the same direction. We need and are irresistibly being led to create, by means of and beyond all physics, all biology and all psychology, a science of human energetics. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, #NFDB
999:Looking at what people with shamanic traditions say about dreams, one comes tot he realization that, experientially, for these people dream reality is a parallel continuum...I suggest [we] take seriously the idea of a parallel continuum, and say that the mind and the body are embedded in the dream and the dream is a higher-order spatial dimension. In sleep one is released into the real world of which the world of waking is only the surface in a very literal geometrical sense.....We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are, in fact, hyperspatial objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism. ~ Fred Alan Wolf, #NFDB
1000:I saw the Drunken Tree all over L.A., but here it wasn’t a tree, it was a shrub. I took clippings and put them in a plastic bag. I took the clippings to the library and in the biology section Mr. Craig found a book for me that had drawings and a small entry. I discovered it was a less poisonous type than the one Mamá had in our garden in Bogotá. The shrub all over L.A. was called Datura arborea, and it was sometimes used for recreational hallucination, though some kids died from the poison. There was an entry on Brugmansia arborea alba, the Drunken Tree from our garden in Bogotá. The entry said indigenous people called the tree The Breath of the Devil because when you were exposed to it, it snatched away your soul and you became a shell of a person. ~ Ingrid Rojas Contreras, #NFDB
1001:Defriending in't just unrecognized by some social oversight, it's protected by its own protocol, a code of silence. Demanding an explanation wouldn't just be undignified; it would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. [...] Laura Kipnis's book Against Love: A Polemic includes a harrowing eight0page inventory of things people are not allowed to do because they're in romantic relationships, from going out without saying where you're going or when you'll be back to wearing that idiotic hat. But your best friend can move across the country without asking you. ~ Tim Kreider, #NFDB
1002:The light belies the bony solidity of the land, playing over it like emotion on a face, and in this the desert is intensely alive, as the apparent mood of mountains changes hourly, as places that are flat and stark at noon fill with shadows and mystery in the evening, as darkness becomes a reservoir from which the eyes drink, as clouds promise rain that comes like passion and leaves like redemption, rain that delivers itself with thunder, with lightning, with a rise of scents in this place so pure that moisture, dust, and the various bushes all have their own smell in the sudden humidity. Alive with the primal forces of rock, weather, wind, light, and time in which biology is only an uninvited guest fending for itself, gilded, dwarfed, and threatened by its hosts. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1003:We begin to catch sight of it in the study of an all too familiar phenomenon, disquieting in appearance, but in fact highly revealing and reassuring—the phenomenon of unemployment. Owing to the extraordinarily rapid development of the machine a rapidly increasing number of workers, running into tens of millions, are out of work. The experts gaze in dismay at this economic apparatus, their own creation, which instead of absorbing all the units of human energy with which they furnish it rejects an increasing number, as though the machine they devised were working to defeat their purpose. Economists are horrified by the growing number of idle hands. Why do they not look a little more to biology for guidance and enlightenment? ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Formation of the Noösphere, #NFDB
1004:College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon? Evolution had created the penis. It was a useful structure for getting certain things done. And if it worked for the pistils of flowers as well as the inseminatory organs of Homo sapiens, whose fault was that but Biology's? But no--anything large or grand in design, any long novel, big sculpture, or towering building, became, in the opinion of the "women" Mitchell knew at college, manifestations of male insecurity about the size of their penises. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
1005:How do we learn? Is there a better way? What can we predict? Can we trust what we’ve learned? Rival schools of thought within machine learning have very different answers to these questions. The main ones are five in number, and we’ll devote a chapter to each. Symbolists view learning as the inverse of deduction and take ideas from philosophy, psychology, and logic. Connectionists reverse engineer the brain and are inspired by neuroscience and physics. Evolutionaries simulate evolution on the computer and draw on genetics and evolutionary biology. Bayesians believe learning is a form of probabilistic inference and have their roots in statistics. Analogizers learn by extrapolating from similarity judgments and are influenced by psychology and mathematical optimization. ~ Pedro Domingos, #NFDB
1006:What happens to a marriage? A persistent failure of kindness, triggered at first, at least in my case, by the inequities of raising children, the sacrifices that take a woman by surprise and that she expects to be matched by her mate but that biology ensures cannot be. Anything could set me off. Any innocuous habit or slight or oversight. The way your father left the lights of the house blazing, day and night. The way he could become so distracted at work that sometimes when I called, he’d put me on hold and forget me, only remembering again when I’d hung up and called back. The way he wore his pain so privately, whistling around the house after we’d had a spat, pretending nonchalance, protecting you and your sisters from discord, hiding behind his good nature, inadvertently ~ Jan Ellison, #NFDB
1007:Like all of you, I use search engines all the time. For people who are sufficiently privileged, the internet is very useful; but it’s usefulness is roughly to the extent that you do have privilege. ‘Privileged’ here means education, resources, a background ability to know what to look for. It’s like a library. Suppose you decide ‘I want to be a biologist’, and so you join the Harvard Biology Library. Everything is in there, so in principle you can become a biologist; but of course it’s useless if you don’t know what to look for, and don’t know how to interpret what you see, and so on. It’s the same with the internet. There’s a huge amount of material out there – some valuable and some not – but it takes understanding, interpretation and background even to know what to look for. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1008:Stand back far enough, and the absurdity of this enterprise makes you wonder about the sanity of our species. But consider: When millers mill wheat, they scrupulously sheer off the most nutritious parts of the seed—the coat of bran and the embryo, or germ, that it protects—and sell that off, retaining the least nourishing part to feed us. In effect, they’re throwing away the best 25 percent of the seed: The vitamins and antioxidants, most of the minerals, and the healthy oils all go to factory farms to feed animals, or to the pharmaceutical industry, which recovers some of the vitamins from the germ and then sells them back to us—to help remedy nutritional deficiencies created at least in part by white flour. A terrific business model, perhaps, but terrible biology. Surely ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
1009:The history of the knowledge of the phenomena of life and of the organized world can be divided into two main periods. For a long time anatomy, and particularly the anatomy of the human body, was the a and ? of scientific knowledge. Further progress only became possible with the discovery of the microscope. A long time had yet to pass until through Schwann the cell was established as the final biological unit. It would mean bringing coals to Newcastle were I to describe here the immeasurable progress which biology in all its branches owes to the introduction of this concept of the cell. For this concept is the axis around which the whole of the modem science of life revolves. ~ Paul R Ehrlich, #NFDB
1010:It marshals a vast amount of scientific evidence, from physics to biology, and offers extensive arguments, all geared to objectively proving the holistic nature of the universe. It fails to see that if we take a bunch of egos with atomistic concepts and teach them that the universe is holistic, all we will actually get is a bunch of egos with holistic concepts. Precisely because this monological approach, with its unskillful interpretation of an otherwise genuine intuition, ignores or neglects the “I” and the “we” dimensions, it doesn’t understand very well the exact nature of the inner transformations that are necessary in the first place in order to be able to find an identity that embraces the manifest All. Talk about the All as much as we want, nothing fundamentally changes. ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
1011:An accurate view of evolution, in all its multifaceted and anarchic glory... We are all evolved creatures who share a common way or perceiving and responding to the world. And yet each of us is unique, the product on an irreproducible set of causal events. Given that we cannot judge people on the basis of their biology or their fitness with respect to some arbitrary criterion of optimality, we have to conclude that all human variants are equally valid. (This conclusion can be derived purely on ethical grounds as well.) None of us is advantaged because of evolution over any other, whether strong or weak, able-bodied or disabled, woman or man, black, white, or any other color. Simply existing as part of the human species, each person automatically has an inherent worth and dignity. ~ Greg Graffin, #NFDB
1012:I was there to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That's not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be.
Certainly there were other people who loved books, I'm sure there were, but whoever had notified them ahead of time that loving books was not the point, was, in fact, a hopelessly counterproductive and naive approach to the study of literature, neglected to notify me. It turned out that the point was to dissect a book like a fetal pig in biology class or to break its back with a single sentence or to bust it open like a milkweek pod and say, "See? All along it was only fluff," and then scatter it into oblivion with one tiny breath. ~ Marisa de los Santos,#NFDB
1013:Today, multiple major waves seem to be arriving simultaneously—technologies like the cloud, AI, AR/ VR, not to mention more esoteric projects like supersonic planes and hyperloops. What’s more, rather than being concentrated narrowly in a personal computer industry that was essentially a niche market, today’s new technologies impact nearly every part of the economy, creating many new opportunities. This trend holds tremendous promise. Precision medicine will use computing power to revolutionize health care. Smart grids use software to dramatically improve power efficiency and enable the spread of renewable energy sources like solar roofs. And computational biology might allow us to improve life itself. Blitzscaling can help these advances spread and magnify their sorely needed impact. ~ Reid Hoffman, #NFDB
1014:Thus, one of the awful things I can admit about myself is that the two years I spent with Jennifer live in my mind mostly as a series of frantic, breathy memories. Clawing hands tugging off clothes, heartbeat thumping in my ears, fingernails digging down my back. salty tastes lingering in my mouth. It's biology. It's hormones. As time passes I can recall fewer and fewer of our conversations and I couldn't give you the details of our five most-fun dates (though I have a fairly graphic vision of how each of them ended).
If upon hearing this you pump your fist and wink knowingly, you can kiss my ass. She was a good friend to me. She put up with my bullshit and at times not even I can put up with my bullshit. But all that is gone and what is left is a big, black hole where the sex used to be. ~ David Wong,#NFDB
1015:I dug deep into the work of the neuroscience researcher John Cacioppo when I was writing Braving the Wilderness. He dedicated his career to understanding loneliness, belonging, and connection, and he makes the argument that we don’t derive strength from our rugged individualism, but rather from our collective ability to plan, communicate, and work together. Our neural, hormonal, and genetic makeup support interdependence over independence. He explained, “To grow to adulthood as a social species, including humans, is not to become autonomous and solitary, it’s to become the one on whom others can depend. Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology have been shaped to favor this outcome.” No matter how much we love Whitesnake—and, as many of you know, I do—we really weren’t born to walk alone. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
1016:All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart
from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from
certain great dominants of our contemporary life -- science, all the sciences,
and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them.
Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an
alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a
metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these
words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used
up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly,
that the truth is a matter of the imagination. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,#NFDB
1017:Reading was the only subject at which I excelled. I would much rather be reading James Fenimore Cooper than dealing with participles in French. My poor school performance was puzzling because my parents saw that I possessed intelligence and curiosity. Marine biology became a passion. When I asked them to drive me to Boston to hear lectures by Jacques Cousteau, my first hero, they were happy to do so. They took me to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, a paradise for a kid in love with water. I was obsessed with learning from those men who explored the deep. I wanted to go deep. I was told that if I kept up my grades I could come back one summer and intern at Woods Hole. That never happened. My grades were below average. That became the great mystery of my childhood: Why was I having ~ Joe Perry, #NFDB
1018:What was the nature of the universe into which she had been born? Why did it exist at all? If it had a purpose, what was it? These seemed to her the only questions worth exploring. And the only valid technique evolved by humans for exploring such questions was the scientific method, a robust and self-correcting search for the truth. Yet it had become obvious to her since about the age of twelve that science as it had progressed so far – physics, chemistry, biology, all the rest – had only inched towards grappling with the true questions, the fundamentals. Those questions had only been addressed by theologians and philosophers, it seemed to her. Unfortunately, their answers were a mush of doubt, self-delusion and flummery that had probably done more harm than good. And yet that was all there was. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1019:Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.
Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.
Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down. ~ Albert Goldbarth,#NFDB
1020:The antidote, in so far as it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective. What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos - all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1021:It marshals a vast amount of scientific evidence, from physics to biology, and offers extensive arguments, all geared to objectively proving the holistic nature of the universe. It fails to see that if we take a bunch of egos with atomistic concepts and teach them that the universe is holistic, all we will actually get is a bunch of egos with holistic concepts. Precisely because this monological approach, with its unskillful interpretation of an otherwise genuine intuition, ignores or neglects the "I" and the "we" dimensions, it doesn't understand very well the exact nature of the inner transformations that are necessary in the first place in order to be able to find an identity that embraces the manifest All. Talk about the All as much as we want, nothing fundamentally changes. ~ Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, #NFDB
1022:How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures forbid them to realize this possibility. 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. ~ Yuval Noah Harari, #NFDB
1023:The reality is that most of us grow up strapped in an educational system that favors obedience over independent thinking. We’re rewarded for trusting authority, and punished for challenging it. We focus on memorizing the stuff other people came up with—formulas in math, grammar rules in English, theories in physics, cell functions in biology—rather than grasping the logic behind our most important breakthroughs and tracing the footsteps of their discovery. We answer test questions with what we think our teacher wants to hear. We chase grades instead of knowledge. And worst of all, we leave the classroom woefully unequipped with the thinking skills that matter most: how to balance open-mindedness with skepticism, how to identify bias, and how to challenge assumptions—including our own—in a way that’s truly objective. ~ Denise Minger, #NFDB
1024:To a biologist like Margulis, who spent her career arguing that humans are simply part of evolution’s handiwork, the answer should be clear. All life is similar at base, she and others say. All species seek to make more of themselves—that is their goal. By multiplying until we reach our maximum possible numbers, we are following the laws of biology, even as we take out much of the planet. Eventually, in accordance with those same laws, the human enterprise will wipe itself out. Shouting from the edge of the petri dish, Borlaug and Vogt might as well be trying to hold back the tide. From this standpoint, the answer to the question “Are we doomed to destroy ourselves?” is “Yes.” That we could be some sort of magical exception—it seems unscientific. Why should we be different? Is there any evidence that we are special? ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
1025:If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy.
When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to. ~ David Eagleman,#NFDB
1026:In my biology class, we’d talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don’t; trees do, plastic doesn’t. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are—brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn’t settle; fire doesn’t tolerate; fire doesn’t “get by.” Fire does. ~ Dan Wells, #NFDB
1027:Finally there is the topic we talked about earlier, which is of great interest to me at the moment, the relationship between biology and culture. I've been reading the work of the late philosopher and theologian Claude Tresmontant. Tresmontant was a Christian, but his books interest me for what they have to say about genetic programming. He situates Christianity at the point of transition between genetic programming—dominant in archaic societies with regard to territorial defense, sexual and hoarding instincts, and so forth—and a new kind of evolutionary programming contained in culture rather than in genes. The argument is suggestive, but it needs to be developed further. Tresmontant doesn't take into account archaic religion, which he conflates with genetic programming in animals. Room has to be made for one more stage. MSB ~ Ren Girard, #NFDB
1028:Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, “homeostasis,” i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
1029:...Grimacing, I plunged a hand into the fouled water to clear the clog, morbid curiosity drawing my youthful eyes to the gray globs of gore floating upon the surface. It was not horror that seized my imagination so much as wonder: sixty years of dreams and desires, hunger and hope, love and longing, blasted away in a single explosive instant, mind and brain. The mind of Erasmus Gray was gone; the remnants of its vessel floated, as light and insubstantial as popcorn, in the water. Which fluffy bit held your ambition, Erasmus Gray? Which speck your pride? Ah, how absurd the primping and preening of our race! Is it not the ultimate arrogance to believe we are more than is contained in our biology? What counterarguments may be put forth, what valid objections raised, to the claim of Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity"? ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
1030:That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face—that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat—that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1031:In my biology class, we’d talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don’t; trees do, plastic doesn’t. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are—brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn’t settle; fire doesn’t tolerate; fire doesn’t “get by.” Fire does. Fire is. ~ Dan Wells, #NFDB
1032:Scholarships allowed her to study at Woods Hole Biological Laboratory, where she fell in love with the sea, and at Johns Hopkins University, where she was isolated, one of a handful of women in marine biology. She had no mentors and no money to continue in graduate school after completing an M.A. in zoology in 1932. Along the way she worked as a laboratory assistant in the school of public health, where she was lucky enough to receive some training in experimental genetics. As employment opportunities in science dwindled, she began writing articles about the natural history of Chesapeake Bay for the Baltimore Sun. Although these were years of financial and emotional struggle, Carson realized that she did not have to choose between science and writing, that she had the talent to do both. From childhood on, Carson was interested in ~ Rachel Carson, #NFDB
1033:Consider how the principles of the law of accelerating returns apply to the epochs we discussed in the first chapter. The combination of amino acids into proteins and of nucleic acids into strings of RNA established the basic paradigm of biology. Strings of RNA (and later DNA) that self-replicated (Epoch Two) provided a digital method to record the results of evolutionary experiments. Later on, the evolution of a species that combined rational thought (Epoch Three) with an opposable appendage (the thumb) caused a fundamental paradigm shift from biology to technology (Epoch Four). The upcoming primary paradigm shift will be from biological thinking to a hybrid combining biological and nonbiological thinking (Epoch Five), which will include “biologically inspired” processes resulting from the reverse engineering of biological brains. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
1034:On the other hand, the conditions of human existence—life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth—can never “explain” what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely. This has always been the opinion of philosophy, in distinction from the sciences—anthropology, psychology, biology, etc.—which also concern themselves with man. But today we may almost say that we have demonstrated even scientifically that, though we live now, and probably always will, under the earth’s conditions, we are not mere earth-bound creatures. Modern natural science owes its great triumphs to having looked upon and treated earth-bound nature from a truly universal viewpoint, that is, from an Archimedean standpoint taken, wilfully and explicitly, outside the earth. 2 ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
1035:When I was lecturing recently to a group of cardiologists at the Mayo Clinic I said...
Why is it that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, the only disorder that you will ever diagnose with a physics textbook is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The laws of thermodynamics are always true, the energy balance equation is irrelevant.
If someone's getting fatter I guarantee you they're taking more energy than they expend (as long as they're getting heavier). And if they're getting leaner I guarantee they're expending more than they're taking in. [It's] given, let's never discuss it again. And if you say it to your patients you're telling them nothing
(University Of Colorado Medical School, May 9th 2013 - via YouTube) ~ Gary Taubes,#NFDB
1036:When I started reading the literature of molecular biology, I was stunned by certain descriptions. Admittedly, I was on the lookout for anything unusual, as my investigation had led me to consider that DNA and its cellular machinery truly were an extremely sophisticated technology of cosmic origin. But as I pored over thousands of pages of biological texts, I discovered a world of science fiction that seemed to confirm my hypothesis. Proteins and enzymes were described as 'miniature robots,' ribosomes were 'molecular computers,' cells were 'factories,' DNA itself was a 'text,' a 'program,' a 'language,' or 'data.' One only had to do a literal reading of contemporary biology to reach shattering conclusions; yet most authors display a total lack of astonishment and seem to consider that life is merely 'a normal physiochemical phenomenon. ~ Jeremy Narby, #NFDB
1037:refers to the many branches of the vagus nerve—Darwin’s “pneumogastric nerve”—which connects numerous organs, including the brain, lungs, heart, stomach, and intestines.) The Polyvagal Theory provided us with a more sophisticated understanding of the biology of safety and danger, one based on the subtle interplay between the visceral experiences of our own bodies and the voices and faces of the people around us. It explained why a kind face or a soothing tone of voice can dramatically alter the way we feel. It clarified why knowing that we are seen and heard by the important people in our lives can make us feel calm and safe, and why being ignored or dismissed can precipitate rage reactions or mental collapse. It helped us understand why focused attunement with another person can shift us out of disorganized and fearful states. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
1038:Metaphysical doctrines can also assist in the elimination of false implications in biological theories, especially those of the theory of evolution. Throughout the world today particularly in the Orient where there are still societies that remain faithful to their religious principles and the social structure based upon them, men are asked to evolve and change simply because evolution is in the nature of things and is inevitable. A more objective assessment of the findings of biology would insist that as long as man has been living on earth he has not evolved at all; nor has his natural environment changed in any way. The same plants and animals are still born, grow, wither and die and regenerate themselves except for the unfortunate species that modem man who believes himself to belong to the process of evolution has made extinct. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
1039:On January 28, 1983, on the eve of the launch of the Human Genome Project, Carrie Buck died in a nursing home in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. She was seventy-six years old. Her birth and death had bookended the near century of the gene. Her generation had borne witness to the scientific resurrection of genetics, its forceful entry into public discourse, its perversion into social engineering and eugenics, its postwar emergence as the central theme of the “new” biology, its impact on human physiology and pathology, its powerful explanatory power in our understanding of illness, and its inevitable intersection with questions of fate, identity, and choice. She had been one of the earliest victims of the misunderstandings of a powerful new science. And she had watched that science transform our understanding of medicine, culture, and society. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1040:The vast majority of protesters were men, and it made perfect sense to Louie—the male of the species felt threatened by the biology of women. Even in the Bible, normal female biological functions were made pathological: You were unclean when you had your menses. Childbirth had to occur in pain. And there was the questionable nature of those who bled regularly—but did not die. There was, of course, the history, too. Women had been property. Their chastity had always belonged to a man, until abortion and contraception put control of women’s sexuality in the women’s hands. If women could have sex without the fear of unwanted pregnancy, then suddenly the man’s role had shrunk to a level somewhere between unnecessary and vestigial. So instead, men vilified women who had abortions. They created the stigma: good women want to be mothers, bad women don’t. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
1041:Shame comes from outside of us—from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from the inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate. We are wired for connection. It’s in our biology. As infants, our need for connection is about survival. As we grow older, connection means thriving—emotionally, physically, spiritually and intellectually. Connection is critical because we all have the basic need to feel accepted and to believe that we belong and are valued for who we are. Shame unravels our connection to others. In fact, I often refer to shame as the fear of disconnection—the fear of being perceived as flawed and unworthy of acceptance or belonging. Shame keeps us from telling our own stories and prevents us from listening to others tell their stories. We silence our voices and keep our secrets out of the fear of disconnection. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
1042:In my biology class, we'd talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don't, trees do, plastic doesn't. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are–brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn't settle; fire doesn't tolerate; fire doesn't 'get by.'
Fire does.
Fire is. ~ Dan Wells,#NFDB
1043:I AM LEERY of suggesting the idea that endings are controllable. No one ever really has control. Physics and biology and accident ultimately have their way in our lives. But the point is that we are not helpless either. Courage is the strength to recognize both realities. We have room to act, to shape our stories, though as time goes on it is within narrower and narrower confines. A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
1044:Shamanism resembles an academic discipline (such as anthropology or molecular biology); with its practitioners, fundamental researchers, specialists, and schools of thought it is a way of apprehending the world that evolves constantly. One thing is certain: Both indigenous and mestizo shamans consider people like the Shipibo-Conibo, the Tukano, the Kamsá, and the Huitoto as the equivalents to universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and the Sorbonne; they are the highest reference in matters of knowledge. In this sense, ayahuasca-based shamanism is an essentially indigenous phenomenon. It belongs to the indigenous people of Western Amizonia, who hold the keys to a way of knowing that they have practiced without interruption for at least five thousand years. In comparison, the universities of the Western world are less than nine hundred years old. ~ Jeremy Narby, #NFDB
1045:The acknowledged American leader of the new science of anthropology, Boas was a scrupulous master of detail drawn from his field experience. Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man (1911; revised and enlarged in 1938) demonstrated that "there is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man." He attacked simplistic racial stereotypes and insisted that "A close connection between race and personality has never been established." His conclusions were firmly based on facts gathered in the field. Boas argued that all surviving societies show equally the capacity to develop culture. They have evolved equally but differently. So he diverted the social scientists' focus from biology (the realism of evolution) to anthropology. And he received the accolade of the German Nazis when they burned his books and rescinded his German Ph.D. ~ Daniel J Boorstin, #NFDB
1046:In the chapters on the biology of trauma we saw how trauma and abandonment disconnect people from their body as a source of pleasure and comfort, or even as a part of themselves that needs care and nurturance. When we cannot rely on our body to signal safety or warning and instead feel chronically overwhelmed by physical stirrings, we lose the capacity to feel at home in our own skin and, by extension, in the world. As long as their map of the world is based on trauma, abuse, and neglect, people are likely to seek shortcuts to oblivion. Anticipating rejection, ridicule, and deprivation, they are reluctant to try out new options, certain that these will lead to failure. This lack of experimentation traps people in a matrix of fear, isolation, and scarcity where it is impossible to welcome the very experiences that might change their basic worldview. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
1047:Those so-called atheists who try to base prescriptive morality on biology are guilty of the aforementioned conflation of descriptive and prescriptive morality, a conflation that costs them their authority. Those who argue that morality comes from evolution: that we have evolved sympathy and altruism and that we therefore ought to be sympathetic and altruistic fall into the is-ought gap. That we have evolved these characteristics is not in question. But that we ought to follow them is. The characteristics are descriptions. But these descriptions are then magically transformed into prescriptions. One could equally validly (i.e. not validly) prescribe envy as it too is a characteristic which we have evolved. Aggression and violence have also evolved, else we would not exhibit these tendencies. Both ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (in the traditional sense) have evolved. To ~ Peter Sj stedt H, #NFDB
1048:Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatoza attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese-twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the reveling cosmos. (Yes, our DNA is unique, but so is a salamander's. Yes, we construct artifacts, but so have species ranging from beavers to the architecture ants... Yes, we weave real fabric things from the dreamstuff of mathematics, but the universe is hardwired with arithmetic. Scratch a circle and pi peeps out. Enter a new solar system and Tycho Brahe's formulae lie waiting under the black velvet cloak of space/time. But where has the universe hidden a word under its outer layer of biology, geometry, or insensate rock?) ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
1049:To see what happens in the real world when an information cascade takes over, and the bidders have almost nothing but one another’s behavior to estimate an item’s value, look no further than Peter A. Lawrence’s developmental biology text The Making of a Fly, which in April 2011 was selling for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. How and why had this—admittedly respected—book reached a sale price of more than $23 million? It turns out that two of the sellers were setting their prices algorithmically as constant fractions of each other: one was always setting it to 0.99830 times the competitor’s price, while the competitor was automatically setting their own price to 1.27059 times the other’s. Neither seller apparently thought to set any limit on the resulting numbers, and eventually the process spiraled totally out of control. ~ Brian Christian, #NFDB
1050:Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
1051:Generalizations in biology are almost invariably of a probabilistic nature. As one wit has formulated it, there is only one universal law in biology: 'All biological laws have exceptions.' This probabilistic conceptualization contrasts strikingly with the view during the early period of the scientific revolution that causation in nature is regulated by laws that can be stated in mathematical terms. Actually, this idea occurred apparently first to Pythagoras. It has remained a dominant idea, particularly in the physical sciences, up to the present day. Again and again it was made the basis of some comprehensive philosophy, but taking very different forms in the hands of various authors. With Plato it gave rise to essentialism, with Galileo to a mechanistic world picture, and with Descartes to the deductive method. All three philosophies had a fundamental impact on biology. ~ Ernst W Mayr, #NFDB
1052:Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading and walking as almost his only pursuits. He voluntarily attended graduate lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them with a rather pathetically intent look in his eyes, as if waiting for something the lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a point. He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of becoming a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand miles away, Amory almost choked with the romantic joy of watching him. Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable to get a foothold. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1053:literary studies share with Moravec a major blind spot when it comes to the significance of embodiment.3 This blind spot is most evident, perhaps, when literary and cultural critics confront the fields of evolutionary biology. From an evolutionary biologist’s point of view, modern humans, for all their technological prowess, represent an eye blink in the history of life, a species far too recent to have significant evolutionary impact on human biological behaviors and structures. In my view, arguments like those that Jared Diamond advances in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Why Sex Is Fun : The Evolution of Human Sexuality should be taken seriously.4 The body is the net result of thousands of years of sedimented evolutionary history, and it is naive to think that this history does not affect human behaviors at every level of thought and action. ~ N Katherine Hayles, #NFDB
1054:Your cells are a country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being. There isn’t a thing they don’t do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper. When you eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the wastes - all those things you learned about in junior high school biology - but they also remember to make you hungry in the first place and reward you with a feeling of well-being afterward so that you won’t forget to eat again. They keep your hair growing, your ears waxed, your brain quietly purring. They manage every corner of your being. They will jump to your defence the instant you are threatened. They will unhesitatingly die for you - billions of them do so daily. And not once in all your years have you thanked even one of them. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1055:The Sciences Sing a Lullabye"
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.
Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.
Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down. ~ Albert Goldbarth,#NFDB
1056:Biology doesn't know in advance what the end product will be; there's no Stuffit Compressor to convert a human being into a genome. But the genome itself is very much akin to a compression scheme, a terrifically efficient description of how to build something of great complexity-perhaps more efficient than anything yet developed in the labs of computer scientists (never mind the complexities of the brain, there are trillions of cells in the rest of the body, and they are all supervised by the same 30,000-gene genome). And although there is no counterpart in nature to a program that compresses a picture into a compact description, there is a natural counterpart to the program that decompresses the compressed encoding, and that's the cell. Genome in, organism out. Through the logic of gene expression, cells are self-regulating factories that translate genomes into biological structure. ~ Gary F Marcus, #NFDB
1057:Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! ~ Sinclair Lewis, #NFDB
1058:Winfree came from a family in which no one had gone to college. He got started, he would say, by not having proper education. His father, rising from the bottom of the life insurance business to the level of vice president, moved family almost yearly up and down the East Coast, and Winfree attended than a dozen schools before finishing high school. He developed a feeling that the interesting things in the world had to do with biology and mathematics and a companion feeling that no standard combination of the two subjects did justice to what was interesting. So he decided not to take a standard approach. He took a five-year course in engineering physics at Cornell University, learning applied mathematics and a full range of hands-on laboratory styles. Prepared to be hired into military-industrial complex, he got a doctorate in biology, striving to combine experiment with theory in new ways. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
1059:Everyone knew Sonja was destined for great things, but no one knew what to do with her until then. Even in academia, her natural habitat, she was an exotic species. Though her Russianness gave her certain dispensations, the idea that a young woman of any ethnicity could so excel in the hard sciences was a far-fetched fantasy. Their parents encouraged her at a distance. Neither understood the molecular formulas, electromagnetic fields, or anatomical minutiae that so captivated her, and so their support came by way of well-intentioned, inadequate generalities. Even after Sonja graduated secondary school at the top of her class and matriculated to the city university biology department, their parents found more to love in Natasha. Sonja’s gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable. Natasha was beautiful and charming. They didn’t need MDs to know how to be proud of her. ~ Anthony Marra, #NFDB
1060:It would indeed seem more expedient to treat the history of thought in terms borrowed from biology..(, with) "evolution" .. a wasteful, fumbling process characterized by sudden mutations of unknown cause, by the slow grinding of selection, and by the dead-ends of overspecialization and rigid inadaptability.. New ideas are thrown up spontaneously like mutations; the vast majority of them are useless crank theories, the equivalent of biological freaks without survival-value. There is a constant struggle for survival between competing theories in every branch of the history of thought. The process of "natural selection", too, has its equivalent in mental evolution: among the multitude of new concepts which emerge only those survive which are well adapted to the period's intellectual milieu. A new theoretical concept will live or die according to whether it can come to terms with this environment.. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1061:Epidemiologic theory. As a phrase, it sounds at once dry and arcane.Yet, in reality, it is vital and engaging. Epidemiologic theory is about explaining the people’s health. It is about life and death. It is about biology and society. It is about ecology and the economy. It is about how the myriad activities and meanings of people’s lives—involving work, dignity, desire, love, play, confl ict, discrimination, and injustice—become literally incorporated into our bodies—that is, embodied—and manifest in our health status, individually and collectively. It is about why rates of disease and death change over time and vary geographically. It is about why different societies—and within societies, why different societal groups—have better or worse health than others. And it is about essential knowledge critical for improving the people’s health and minimizing inequitable burdens of disease, disability, and death ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1062:If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all. ~ Stuart A Kauffman, #NFDB
1063:But does the danger really lie in the lack of universality? Doesn't it rather lurk in the pretense of totality? What is dangerous is the attempt of a man who is an expert, say, in the field of biology, to understand and explain human beings exclusively in terms of biology. The same is true of psychology and sociology as well. At the moment at which totality is claimed, biology becomes biologism, psychology becomes psychologism, and sociology becomes sociologism. In other words, at that moment science is turned into ideology. What we have to deplore, I would say, is not that scientists are specializing, but that the specialists are generalizing. We are familiar with that type called terrible simplificateurs. Now we become acquainted with a type I would like to call terrible generalisateurs. I mean those who cannot resist the temptation to make overgeneralized statements on the grounds of limited findings. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
1064:Ironically, the modern era of molecular biology, and all the extraordinary DNA technology that it entails, arguably began with a physicist, specifically with the publication of Erwin Schrödinger’s book What is Life? in 1944. Schrödinger made two key points: first, that life somehow resists the universal tendency to decay, the increase in entropy (disorder) that is stipulated by the second law of thermodynamics; and second, that the trick to life’s local evasion of entropy lies in the genes. He proposed that the genetic material is an ‘aperiodic’ crystal, which does not have a strictly repeating structure, hence could act as a ‘code-script’ – reputedly the first use of the term in the biological literature. Schrödinger himself assumed, along with most biologists at the time, that the quasicrystal in question must be a protein; but within a frenzied decade, Crick and Watson had inferred the crystal structure of DNA itself. ~ Nick Lane, #NFDB
1065:One of the four genes used by Yamanaka to reverse cellular fate is called c-myc. Myc, the rejuvenating factor, is no ordinary gene: it is one of the most forceful regulators of cell growth and metabolism known in biology. Activated abnormally, it can certainly coax an adult cell back into an embryo-like state, thereby enabling Yamanaka's cell-fate reversal experiment (this function requires the collaboration of the three other genes found by Yamanaka). But myc is also one of the most potent cancer-causing genes known in biology; it is also activated in leukemias and lymphomas, and in pancreatic, gastric, and uterine cancer. As in some ancient moral fable, the quest for eternal youthfulness appears to come at a terrifying collateral cost. The very genes that enable a cell to peel away mortality and age can also tip its fate toward malignant immortality, perpetual growth, and agelessness-the hallmarks of cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1066:Very prudent and very bourgeois. But you don't win a game by hitting the balls out of court. Why would you say that so many different beliefs have appeared and disappeared throughout history?'
'I don't know. Social, economic, or political factors, I suppose. You're talking to someone who left school at the age of ten. History has never been my strong point.'
'History is biology's dumping ground, Martin.'
'I think I wasn't in school the day that lesson was taught.'
'This lesson is not taught in classrooms, Martin. It is taught through reason and the observation of reality. This lesson is the one nobody wants to learn and is therefore the one we must examine carefully in order to be able to do our work. All business opportunities stem from someone else's inability to resolve a simple and inevitable problem.'
'Are we talking about religion or economics?'
'You choose the label. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n,#NFDB
1067:Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is- more than anything else- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we're in- and reality's implications- we'll face big problems. ~ Carl Safina, #NFDB
1068:Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the 'blind watchmaker' of natural selection with the real human one. 'A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection . . . has no purpose in mind'.
I think this distinction is wrong. There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels, and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they produce what looks like foresight. ~ Susan Blackmore,#NFDB
1069:In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.13 This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. It is an increasingly influential idea in evolutionary theory, and one that will recur throughout the book. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. Life is a chess tournament in which if you win a game, you start the next game with the handicap of a missing pawn. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
1070:No sane paleontologist would ever claim that he or she had discovered "The Ancestor." Think about it this way: What is the chance that while walking through any random cemetery on our planet I would discover an actual ancestor of mine? Diminishingly small. What I would discover is that all people buried in these cemeteries-- no mater whether that cemetery is in China, Botswana, or Italy-- are related to me to different degrees. I can find this out by looking at their DNA with many of the forensic techniques in use in crime labs today. I'd see that some of the denizens of the cemeteries are distantly related to me, others are related more closely. This tree would be a very powerful window into my past and my family history. It would also have a practical application because I could use this tree to understand my predilection to get certain diseases and other facts of my biology. The same is true when we infer relationship among species. ~ Neil Shubin, #NFDB
1071:Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter is all there is – that there is no such thing as spirit, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology – all these things, and many more, in mythological terms at least, do not look good for us. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
1072:But was chance necessary? Hubbard, too, thought about the parallels between the Mandelbrot set and the biological encoding of information, but he bristled at any suggestion that such processes might depend on probability. "There is no randomness in the Mandelbrot set," Hubbard said. "There is no randomness in anything that I do. Neither do I think that the possibility of randomness has any direct relevance to biology. In biology randomness is death, chaos is death. Everything is highly structured. When you clone plants, the order in which the branches come out is exactly the same. The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
1073:This description of physiology—as the exquisite matching of form and function, down to the molecular level—dates back to Aristotle. For Aristotle, living organisms were nothing more than exquisite assemblages of machines. Medieval biology had departed from that tradition, conjuring up “vital” forces and mystical fluids that were somehow unique to life—a last-minute deus ex machina to explain the mysterious workings of living organisms (and justify the existence of the deus). But biophysicists were intent on restoring a rigidly mechanistic description to biology. Living physiology should be explicable in terms of physics, biophysicists argued—forces, motions, actions, motors, engines, levers, pulleys, clasps. The laws that drove Newton’s apples to the ground should also apply to the growth of the apple tree. Invoking special vital forces or inventing mystical fluids to explain life was unnecessary. Biology was physics. Machina en deus. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1074:To “put up a straw man” is to intentionally caricature a person’s argument with the aim of attacking the caricature rather than the actual argument. Misrepresenting, misquoting, misconstruing, and oversimplifying an opponent’s position are all means by which one can commit this fallacy. The straw man argument is usually more absurd than the actual argument, making it an easier target to attack. It may also lure the other person toward defending the more ridiculous argument rather than their original one. For example, a skeptic of Darwinism might say, “My opponent is trying to convince you that we evolved from chimpanzees who were swinging from trees, a truly ludicrous claim.” This is a misrepresentation of what evolutionary biology actually claims, which is that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor millions of years ago. Misrepresenting the idea is much easier than refuting the evidence for it. Informal Fallacy › Red Herring › Straw Man ~ Ali Almossawi, #NFDB
1075:Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology "homeostasis", i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
1076:There was something wrong with me. The human body doesn't want to get hurt. We're programmed to feel squeamish at the sight of blood. Pain is a careful orchestration of chemical processes so that we keep our body alive. Studies have shown that people born with congenital analgesia -- the inability to feel pain -- bite off the tips of their tongues and scratch holes in their eyes and break bones. We are a wonder of checks and balances to keep running. The human body doesn't want to get hurt. There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I didn't care. There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I wanted it. We fear death; we fear the void; we scrabble to keep our pulses. I was the void. What are you afraid of? Nothing ... I wasn't meant to live, probably. This was why I was wired this way. Biology formed me and then took a look and wondered what the hell it was thinking and put in a mental fail-safe. In case of emergency pull cord. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
1077:In contrast to mainstream artificial intelligence, I see competition as much more essential than consistency," he says. Consistency is a chimera, because in a complicated world there is no guarantee that experience will be consistent. But for agents playing a game against their environment, competition is forever. "Besides," says Holland, "despite all the work in economics and biology, we still haven't extracted what's central in competition." There's a richness there that we've only just begun to fathom. Consider the magical fact that competition can produce a very strong incentive for cooperation, as certain players spontaneously forge alliances and symbiotic relationships with each other for mutual support. It happens at every level and in every kind of complex, adaptive system, from biology to economics to politics. "Competition and cooperation may seem antithetical," he says, "but at some very deep level, they are two sides of the same coin. ~ M Mitchell Waldrop, #NFDB
1078:There is a classic observation that rings true across all of biology. The observation concerns whether organisms learn and take instruction from the environment or whether the reactions that organisms have to environmental stimuli are managed by systems already built into the organism. The “selection versus instruction” debate has raged for years and has especially caught the limelight in the field of immunology. Put simply, when something foreign enters the body and there is an immune response to it, are the antibodies formed then and there around the foreign body, and do they then multiply (instruction)? Or does the antibody already exist, and is the immune response time the time it takes to find the preexisting antibody (selection) and jerk it into action? In the previous century, biology learned it is the latter situation, a finding that illustrates that a whole lot of stuff comes with the package—standard equipment for our bodies and brains. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga, #NFDB
1079:What motivates Olympic athletes to train for years for one event—in some cases, for just seconds of actual competition? It’s the same thing that kept my friend Pete nosing around old bookstores for years. It’s the same thing that makes a person venture out of a comfortable job to start a new business. We see it in the artist who spends day after day in a studio chipping away at a block of stone. Look closely and you’ll find it in the shopper who passes up the good deal in search of the best deal. It’s one of the things that makes us most human. We consciously pursue what we value. It’s not simply a matter of being driven by biology or genetics or environmental conditioning to satisfy instinctive cravings. Rather, we perceive something, prize it at a certain value, then pursue it according to that assigned value because we were created that way. This ability to perceive, prize, and pursue is part of our essential humanness, and it’s the essence of ambition. ~ Dave Harvey, #NFDB
1080:In America, Rousseauism has turned Freud’s conflict-based psychoanalysis into weepy hand-holding. Contemporary liberalism is untruthful about cosmic realities. Therapy, defining anger and hostility in merely personal terms, seeks to cure what was never a problem before Rousseau. Mediterranean, as well as African-American, culture has a lavish system of language and gesture to channel and express negative emotion. Rousseauists who take the Utopian view of personality are always distressed or depressed over world outbreaks of violence and anarchy. But because, as a Sadean, I believe history is in nature and of it, I tend to be far more cheerful and optimistic than my liberal friends. Despite crime’s omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium. Films like Seven Samurai (1954) and Two Women (1961) accurately show the breakdown of social controls as a regression to animal-like squalor. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
1081:Warren Weaver is not a household name, but he may be the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of, actively shaping three of the most important scientific revolutions of the last century—life sciences, information technology, and agriculture. In 1932 Weaver joined the Rockefeller Foundation to lead the division charged with supporting scientific research. Funding was scarce during the Great Depression, and the Rockefeller Foundation, with an endowment nearly twice the size of Harvard’s at the time, was one of the most important patrons of scientific research in the world. Over his three decades at the Rockefeller Foundation, Weaver acted as a banker, talent scout, and kingmaker to support the nascent field of molecular biology, a term he himself coined. Weaver had an uncanny knack for picking future all-stars. Eighteen scientists won Nobel Prizes for research related to molecular biology in the middle of the century, and Weaver had funded all but three of them. ~ Donald Sull, #NFDB
1082:What're you reading?"
"Gertrude Stein."
I shook my head. I'd never heard of her.
"The poet?" he asked. "You know, 'A rose is a rose is a rose'?"
I shook my head again.
"During the last year of her life, my mother became obsessed with her," Grant said. "She'd spent most of her life reading the Victorian poets, and when she found Gertrude Stein, she told me she was a comfort."
"What does she mean, 'A rose is a rose is a rose'?" I asked. Snapping the biology book shut, I was confronted with the skeleton of a human body. I tapped the empty eye socket.
"That things just are what they are," he said.
" 'A rose is a rose.' "
" 'Is a rose,' " he finished, smiling faintly.
I thought about all the roses in the garden below, their varying shades of color and youth. "Except when it's yellow," I said. "Or red, or pink, or unopened, or dying."
"That's what I've always thought," said Grant. "But I'm giving Ms. Stein the opportunity to convince me. ~ Vanessa Diffenbaugh,#NFDB
1083:It is not only through their complexity that the immune systems confuse their owners' longing for security; they cause even more perplexity through their immanent paradox, as their successes, if they become too thorough, are perverted to become their own kind of reasons for illness: the growing universe of auto-immune pathologies illustrates the dangerous tendency of the own to win itself to death in the battle against the other.
It is no coincidence that recent interpretations of the immunity phenomenon exhibit a tendency to assign far greater significance to the presence of the foreign amidst the own than was intended in traditional identitary understandings of a monolithically closed organismic self - one could almost speak of a post-structuralist turn in biology. In the light of this, the patrol of antibodies in an organism seems less like a police force applying a rigid immigration policy than a theater troupe parodying its invaders and performing as their transvestites. ~ Peter Sloterdijk,#NFDB
1084:There’s no danger of disease,” he said. “I haven’t been with a woman since before the shooting, and in the hospital every cell in my body was screened. But there is another matter…. Are you taking pills?” She shook her head, but her eyes were clear. “Ah,” he said. “Mel can help with that. There’s something she can give you to prevent a baby.” “What if I didn’t do that?” she asked. “What if I didn’t go to Mel?” That caused him to straighten a bit. “I assume you passed biology 101,” he said. “There’s no telling what would happen.” She shrugged. “Probably nothing.” “If the amount of pleasure we have correlates to conception, there will be a hundred babies by the end of the week.” “If you’d like me to see Mel, I will. This is probably just crazy. I wouldn’t push you, rush you.” “Brie, you can’t rush me. I want to give you everything. If you wanted me to give you a baby, I would die trying, but only if it was our baby. Together. Maybe you should think about it a little longer, until you’re sure.” She ~ Robyn Carr, #NFDB
1085:I think what I want is for someone to know me. Really know me. Know me better than anyone else and maybe even me. Isn’t that why we commit to another? It’s not for sex. If it were for sex, we wouldn’t marry one person. We’d just keep finding new partners. We commit for many reasons, I know, but the more I think about it, the more I think long-term relationships are for getting to know someone. I want someone to know me, really know me, almost like that person could get into my head. What would that feel like? To have access, to know what it’s like in someone else’s head. To rely on someone else, have him rely on you. That’s not a biological connection like the one between parents and children. This kind of relationship would be chosen. It would be something cooler, harder to achieve than one built on biology and shared genetics. I think that’s it. Maybe that’s how we know when a relationship is real. When someone else previously unconnected to us knows us in a way we never thought or believed possible. ~ Iain Reid, #NFDB
1086:And all the while I have people telling me, at least you still have something of your husband. Do they mean the book chronicling our work in Vystrana? No, of course not—never mind that we undertook that work together, with intent. That cannot possibly be as valuable as the accidental consequence of biology.”
Very quietly, Tom said, “Is not a child worth more than a book?”
“Yes,” I said violently. “But then for God’s sake let us value my son for himself, and not as some relic of his father. When he is grown enough to read, I will be delighted to share his father’s legacy with him; it is my legacy as well, and I hope he has inherited our curiosity enough to appreciate it. I would not mind a motherhood where that was my purpose—to foster my son’s mind and teach him the intellectual values of his parents. But no; society tells me my role is to change his napkins and coo over the faces he makes, and in so doing abandon the things I want him to treasure when he is grown. ~ Marie Brennan,#NFDB
1087:Of the spirit of women. - The spiritual power of a woman is best demonstrated by her sacrificing her own spirit to that of a man out of love of him and of his spirit but then, despite this sacrifice, immediately evolving a new spirit within the new domain, originally alien to her nature, to which the man's disposition impels her. (from Assorted Opinions & Maxims 272)
-- This is the first time among years of reading Nietzsche that i agree with his words on women: this aphorism captures a few quintessences of true and gallant womanhood, namely the will(ingness) to sacrifice (not only to others but also to the necessity that arises in a context), the balance between creative and reactive, the free-spiritedness out of such balance without conceit and swagger, and the malleability/fluidity without blind submission. (It is momentous to note that the man-woman dynamic is not binary, and that man/womanhood is not a given in one's biology - it's more something that evolves in a person over time.) ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#NFDB
1088:The questions of God – meaning in Milton’s phrase “The god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven” – I don’t think psychedelics can address that definitively, but there is another god, a goddess, the goddess of biology, the goddess of the coherent animal human world, the world of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the planet. In short, our world! The world that we were born into, that we evolved into, and that we came from. That world, the psychedelics want to connect us up to… Our individuality, as people and as a species, is an illusion of bad language that the psychedelics dissolve into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here, and to my mind that’s the religious impulse. It’s not a laundry list of moral dos and don’ts, or a set of dietary prescriptions or practices: it’s a sense of connectedness, responsibility for our fellow human beings and for the earth you walking around on, and because these psychedelics come out of that plant vegetable matrix they are the way back into it. ~ Terence McKenna, #NFDB
1089:the disparity between Eastern and Western spirituality resembles that found between Eastern and Western medicine—with the arrow of embarrassment pointing in the opposite direction. Humanity did not understand the biology of cancer, develop antibiotics and vaccines, or sequence the human genome under an Eastern sun. Consequently, real medicine is almost entirely a product of Western science. Insofar as specific techniques of Eastern medicine actually work, they must conform, whether by design or by happenstance, to the principles of biology as we have come to know them in the West. This is not to say that Western medicine is complete. In a few decades, many of our current practices will seem barbaric. One need only ponder the list of side effects that accompany most medications to appreciate that these are terribly blunt instruments. Nevertheless, most of our knowledge about the human body—and about the physical universe generally—emerged in the West. The rest is instinct, folklore, bewilderment, and untimely death. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1090:website Kickstarter.com (“A New Way to Fund and Follow Creativity”), where inventors, entrepreneurs, and dreamers of every stripe could post their wild schemes and pet projects and ask for money to fund them. BioCurious announced an initial goal of $30,000. The partners were soon oversubscribed, almost overwhelmed, with 239 backers pledging $35,319. In the fall of 2010 Gentry and her partners were looking to lease 3,000 square feet of industrial space in Mountain View, but in the end settled for a 2,400 square feet in Sunnyvale, calling it “Your Bay Area hackerspace for biotech.” In December 2010, meanwhile, another DIY biohacker lab, Genspace, opened in Brooklyn, New York. The founders referred to it as “the world’s first permanent, biosafety level 1 community laboratory” (genspace.org). Many others soon followed, in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. With free synthetic biology kits, DIYbio, Livly lab, BioCurious, Genspace, and others, the synthetic biology genie was well and truly out of the bottle. ~ George M Church, #NFDB
1091:As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children ('as much as they can understand') there are lies-to-bosses ('as much as they need to know') lies-to-patients ('they won't worry about what they don't know') and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. 'Yes, but you needed to understand that,' they are told, 'so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true.' Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1092:But perhaps an even greater principle was at stake, Bateson realized. The flow of biological information was not restricted to heredity. It was coursing through all of biology. The transmission of hereditary traits was just one instance of information flow-but if you looked deeply, squinting your conceptual lenses, it was easy to imagine information moving pervasively through the entire living world. The unfurling of an embryo; the reach of a plant toward sunlight; the ritual dance of bees-every biological activity required the decoding of coded instructions. Might Mendel, then, have also stumbled on the essential structure of these instructions? Were units of information guiding each of these processes? "Each of us who now looks at his own patch of work sees Mendel's clues running through it," Bateson proposed. "We have only touched the edge of that new country which is stretching out before us....The experimental study of heredity...is second to no branch of science in the magnitude of the results it offers. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1093:CARL SAGAN SAID that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. When he says “from scratch,” he means from
nothing. He means from a time before the world even existed. If you want to make an apple pie from nothing at all, you have to start with the Big Bang and expanding universes, neutrons, ions, atoms, black holes, suns, moons, ocean tides, the Milky Way, Earth, evolution, dinosaurs, extinction- level events, platypuses,
Homo erectus, Cro- Magnon man, etc. You have to start at the beginning. You must invent fire. You need water and fertile soil and seeds. You need cows and people to milk them and more people to churn that milk into butter. You need wheat and sugar cane and apple trees. You need chemistry and biology. For a really good apple pie, you need the arts. For an apple pie that can last for generations, you need the printing press and the Industrial Revolution and maybe even a poem.To make a thing as simple as an apple pie, you have to create the whole wide world. ~ Nicola Yoon,#NFDB
1094:There are lots of girls out there, Joshy. You’ll probably date a bunch of them. Or maybe you’ll only date a few. But one day, you’ll find the one.” He’d given Josh an all-knowing smile and wiped his hands on a napkin. “It will probably knock you over when you least expect it. At least that’s what happened with me. Your mother walked into my Biology 101 lab in college and there was something about her that made me take notice. We were lab partners and I could hardly focus on what we needed to do. I asked her out before we left the room. We were engaged a year later, but I knew right away I’d marry her someday. And every day I spent with her only made me more certain. She’d look at me in this special way…and my heart would melt. I wanted to make all her dreams come true and you know what? I’ve spent my life trying. I’ve never loved anyone as much as I love your mother and I never will.” And with that, his father had picked up another slice of pizza. “Someday you’ll find the one. And I can’t wait to meet her once you do. ~ Denise Grover Swank, #NFDB
1095:It was called evolutionary biology. Under its sway, the sexes were separated again, men into hunters and women into gatherers. Nurture no longer formed us; nature did. Impulses of hominids dating from 20,000 B.C. were still controlling us. And so today on television and in magazines you get the current simplifications. Why can't men communicate? (Because they had to be quiet on the hunt.) Why do women communicate so well? (Because they had to call out to one another where the fruits and berries were.) Why can men never find things around the house? (Because they have a narrow field of vision, useful in tracking prey.) Why can women find things so easily? (Because in protecting the nest they were used to scanning a wide field.) Why can't women parallel-park? (Because low testosterone inhibits spatial ability.) Why won't men ask for directions? (Because asking for directions is a sign of weakness, and hunters never show weakness.) This is where we are today. Men and women, tired of being the same, want to be different again. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
1096:The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus. ~ Daniel C Dennett, #NFDB
1097:And maybe it had to do with all the murders lately, but death was on her mind and what she had so far in regard to her graduation talk was not exactly what you would call inspiring. Life in a nutshell: we’re born, we suffer, and then we die. Heartache and grief and loneliness chase us every day, the kind of love we long for is never quite within our reach, justice eludes us, and in the end, meaning is nothing but an illusion. After all, life is an anomaly, the exception, not the norm. Death is the natural state of affairs both here and everywhere else we know of in the universe—and it’s on its way to reasserting itself. All the evidence from evolutionary biology, astrophysics, astronomy, all the theorizing in statistics and probability make it clear there’s no possible way intelligent life exists anywhere else other than on earth. Any other view is either wishful thinking or a carefully cultivated blindness. Death is the default setting of the universe. The end of life on this planet would be the end of life everywhere. And that day is coming. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1098:I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor's raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion ... Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity ... Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor's taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1099:Exploring all I could find, often with reckless dedication, I devoured the philosophies and theologies of animistic and shamanistic traditions. Hungrily I began learning: how to feel connection with the wind and the waves, how to hear the songs of the land and the stories of the ancestors, how to dissolve into darkness and ride the thermals of light. Slowly I discovered how these traditions are still alive, not just in lands that, with a mix of disquiet and envy, Western cultures call primitive and uncivilized. Returning to the islands of my ancestors, with wonder and relief, I found animistic religions in the rolling hills and flowering gardens of Britain. To my surprise and delight, I found too that here my passion for science was as nurtured as my soul’s artistic creativity. There was nothing in quantum physics or molecular biology, or the theories of the physiology of consciousness that could negate my growing understanding and experience of sanctity. I found the power of reason here, naturally inherent within the language of a religion. ~ Emma Restall Orr, #NFDB
1100:In a long and eventful life", the Doctor said eventually, "I have experienced nothing that I could not account for by the laws of physics, chemistry or biology. If a God or Gods exist, and I cannot rule out the possibility, then I can only presume that He, She or They take no active part in the lives of the many and various creatures that populate this extensive and wonderful universe of theirs". He picked a crumb of cheese from his plate and swallowed it. "In addition, I have seen countless races worship, countless Gods with attributes which are mutually incompatible, and each race believes itself to be following the one true faith. While I respect their beliefs, I would consider it arrogance for any race to try and impose their beliefs on me, and if I had a belief of my own then it would be equally arrogant of me to impose it on them. In short, sir, I am currently an agnostic, and by the time my life draws to its close, and I have travelled from one side of the universe to the other and seen every sight there is to see, I firmly expect to be an atheist". ~ Andy Lane, #NFDB
1101:Recently scientists have found that cephalopods (the family that contains the octopus) can recode their RNA. RNA molecules have the privilege of establishing codes with DNA (in the part of the RNA that recognizes the three-nucleotide DNA codon sequence) and also with proteins (in the separate part of the RNA that recognizes the amino acid). Recoding the RNA means that new proteins can be constructed while the DNA sequence of symbols stays the same. The collective result is the destruction of the one-to-one gene-to-protein correspondence. Recoding allows a single octopus gene to produce many different types of proteins from the same DNA sequence.18 This is a big deal. It is evidence against the three concepts in biology that dismiss semiotic systems in living organisms. The system can change its code. The system has an internal codemaker that can produce biological innovations—new proteins—but not via natural selection. It illustrates the arbitrariness of the connection of a symbol with its meaning in a living system. If symbols within living systems ~ Michael S Gazzaniga, #NFDB
1102:Indeed, Aristotle makes as many mistakes as possible for a man who is founding the science of biology. He thinks, for example, that the male element in reproduction merely stimulates and quickens; it does not occur to him (what we now know from experiments in parthenogenesis) that the essential function of the sperm is not so much to fertilize the ovum as to provide the embryo with the heritable qualities of the male parent, and so permit the offspring to be a vigorous variant, a new admixture of two ancestral lines. As human dissection was not practised in his time, he is particularly fertile in physiological errors: he knows nothing of muscles, not even of their existence; he does not distinguish arteries from veins; he thinks the brain is an organ for cooling the blood; he believes, forgivably, that man has more sutures in the skull than woman; he believes, less forgivably, that man has only eight ribs on each side; he believes, incredibly, and unforgivably, that woman has fewer teeth than man.25 Apparently his relations with women were of the most amicable kind. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
1103:It is the impulse of science to understand nature, and the impulse of technology to try to manipulate it. Recombinant DNA had pushed genetics from the realm of science into the realm of technology. Genes were not abstractions anymore. They could be liberated from the genomes of organisms where they had been trapped for millennia, shuttled between species, amplified, purified, extended, shortened, altered, remixed, mutated, mixed, matched, cut, pasted, edited; they were infinitely malleable to human intervention. Genes were no longer just the subjects of study, but the instruments of study. There is an illuminated moment in the development of a child when she grasps the recursiveness of language: just as thoughts can be used to generate words, she realizes, words can be used to generate thoughts. Recombinant DNA had made the language of genetics recursive. Biologists had spent decades trying to interrogate the nature of the gene-but now it was the gene that could be used to interrogate biology. We had graduated, in short, from thinking about genes, to thinking in genes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1104:In our profession, we tend to name things exactly as we see them. Big red stars we call red giants. Small white stars we call white dwarfs. When stars are made of neutrons, we call them neutron stars. Stars that pulse, we call them pulsars. In biology they come up with big Latin words for things. MDs write prescriptions in a cuneiform that patients can’t understand, hand them to the pharmacist, who understands the cuneiform. It’s some long fancy chemical thing, which we ingest. In biochemistry, the most popular molecule has ten syllables—deoxyribonucleic acid! Yet the beginning of all space, time, matter, and energy in the cosmos, we can describe in two simple words, Big Bang. We are a monosyllabic science, because the universe is hard enough. There is no point in making big words to confuse you further.
Want more? In the universe, there are places where the gravity is so strong that light doesn’t come out. You fall in, and you don’t come out either: black hole. Once again, with single syllables, we get the whole job done. Sorry, but I had to get all that off my chest. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,#NFDB
1105:Feminists have fought to remove the definition of what a woman is from... masculine institutions and develop their own understandings. Claims to the ‘right’ to self define ‘gender’, subject womanhood to men’s power to define once again.The major task of feminist theory was to bring women out from under the weight of men’s definitions and theories. Feminists developed what has been called ‘feminist standpoint theory’ to describe a new form of knowledge about women, that which is formed out of women’s experience as an oppressed group and refined through struggle and collective process (Harding (ed.), 2004). The very basis of feminism is this declaration of independence, the rejection of men’s ‘knowledge’ about women and the privileging of our own. Men’s ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most advantage their masters, as well as justify men’s rule over them. They do not represent ‘truth’ but have been promoted as if they were, with the backing of science and patriarchal views of biology. ~ Sheila Jeffreys, #NFDB
1106:Please continue. The creature you mentioned—the one with the wings. Was it one of the Kindred?”
I nod. “He’s called Alevar. Creepy little dude. But I’m going to need a health break before I go any further.”
I do need to use the facilities, but I also need a moment. The memory of being with Daryn is so real, it’s like I can still feel her head on my chest. I have to shake it off. I just need a second to lock it back down.
Cordero frowns. “Health break?”
I was trying to be tactful but I guess she wants details, which I can respect. “I gotta hit the head. And trust me. You don’t want to keep War away from a toilet when he needs one.”
Texas and Beretta laugh right away. They know I’m messing around, but I’ve really scared the civvie. The look on Cordero’s face is priceless.
“I’m just playing with you, Cordero. I drank all that water. It’s just biology. You know. Natural.”
“Five-minute break.” Cordero pushes up from her desk. “You know your orders,” she says to Texas. “Make sure everyone is on alert.”
“I don’t have to go that bad ~ Veronica Rossi,#NFDB
1107:The term ‘female’ is derogatory not because it emphasises woman’s animality, but because it imprisons her in her sex; and if this sex seems to man to be contemptible and inimical even in harmless dumb animals, it is evidently because of the uneasy hostility stirred up in him by woman. Nevertheless he wishes to find in biology a justification for this sentiment. The word female brings up in his mind a saraband of imagery – a vast, round ovum engulfs and castrates the agile spermatozoan; the monstrous and swollen termite queen rules over the enslaved males; the female praying mantis and the spider, satiated with love, crush and devour their partners; the bitch in heat runs through the alleys, trailing behind her a wake of depraved odours; the she-monkey presents posterior immodestly and then steals away with hypocritical coquetry; and the most superb wild beasts – the tigress, the lioness, the panther – bed down slavishly under the imperial embrace of the male. Females sluggish, eager, artful, stupid, callous, lustful, ferocious, abased – man projects them all at once upon woman. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1108:Unfortunately, I do not find Tegmark's line of reasoning to be extremely compelling. The leap from the existence of an external reality (independent of humans) to the conclusion that, in Tegmark's words, "You must believe in what I call the mathematical universe hypothesis: that our physical reality is a mathematical structure," involves, in my opinion, a sleight of hand. When Tegmark attempts to characterize what mathematics really is, he says: "To a modern logician, a mathematical structure is precisely this: a set of abstract entities with relations between them." But this modern logician is human! In other words, Tegmark never really proves that our mathematics is not invented by humans; he simply assumes it. Furthermore, as the French neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeaux has pointed out in response to a similar assertion: "To claim physical reality for mathematical objects, on a level of the natural phenomena we study in biology, poses a worrisome epistemological problem it seems to me. How can a physical state, internal to our brain, represent another physical state external to it? ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
1109:The fact that willful refocusing of attention caused brain changes in patients with OCD had exciting implications for the physics of mind-brain. “Ideas that I had long been working on, but which seemed to have no practical application, tied in very well with Jeff’s discovery of the power of mental effort to keep attention focused,” Stapp recalled. “That gave me the impetus to pursue this.” In his own JCS paper, Stapp argued that neither scientists nor philosophers who adhered to the ideas of classical Newtonian physics would ever resolve the mind-brain mystery until they acknowledged that their underlying model of the physical world was fundamentally flawed. For three centuries classical physics has proved incapable of resolving the mind-body problem, Stapp noted. And although quantum physics supplanted classical physics a century ago, the implications of the quantum revolution have yet to penetrate biology and, in particular, neuroscience. And that’s a problem, for the key difference between classical and quantum physics is the connection they make between physical states and consciousness. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1110:Thanks to the rapid advances in network theory it appears that we are not far from the next major step: constructing a general theory of complexity. The pressure is enormous. In the twenty-first century, complexity is not a vague science buzzword any longer, but an equally pressing challenge for everything from the economy to cell biology. Yet, most earlier attempts to construct a theory of complexity have overlooked the deep link between it and networks. In most systems, complexity starts where networks turn nontrivial. No matter how puzzled we are by the behavior of an electron or an atom, we rarely call it complex, as quantum mechanics offers us the tools to describe them with remarkable accuracy. The demystification of crystals-highly regular networks of atoms and molecules-is one of the major success stories of twentieth-century physics, resulting in the development of the transistor and the discovery of superconductivity. Yet, we continue to struggle with systems for which the interaction map between the components is less ordered and rigid, hoping to give self-organization a chance. ~ Albert L szl Barab si, #NFDB
1111:The differentiation of science into its specialties is, after all, an artificial and man-made state of affairs. While the level of knowledge was still low, the division was useful and seemed natural. It was possible for a man to study astronomy or biology without reference to chemistry or physics, or for that matter to study either chemistry or physics in isolation. With time and accumulated information, however, the borders of the specialties approached, met, and finally overlapped. The- techniques of one science became meaningful and illuminating in another.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, physical techniques made it possible to determine the chemical constitution and physical structure of stars, and the science of "astrophysics" was born. The study of the vibrations set up in the body of the earth by quakes gave rise to the study of "geophysics." 'Me study of chemical reactions through physical techniques initiated and constantly broadened the field of "physical chemistry," and the latter in turn penetrated the study of biology to produce what we now call "molecular biology. ~ Isaac Asimov,#NFDB
1112:When I was little, I didn’t understand that you could change a few sounds in a name or a phrase and have it mean something entirely different. When I told teachers my name was Benna and they said, “Donna who?” I would say, “Donna Gilbert.” I thought close was good enough, that sloppiness was generally built into the language. I thought Bing Crosby and Bill Crosby were the same person. That Buddy Holly and Billie Holiday were the same person. That Leon Trotsky and Leo Tolstoy were the same person. It was a shock for me quite late in life to discover that Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau were not even related. Meaning, if it existed at all, was unstable and could not survive the slightest reshuffling of letters. One gust of wind and Santa became Satan. A slip of the pen and pears turned into pearls. A little interior decorating and the world became her twold, an ungrammatical and unkind assessment of an aging aunt in a singles bar. Add a d to poor, you got droop. It was that way in biology, too. Add a chromosome, get a criminal. Subtract one, get an idiot or a chipmunk. That was the way with things. ~ Lorrie Moore, #NFDB
1113:Rububiyyah: Lordship, the quality of being a lord. A term derived from the Qur'anic
descriptions of Allah's lordship over creation. One might say the ecology of natural existence.
It is an essential element in Sufic cosmology and is a most sophisticated concept which
surpasses the crude specificity and mechanistic views of evolutionist biology. It is an energy
system of relationships in constant change and altering dynamics. It functions through the
different realms, the atomic, the mineral, the plant, and so on. It relates the levels of living
organisms from the uni-cellular up to man, and the interpenetrations of organism and
environment. It re-defines "event" from crude historicity to a picture of organism/event in a
unified field. It is the underlying concept which allows us to abandon the dead mind/body
split of the dying culture. It permits us to utilize and develop the energy concepts of
Islamic/Chinese medicine - which hold a common energy concept at base. Rububiyya permits
us to observe ONE PROCESS at work throughout every level of the creational realities. ~ Ibn Arabi,#NFDB
1114:To use an analogy, the "leadership is the answer to everything" perspective is the modern equivalent of the, 'God is the answer to everything' perspective that held back our scientific understanding of the physical world in the Dark Ages.
In the 1500's, people ascribed all events they didn't understand to God.
Why did the crops fail? God did it.
Why did we have an earthquake? God did it.
What holds the planets in place? God.
But with the Enlightenment, we began the search for a more scientific understanding - physics, chemistry, biology and so forth. Not that we become atheists, but we gained deeper understanding about how the universe ticks.
Similarly, every time we attribute everything to 'Leadership," we're no different from the people in the 1500's. We're simply admitting our ignorance. Not that we should become leadership atheists (leadership does matter), but every time we throw our hands up in frustration - reverting back to "well, the answer must be Leadership!" - we prevent ourselves from gaining deeper, more scientific understanding about what makes great companies tick. ~ James C Collins,#NFDB
1115:Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding? ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
1116:If ever a society could be said to meet all the mythological criteria of the next lost civilization – a society that ticks all the boxes – is it not obvious that it is our own? Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter is all there is – that there is no such thing as spirit, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology – all these things, and many more, in mythological terms at least, do not look good for us. ~ Graham Hancock, #NFDB
1117:Creatures from another world, only statues when you see them. Lonely Assassins, that's what they used to be called. No one quite knows where they came from, but they're as old as the Universe, or very nearly. And they have survived this long because they have the most perfect defence system ever evolved. They are Quantum Locked. They don't exist when they are being observed. The moment they are seen by any other living creature they freeze into rock. No choice, it's a fact of their biology. In the sight of any living thing, they literally turn into stone. And you can't kill a stone. Of course, a stone can't kill you either, but then you turn your head away. Then you blink. Then, oh yes, it can. That's why they cover their eyes. They're not weeping, they can't risk looking at each other. Their greatest asset is their greatest curse. They can never be seen. Loneliest creatures in the Universe. And I'm sorry. I am very, very sorry. It's up to you now. Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. They are fast. Faster than you can believe. Don't turn your back, don't look away, and DON'T blink. Good luck. ~ Steven Moffat, #NFDB
1118:I guess you’ll have to try to do something with F’s moon now. Presumably it’s dead. Or even try E.” He looked up at it, big in the blue sky. “Well, no. It’s too big. Too heavy.” Two minutes later: “Maybe you can just keep living on the ship, and stock up on whatever you run out of, from here and from E. Terraform F’s moon if you can. Or maybe you can resupply and get to another system entirely. I seem to recall there’s a G star just a few more light-years out.” Long silence. Then: “But you know, I bet they’re all like this one. I mean, they’re either going to be alive or dead, right? If they’ve got water and orbit in the habitable zone, they’ll be alive. Alive and poisonous. I don’t know. Maybe they could be alive and we live with them and the two systems pass each other by. But that doesn’t sound like life, does it? Living things eat. They have immune systems. So that’s going to be a problem, most of the time anyway. Invasive biology. Then on the dead worlds, those’ll be dry, and too cold, or too hot. So they’ll be useless unless they have water, and if they have water they’ll probably be alive. I know ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1119:You Do Make a Difference But biology is not destiny. What we now know is that nature and nurture matter. How your child’s temperament is ultimately expressed depends on his age, experience, and training. David Reiss of George Washington University, states, “Whether and how strongly genes that underlie behaviors are turned on or expressed depends on the interaction and relationships a child has with the important people in his life.” You don’t get to choose your child’s temperament, nor does your child, but you do make a big difference. It is you who helps your child understand his temperament, emphasizes his strengths, provides him with the guidance he needs to express himself appropriately, and gently nudges him forward. The researchers now believe that by doing so you provide the practice needed to create new pathways within the brain and as a result fresh ways of responding and functioning. So when you recognize your child’s intense reaction, move in to soothe and calm him, and ultimately teach him how to compose himself, you change not only his behavior but the physical reaction within his body as well. ~ Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, #NFDB
1120:What happens to a marriage? A persistent failure of kindness, triggered at first, at least in my case, by the inequities of raising children, the sacrifices that take a woman by surprise and that she expects to be matched by her mate but that biology ensures cannot be. Anything could set me off. Any innocuous habit or slight or oversight. The way your father left the lights of the house blazing, day and night. The way he could become so distracted at work that sometimes when I called, he’d put me on hold and forget me, only remembering again when I’d hung up and called back. The way he wore his pain so privately, whistling around the house after we’d had a spat, pretending nonchalance, protecting you and your sisters from discord, hiding behind his good nature, inadvertently calling out my ill nature in the process, persisting in being optimistic, and cheerful, and affectionate, when there was clearly no call for any of that. These were the tallies I kept, the grudges I nursed. Would I have indulged myself that way if I’d fully understood the situation? I would have behaved better, I hope. I hope I would have been kinder. P ~ Jan Ellison, #NFDB
1121:What are the stars? Such questions are as natural as an infant’s smile. We have always asked them. What is different about our time is that at last we know some of the answers. Books and libraries provide a ready means for finding out what those answers are. In biology there is a principle of powerful if imperfect applicability called recapitulation: in our individual embryonic development we retrace the evolutionary history of the species. There is, I think, a kind of recapitulation that occurs in our individual intellectual developments as well. We unconsciously retrace the thoughts of our remote ancestors. Imagine a time before science, a time before libraries. Imagine a time hundreds of thousands of years ago. We were then just about as smart, just as curious, just as involved in things social and sexual. But the experiments had not yet been done, the inventions had not yet been made. It was the childhood of genus Homo. Imagine the time when fire was first discovered. What were human lives like then? What did our ancestors believe the stars were? Sometimes, in my fantasies, I imagine there was someone who thought like this: We ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1122:When you’re a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you’re better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys, and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the history/biology/French test and say, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to be such a disaster! I’m so scared!’ and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won’t feel threatened by you, so they’ll like you, because you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are. You learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn’t see you clearly, and you know—you get told by others—that they think you’re really sweet, and you feel a thrill of triumph: ‘Yes, I’m good at history/biology/French, and I’m good at this, too.’ It doesn’t ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable. ~ Claire Messud, #NFDB
1123:When you’re a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you’re better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys, and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the history/biology/French test and say, “Oh my God, it’s going to be such a disaster! I’m so scared!” and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won’t feel threatened by you, so they’ll like you, because you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are. You learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn’t see you clearly, and you know—you get told by others—that they think you’re really sweet, and you feel a thrill of triumph: “Yes, I’m good at history/biology/French, and I’m good at this, too.” It doesn’t ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable. ~ Claire Messud, #NFDB
1124:pg.90 of Philosophy in the Flesh: We are basing our argument on the existence of at least three stable scientific findings--the embodied mind, the cognitive unconscious, and metaphorical thought. Just as the ideas of cells and DNA in biology are stable and not likely to be found to be mistakes, so we believe that there is more than enough converging evidence to establish at least these three results.
Ironically, these scientific results challenge the classical philosophical view of scientific realism, a disembodied objective scientific realism that can be characterized by the following three claims:
1. There is a world independent of our understanding of it.
2. We can have stable knowledge of it.
3. Our very concepts and forms of reason are characterized not by our bodies and brains, but by the external world in itself. It follows that scientific truths are not merely truths as we understand them, but absolute truths.
Obiviously, we accept (1) and (2) and we believe that (2) applies to the three findings of cognitive science we are discussing on the basis of converging evidence. But those findings themselves contradict (3). ~ George Lakoff,#NFDB
1125:Because the family is our first and in many ways our most important social environment, quality of life depends to a large extent on how well a person succeeds in making the interaction with his or her relatives enjoyable. For no matter how strong the ties biology and culture have forged between family members, it is no secret that there is great variety in how people feel about their relatives. Some families are warm and supportive, some are challenging and demanding, others threaten the self of their members at every turn, still others are just insufferably boring. The frequency of murder is much higher among family members than among unrelated people. Child abuse and incestuous sexual molestation, once thought to be rare deviations from the norm, apparently occur much more often than anyone had previously suspected. In John Fletcher’s words, “Those have most power to hurt us that we love.” It is clear that the family can make one very happy, or be an unbearable burden. Which one it will be depends, to a great extent, on how much psychic energy family members invest in the mutual relationship, and especially in each other’s goals. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
1126:there is no such thing as different races of humans. Any differences we traditionally associate with race are a product of our need for vitamin D and our relationship to the Sun. Just a few clusters of genes control skin color; the changes in skin color are recent; they’ve gone back and forth with migrations; they are not the same even among two groups with similarly dark skin; and they are tiny compared to the total human genome. So skin color and “race” are neither significant nor consistent defining traits. We all descended from the same African ancestors, with little genetic separation from each other. The different colors or tones of skin are the result of an evolutionary response to ultraviolet light in local environments. Everybody has brown skin tinted by the pigment melanin. Some people have light brown skin. Some people have dark brown skin. But we all are brown, brown, brown. Our reactions to other groups are real enough, but evolutionary biology shows that those reactions have nothing to do with race, because race is not real. Scientifically speaking, there is tribalism and group bias, but there cannot be any such thing as racism. We are all one. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
1127:Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over.
I know how wrong this is.
When I was a child, I didn't understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn't comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite--I'd be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn't have access to the body's emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology.
It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again. ~ David Levithan,#NFDB
1128:For those who do not wish to blame this sordid history on science, and prefer to speak of pseudoscience, it will be good to consider that eugenics was a serious academic discipline at many universities. By 1930, institutes devoted to it existed in England, Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, America, Germany, and Norway. Its theories were supported by prominent figures, including American presidents. Its founding father, the British anthropologist and polymath Sir Francis Galton, became a fellow of the Royal Society and was knighted well after having espoused ideas about improving the human race. Notably, Galton felt that the average citizen was “too base for the everyday work of modern civilization.”11 It took Adolf Hitler and his henchmen to expose the moral bankruptcy of these ideas. The inevitable result was a precipitous drop of faith in science, especially biology. In the 1970s, biologists were still commonly equated with fascists, such as during the heated protest against “sociobiology.” As a biologist myself, I am glad those acrimonious days are over, but at the same time I wonder how anyone could forget this past and hail science as our moral savior. How ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
1129:the Omegas harnessed Prometheus to revolutionize education. Given any person’s knowledge and abilities, Prometheus could determine the fastest way for them to learn any new subject in a manner that kept them highly engaged and motivated to continue, and produce the corresponding optimized videos, reading materials, exercises and other learning tools. Omega-controlled companies therefore marketed online courses about virtually everything, highly customized not only by language and cultural background but also by starting level.
Whether you were an illiterate forty-year-old wanting to learn to read or a biology PhD seeking the latest about cancer immunotherapy, Prometheus had the perfect course for you. These offerings bore little resemblance to most present-day online courses: by leveraging Prometheus’ movie-making talents, the video segments would truly engage, providing powerful metaphors that you would relate to, leaving you craving to learn more.
Some courses were sold for profit, but many were made available for free, much to the delight of teachers around the world who could use them in their classrooms—and to most anybody eager to learn anything. ~ Max Tegmark,#NFDB
1130:Transgenderism depends for its very existence on the idea that there is an ‘essence’ of gender, a psychology and pattern of behaviour, which is suited to persons with particular bodies and identities.This is the opposite of the feminist view, which is that the idea of gender is the foundation of the political system of male domination. ‘Gender’, in traditional patriarchal thinking, ascribes skirts, high heels and a love of unpaid domestic labour to those with female biology, and comfortable clothing, enterprise and initiative to those with male biology. In the practice of transgenderism, traditional gender is seen to lose its sense of direction and end up in the minds and bodies of persons with inappropriate body parts that need to be corrected. But without ‘gender’, transgenderism could not exist. From a critical, feminist point of view, when transgender rights are inscribed into law and adopted by institutions, they instantiate ideas that are harmful to women’s equality and give authority to outdated notions of essential differences between the sexes. Transgenderism is indeed transgressive, but of women’s rights rather than an oppressive social system. ~ Sheila Jeffreys, #NFDB
1131:If you turn to a branch of those sciences that try to give a solution to the questions of life--to physiology, psychology, biology, sociology--there you will find an astounding poverty of thought, a very great lack of clarity, completely unjustified claims to answer questions that lie outside their subject and never-ending contradictions between one thinker and others, and even within himself.
If you turn to a branch of the sciences that is not concerned with solving the questions of life but answers its own scientific, specialized questions, then you are captivated by the power of human intellect but you know in advance that there are no answers to the questions of life.
These sciences directly ignore the questions of life.
They say, "We have no answers to 'What are you?' and 'Why do you live?' and are not concerned with this; but if you need to know the laws of light, of chemical compounds, the laws of the development of organisms, if you need to know the laws of bodies and their forms and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you need to know the laws of your own mind, to all that we have clear, precise, and unquestionable answers. ~ Leo Tolstoy,#NFDB
1132:Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object. Other things merely sit in place, waiting to be pushed or pulled around. Even non-human animals mainly follow the instincts and behaviors that characterise their species, Sartre believed. But as a human being, I have no perceived nature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. Of course I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background, but none of this adds to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along... having found myself thrown into the world, I go on to create my own definition (or nature, or essence), in a way that never happens with other objects or life forms. You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is the human condition, from the moment of first consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom: no more, no less. ~ Sarah Bakewell, #NFDB
1133:As the ego-dead, so we might imagine, we would continue to know pain in its various forms—that is the essence of existence—but we would not be cozened by our egos to take it personally, an attitude that converts an individual’s pain into conscious suffering. Naturally, we would still have to feed, but we would not be omnivorous gourmands who eat for amusement, gorging down everything in nature and turning to the laboratory for more. As for reproduction, who can say? Animals are driven to copulate, and even as the ego-dead we would not be severed from biology, although we would not be unintelligently ruled by it, as we are now. As a corollary of not being unintelligently ruled by biology, neither would we sulk over our extinction, as we do now. Why raise another generation destined to climb aboard the evolution treadmill? But then, why not raise another generation of the ego-dead? For those who do not perceive either their pleasures or their pains as belonging to them, neither life nor death would be objectionable or not objectionable, desirable or not desirable, all right or not all right. We would be the ego-dead, the self-less, and, dare we are, the enlightened. ~ Thomas Ligotti, #NFDB
1134:Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral, and it has led, indeed, to all kinds of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of imperialistic ideologies. In the seventies and eighties of the last century, Darwinism was still almost exclusively in the hands of the utilitarian anti-colonial party in England. And the first philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer, who treated sociology as part of biology, believed natural selection to benefit the evolution of mankind and to result in everlasting peace. For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic "survival of the fittest," and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new "science" of eugenics. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
1135:These axons can shuttle information around so quickly because they’re fatter than normal axons, and because they’re sheathed in a fatty substance called myelin. Myelin acts like rubber insulation on wires and prevents the signal from petering out: in whales, giraffes, and other stretched creatures, a sheathed neuron can send a signal multiple yards with little loss of fidelity. (In contrast, diseases that fray myelin, like multiple sclerosis, destroy communication between different nodes in the brain.) In sum, you can think about the gray matter as a patchwork of chips that analyze different types of information, and about the white matter as cables that transmit information between those chips. (And before we go further, I should point out that “gray” and “white” are misnomers. Gray matter looks pinkish-tan inside a living skull, while white matter, which makes up the bulk of the brain, looks pale pink. The white and gray colors appear only after you soak the brain in preservatives. Preservatives also harden the brain, which is normally tapioca-soft. This explains why the brain you might have dissected in biology class way back when didn’t disintegrate between your fingers.) ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
1136:Autophagy also plays an important role in the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s is characterized by the abnormal accumulation of amyloid beta (Aß) proteins in the brain, and it’s believed that these accumulations eventually destroy the synaptic connections in the memory and cognition areas. Normally, clumps of Aß protein are removed by autophagy: the brain cell activates the autophagosome, the cell’s internal garbage truck, which engulfs the Aß protein targeted for removal and excretes it, so it can be removed by the blood and recycled into other protein or turned into glucose, depending upon the body’s needs. But in Alzheimer’s disease, autophagy is impaired and the Aß protein remains inside the brain cell, where eventual buildup will result in the clinical syndromes of Alzheimer’s disease. Cancer is yet another disease that may be a result of disordered autophagy. We’re learning that mTOR plays a role in cancer biology, and mTOR inhibitors have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of various cancers. Fasting’s role in inhibiting mTOR, thereby stimulating autophagy, provides an interesting opportunity to prevent cancer’s development. ~ Jason Fung, #NFDB
1137:If all human beings in a population either are declared equal in their native strengths and rights, or else are persuaded to believe this, then the eventual realization of the hard truth of the matter that no amount of redistribution of wealth and status can ever obliterate inequality in one form or another must often take the form of covetousness mixed with resentment: that is, envy. ....The only remedy for the poisons created by egalitarianism in a society is emphatically not ever-greater dosages of political redistribution of wealth and status, for such dosages worsen the disease, producing fevers of avarice and envy. No, the sole remedy for this pathology is the introduction and diffusion of individual liberty as a sovereign value. Respect for individual liberty makes it possible for human beings to live in and be aware of differentiation a condition that, in biology, is recognized for what it is, the basis of progressive evolution, but which, in its social manifestation, receives no such recognition because of both the inequality intrinsic to all social differentiation and the ideology of equality that has spread so widely and so devastatingly in the twentieth century. ~ Robert A Nisbet, #NFDB
1138:Catch me up. I had to stay late after class because I was busy sucking up to the TA,” Brian confessed. “Ellie has a cute freshman lab partner, Sasha’s tired of Victoria, and I sat next to Bo Randolph in biology.” I conveniently left out mention of the note. Three sighs of delight reverberated through the room at the mention of Bo’s name. “Bo looks like he’s sculpted from stone by some master and skin was stretched over the form. Unreal,” Sasha declared. “I’d love to see him in a life drawing class.” “The guns on that guy,” Brian concurred. “Where are all of you seeing him?” I asked, surprised at their distinct recall of Bo’s body. “I see him in the gym, lifting,” Brian said. “Yoga,” Sasha offered. “He does yoga?” My eyebrows shot up in surprise. “No, while I’m doing yoga, I see him working out. He’s like all muscle. Last semester’s yoga class at 5 P.M. was packed once word got out that he and his buddy Noah lifted weights there before dinner. It’s like a burlesque show. They start out with their shirts on and then slowly unveil the package as they get sweatier and sweatier,” Sasha explained. “Then, when they’re super hot and super sweaty, they’ll run their discarded shirts over their chests. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1139:Human Cloning: The Least Interesting Application of Cloning Technology One of the most powerful methods of applying life’s machinery involves harnessing biology’s own reproductive mechanisms in the form of cloning. Cloning will be a key technology—not for cloning actual humans but for life-extension purposes, in the form of “therapeutic cloning.” This process creates new tissues with “young” telomere-extended and DNA-corrected cells to replace without surgery defective tissues or organs. All responsible ethicists, including myself, consider human cloning at the present time to be unethical. The reasons, however, for me have little to do with the slippery-slope issues of manipulating human life. Rather, the technology today simply does not yet work reliably. The current technique of fusing a cell nucleus from a donor to an egg cell using an electric spark simply causes a high level of genetic errors.57 This is the primary reason that most of the fetuses created by this method do not make it to term. Even those that do make it have genetic defects. Dolly the Sheep developed an obesity problem in adulthood, and the majority of cloned animals produced thus far have had unpredictable health problems.58 ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
1140:Hi Nikki, It’s Brandon. Before you ball up this note and toss it away, please read it to the end. I’m still not sure what happened exactly, but I’ve been really bummed since we quit hanging out. Biology isn’t the same without us goofing off during class and you laughing at my lame jokes. I miss washing dogs at Fuzzy Friends with you, even though we end up getting more dog shampoo on ourselves than on them. And the dogs miss you too! Was it because of that . . . um, well, what we did at the kissing booth, at the end of the party? And the rumor that came out afterward? I’m sorry if I made you feel bad. I definitely wish I hadn’t done anything to mess up our friendship. You said something about how you don’t even know me. So what if we meet at the CupCakery after school today and grab some red velvet cupcakes——my treat! I’ll tell you anything you want to know about me (and not worry that you’ll think I’m weird). I’ve learned that honesty and trust are vital in a true friendship. If you decide NOT to hang out today, I totally understand. I guess that will mean I don’t really deserve your friendship. But it would make me happy if you would please give me another chance. Your Fuzzy Friend, Brandon ~ Rachel Ren e Russell, #NFDB
1141:The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics, why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics until it is time to learn to plough.”* ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
1142:A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options—neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr. Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
1143:A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They're on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority's blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there's cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I'm easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I'll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
1144:tape already marked the area around the body. A first responding officer jumped to his feet, holding the scene log on a clipboard. “Good morning, sir.” The young man spoke in the nasal voice of someone whose nose is blocked. Lei spotted white cotton sprouting from his nostrils. “Hey. Nice up here if it weren’t for the smell.” She took the clipboard, and each of them signed in. Passing the tape, Lei spotted the hand first, extended toward them from beneath the ferns, palm up. The tissue was swollen and discolored, masked in a filmy gray gauze of mold that seemed to be drawing the body down into the forest floor. Lei could imagine that in just a few weeks, the body would have been all but gone in the biology of the cloud forest. The victim lay on his stomach, his head turned away and facing into a fern clump, black hair already looking like just another lichen growing on the forest floor. The body was at the expansion phase, distending camouflage-patterned clothing as if inflated. A black fiberglass arrow fletched in plastic protruded from the man’s back. Lei and Pono stayed well back from the body. Lei unpacked the police department’s camera from her backpack, and Pono took out his crime kit. The modest quarter-karat engagement ~ Toby Neal, #NFDB
1145:There is a principle to be learned by studying the biological origins of moral reasoning. It is that outside the clearest ethical precepts, such as the condemnation of slavery, child abuse, and genocide, which all will agree should be opposed everywhere without exception, there is a larger gray domain inherently difficult to navigate. The declaration of ethical precepts and judgments made from them requires a full understanding of why we care about the matter one way or the other, and that includes the biological history of the emotions engaged. This inquiry has not been done. In fact, it is seldom even imagined. With deepened self-understanding, how will we feel about morality and honor? I have no doubt that in many cases, perhaps the great majority, the precepts shared by most societies today will stand the test of biology-based realism. Others, such as the ban on artificial conception, condemnation of homosexual preference and forced marriages of adolescent girls, will not. Whatever the outcome, it seems clear that ethical philosophy will benefit from a reconstruction of its precepts based on both science and culture. If such greater understanding amounts to the “moral relativism” so fervently despised by the doctrinally righteous, so be it. ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
1146:What was the nature of the universe into which she had been born? Why did it exist at all? If it had a purpose, what was it? These seemed to her the only questions worth exploring. And the only valid technique evolved by humans for exploring such questions was the scientific method, a robust and self-correcting search for the truth. Yet it had become obvious to her since about the age of twelve that science as it had progressed so far – physics, chemistry, biology, all the rest – had only inched towards grappling with the true questions, the fundamentals. Those questions had only been addressed by theologians and philosophers, it seemed to her. Unfortunately, their answers were a mush of doubt, self-delusion and flummery that had probably done more harm than good. And yet that was all there was. For now she had devoted herself, nominally at least, to theology and philosophy, as well as to explorations of the natural sciences, such as on this expedition. She had even received grants to help support this mission to the stepwise East from the Vatican, the Mormons, from Muslim orders, and various philosophical foundations. Dealing with such bodies, she had quickly learned when not to share her view that organized religion was a kind of mass delusion. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1147:As whites cease to be the mainstream, their interests become less important. In 2008, the College Board, the New York-based non profit that administers Advanced Placement (AP) tests, announced it was dropping AP courses and exams in Italian, Latin literature, and French literature. Blacks and Hispanics are not interested in those subjects, and they were the groups the College Board wanted to reach.
In Berkeley, California, the governance council for the school district came up with a novel plan for bridging the racial achievement gap: eliminate all science labs, fire the five teachers who run them, and spend the money on “underperforming” students. The council explained that science labs were used mainly by white students, so they were a natural target for cuts.
Many schools have slashed enriched programs for gifted students because so few blacks and Hispanics qualify for them. Evanston Township High School in Illinois prides itself on diversity and academic excellence but, like so many others, is dismayed that the two do not always go together. In 2010 it eliminated its elite freshman honors courses in English because hardly any blacks or Hispanics met the admission criteria. The honors biology course was scheduled for elimination the next year. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
1148:Since well-educated people are better voters, another tempting way to improve democracy is to give voters more education. Maybe it would work. But it would be expensive, and as mentioned in the previous chapter, education may be a proxy for intelligence or curiosity. A cheaper strategy, and one where a causal effect is more credible, is changing the curriculum. Steven Pinker argues that schools should try to “provide students with the cognitive skills that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with,” by emphasizing “economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics.”60 Pinker essentially wants to give schools a new mission: rooting out the biased beliefs that students arrive with, especially beliefs that impinge on government policy.61 What should be cut to make room for the new material? There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than elementary economics.62 ~ Bryan Caplan, #NFDB
1149:It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons. ~ Freeman Dyson, #NFDB
1150:What the brain is really good at is toggling between mind-absorbing tasks—shifting focus rather than dividing it, then picking up where it left off when it toggles back. So when drivers are messing with cell phones or car stereos or dropped baby bottles, they are not driving. They have toggled, shifting focus and attention from one task to another, sometimes quite rapidly, but never simultaneously. This is the essence of distraction and it’s not limited to staring down at a phone instead of out through the windshield. Brain scans of drivers talking on the phone while staring straight ahead show that activity in the area of the brain that processes moving images decreases by one third or more—hard evidence of a distracted brain. There have been many fatal crashes attributed to this “inattention blindness,” commonly called “tunnel vision.” Drivers talking on cell phones or performing other non-driving tasks can become so focused on the non-driving activity that their brains fail to perceive half the information their eyeballs are receiving from the driving environment. They can appear to be paying attention—the drivers may even think they are paying attention—but they are distracted drivers. This is not a matter of skill or practice or experience. It’s biology. The ~ Edward Humes, #NFDB
1151:The overwhelming noise we live with has made a fundamental pleasure like sex somehow less exciting, less satisfying, than it was for our libidinous forefathers and mothers. It seems to me that for sex and other pleasures to be enjoyed to the fullest, a certain contemplative quality to life must be present. If you doubt this imagine yourself for a moment having sex. Now imagine you wished to increase the pleasure you were feeling, feel it more intensely. What might you do? Well one of the things you'd probably do is close your eyes. What this does of course is shut out other stimuli. The visual quiet increases your sensual enjoyment and you concentrate more fully on the pleasure. The same is true for the removal of auditory noise as well. Well my feeling is that the average person has a much harder time doing this today than they would have decades ago. Today you close your eyes and shut off Television but the noise persists. It's part of our fabric now, our biology, and all other pleasures including sex are diminished as a result. We don't notice this derogation by the way and sex still feels great, don't get me wrong, but I think the difference is there nonetheless. Like the difference between seeing breasts when you're thirty as opposed to when you were thirteen. ~ Sergio de la Pava, #NFDB
1152:Even if just equal in capacity to our own brains, this nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be more powerful because it will combine the pattern-recognition powers of human intelligence with the memory- and skill-sharing ability and memory accuracy of machines.
The nonbiological portion will always operate at peak capacity, which is far from the case for biological humanity today; the 10²⁶ cps represented by biological human civilization today is poorly utilized.
This state of computation in the early 2030s will not represent the Singularity, however, because it does not yet correspond to a profound expansion of our intelligence. By the mid-2040s, however, that one thousand dollars’ worth of computation will be equal to 10²⁶ cps, so the intelligence created per year (at a total cost of about $10¹²) will be about one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.⁶⁶
That will indeed represent a profound change, and it is for that reason that I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045.
Despite the clear predominance of nonbiological intelligence by the mid-2040s, ours will still be a human civilization. We will transcend biology, but not our humanity. ~ Ray Kurzweil,#NFDB
1153:If biology limited women’s ability to code, then the ratio of women to men in programming ought to be similar in other countries. It isn’t. In India, roughly 40 percent of the students studying computer science and related fields are women. This is despite even greater barriers to becoming a female coder there; India has such rigid gender roles that female college students often have an 8 p.m. curfew, meaning they can’t work late in the computer lab, as the social scientist Roli Varma learned when she studied them in 2015. The Indian women had one big cultural advantage over their American peers, though: They were far more likely to be encouraged by their parents to go into the field, Varma says. What’s more, the women regarded coding as a safer job because it kept them indoors, lessening their exposure to street-level sexual harassment. It was, in other words, considered normal in India that women would code. The picture has been similar in Malaysia, where in 2001 — precisely when the share of American women in computer science had slid into a trough — women represented 52 percent of the undergraduate computer-science majors and 39 percent of the Ph.D. candidates at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. ~ Clive Thompson, “The Secret History of Women in Coding”, The New York Times, (Feb. 13, 2019), #NFDB
1154:What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology which are likely to have similar universal validity? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything which must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered which boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found which is not based on chemistry at all, but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle which is true of all life? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1155:A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all! ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
1156:Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different. Let’s be clear. There’s absolutely nothing admirable or confident about indifference. People who are indifferent are lame and scared. They’re couch potatoes and Internet trolls. In fact, indifferent people often attempt to be indifferent because in reality they give way too many fucks. They give a fuck about what everyone thinks of their hair, so they never bother washing or combing it. They give a fuck about what everyone thinks of their ideas, so they hide behind sarcasm and self-righteous snark. They’re afraid to let anyone get close to them, so they imagine themselves as some special, unique snowflake who has problems that nobody else would ever understand. Indifferent people are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices. That’s why they don’t make any meaningful choices. They hide in a gray, emotionless pit of their own making, self-absorbed and self-pitying, perpetually distracting themselves from this unfortunate thing demanding their time and energy called life. Because here’s a sneaky truth about life. There’s no such thing as not giving a fuck. You must give a fuck about something. It’s part of our biology to always care about something and therefore to always give a fuck. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
1157:Market fundamentalism is a harsh accusation. Christian fundamentalists are notorious for their strict biblical literalism, their unlimited willingness to ignore or twist the facts of geology and biology to match their prejudices. For the analogy to be apt, the typical economist would have to believe in the superiority of markets virtually without exception, regardless of the evidence, and dissenters would have to fear excommunication. From this standpoint, the charge of “market fundamentalism” is silly, failing even as a caricature. If you ask the typical economist to name areas where markets work poorly, he gives you a list on the spot: Public goods, externalities, monopoly, imperfect information, and so on. More importantly, almost everything on the list can be traced back to other economists. Market failure is not a concept that has been forced upon a reluctant economics profession from the outside. It is an internal outgrowth of economists’ self-criticism. After stating that markets usually work well, economists feel an urge to identify important counterexamples. Far from facing excommunication for sin against the sanctity of the market, discoverers of novel market failures reap professional rewards. Flip through the leading journals. A high fraction of their articles present theoretical or empirical evidence of market failure. ~ Bryan Caplan, #NFDB
1158:Children should have as much exposure as possible to animals. In all animals, including domestic, farm, and wild, are entire curricula. There are biology, sociology, genetics, economics, history, cultures, communication, language, hierarchies, governance, relationships sweeping story arcs, morality, even nutrition, just to name a few. Animals are the perfect microcosms. They are life. But it doesn’t count if the animals are just images or characters in a book. A poster of a kitten clinging to a branch with the words “Hang in there!” doesn’t count either. There is no greater example of the “flattening of content” that classes achieve than a “unit study” that examines, even purports to love, animals but does not actually engage any on a regular basis. Worse still, the more removed a culture is from animals, the more stylized and inaccurately the animals are inevitably represented. Tribes in Africa portray hippos as the deadly, fierce creatures they are. By the time most schoolchildren see them in the United States, they have morphed into “Mr. Hippo gets in his car to drive to work,” complete with his bright pink skin and marshmallow-shaped teeth. Dogs and cats, chickens and cows, songbirds and frogs are all there, waiting to be engaged. They have so much to teach us that any attempt to segregate environments of learning from them should never be accepted. In ~ Clark Aldrich, #NFDB
1159:She had short, thick forearms, fingers like cocktail sausages, and a broad fleshy nose with flared nostrils. Deep folds of skin connected her nose to either side of her chin, and separated that section of her face from the rest of it, like a snout. Her head was too large for her body. She looked like a bottled fetus that had escaped from its jar of formaldehyde in a Biology lab an unshriveled and thickened with age.
She kept damp cash in her bodice, which she tied tightly around her chest to flatten her unchristian breasts, Her kunukku earrings were thick and gold. Her earlobes had been distended into weighted loops that swung around her neck, her earrings sitting in them like gleeful children in a merry-go-(not all the way)-round. Her right lobe had split open once and was sewn together by Dr. Verghese Verghese. Kochu Maria couldn't stop wearing her kunukku because if she did, how would people know that despite her lowly cook's job (seventy-five rupees a month) she was a Syrian Christian, Mar Thomite? Not a Pelaya, or a Pulaya, or a Paravan. But a Touchable, upper-caste Christian (into whom Christianity had seeped like tea from a teabag). Split lobes stitched back were a better option by far.
Kochu Maria hadn't yet made her acquaintance with the television addict waiting inside her. The Hulk Hogan addict. She hadn't yet seen a television set... ~ Arundhati Roy,#NFDB
1160:You know, I reckon you’ve had a narrow escape. I was reading an article about early-onset arthritis in rugby players, and apparently the whole lot of them are cripples by the time they get to sixty. And they’re the ones who are sixty now; they played a hell of a lot less games forty years ago.’
‘But they patch them up a lot better these days,’ I pointed out.
‘There’s still not much you can do about having no cartilage left in any of your joints.’
‘They can replace knees and hips.’
‘Not shoulders. Or fingers. How many of them has he dislocated?’
‘I don’t know. A few.’
‘There you go. Those’ll all be buggered in another ten years. You would have ended up wiping his bum for him.’
‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ I muttered.
He passed me out a handful of bolts and shuffled along to the next corner. ‘You’re pathetic. And there’s another reason you should have been heading for the hills.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Do you know what the All Blacks’ motto is?’
‘“Feed your backs”?’
‘Nope. It is – and I kid you not – “Subdue and penetrate”.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Google it then.’
‘Maybe it didn’t sound so dodgy a hundred years ago when they came up with it,’ I said weakly.
‘Of course it did. It’s not like human biology’s changed since then. Very shady people, rugby players. ~ Danielle Hawkins,#NFDB
1161:It would be a kindness, by the way, and a service to history, if you could please rid yourself of the legend that Christians believed a fairy tale about the origin of the world until forced to think otherwise by the triumph of secular science. Substantially everyone in the Judeo-Christian bits of the planet believed the Genesis account until the early nineteenth century, remember, there being till then no organised alternative. The work of reading the geological record, and thereby exploding the Genesis chronology, was for the most part done not by anti-Christian refuseniks but by scientists and philosophers thinking their way onward from starting-points within the religious culture of the time. Once it became clear that truth lay elsewhere than in Genesis, religious opinion on the whole moved with impressive swiftness to accommodate the discovery. In the same way, when the Origin of Species was published, most Christians in Britain at least moved with some speed to incorporate evolutionary biology into their catalogue of ordinary facts about the world. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s resistance to Darwinism was an outlier, untypical. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that the ready acceptance of evolution in Britain owed a lot to the great cultural transmission mechanism of the Church of England. If you’re glad that Darwin is on the £10 note, hug an Anglican. ~ Francis Spufford, #NFDB
1162:Jodie had taught her that the female firefly flickers the light under her tail to signal to the male that she's ready to mate. Each species of firefly has its own language of flashes. As Kya watched, some females signed dot, dot, dot, dash, flying a zigzag dance, while others flashed dash, dash, dot in a different dance pattern. The males, of course, knew the signals of their species and flew only to those females. Then, as Jodie had put it, they rubbed their bottoms together like most things did, so they could produce young.
Suddenly Kya sat up and paid attention: one of the females had changed her code. First she flashed the proper sequence of dashes and dots, attracting a male of her species, and they mated. Then she flickered a different signal, and a male of a different species flew to her. Reading her message, the second male was convinced he'd found a willing female of his own kind and hovered above her to mate. But suddenly the female firefly reached up, grabbed him with her mouth, and ate him, chewing all six legs and both wings.
Kya watched others. The females all got what they wanted – first a mate, then a meal – just by changing their signals.
Kya knew judgment had no place here. Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the players. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light. ~ Delia Owens,#NFDB
1163:I have been to many religious services over the years. Each one I go to only reinforces my general impression that religions have much, much more in common than they like to admit. The beliefs are almost always the same; it's just that the histories are different. Everybody wants to believe in a higher power. Everybody wants to belong to something bigger than themselves, and everybody wants company in doing that. They want there to be a force of good on earth, and they want an incentive to be a part of that force. They want to be able to prove their belief and their belonging, through rituals and devotion. They want to touch the enormity.
It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion--whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that. ~ David Levithan,#NFDB
1164:In art, as in biology, there is a phenomenon that can be described as mutation, in which appearances radically change at a tempo much more rapid than that at which they normally proceed. As in the case of biology, we have no means to determine the process by which this radical change occurs. Yet we do know that it is a reaction to a form of congestion. It is a desperate change due to the arrival at a point where the corollaries to a situation are exhausted, when the stimulus to additional growth is sluggish and a rapid rejuvenation is needed so that art, through disuse, does not atrophy in much the same way as an unused human organ. Here art must attain a new start if it is to survive. Then, assiduously, it renews its traditions by marriage with alien traditions, by the reexamination of its own processes, and by those means reestablishes contact again with its own roots. It is in this way that new plastic worlds are born. For art, like a race, cannot inbreed very long without losing its incentives to continue; it needs the rejuvenation of new experiences and new blood. These mutations, it must be clear, however, do not constitute a change in properties, or mean that art has discarded its past. On the contrary, mutation involves a more conscious evaluation of art’s inheritance and the redirection of that inheritance into channels where it can be continued with greater force. ~ Mark Rothko, #NFDB
1165:Rapamycin works at a fundamental level of cell biology. In the early 1990s, scientists at Novartis’s predecessor, Sandoz, discovered that a rapamycin molecule inhibits a key cellular pathway regulating growth and metabolism. This pathway was eventually dubbed “target of rapamycin,” or TOR, and it’s found in everything from yeast to humans (it’s known as mTOR in mammals). MTOR is like the circuit breaker in a factory: When it’s activated, the cell grows and divides, consuming nutrients and producing proteins. When mTOR is turned down, the “factory” switches into more of a conservation mode, as the cell cleans house and recycles old proteins via a process called autophagy. One reason caloric restriction extends life span in animals, researchers believe, is because it slows down this mTOR pathway and cranks up autophagy. Rapamycin does the same thing, only without the gnawing hunger. “Really what rapamycin is doing is tapping into the body’s systems for dealing with reduced nutrition,” says Brian Kennedy, chief executive officer of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, Calif. “We’ve evolved over billions of years to be really good at that. When things are good, we’re going to grow and make babies. And when things are not so good, we go into a more stress-resistant mode, so we survive until the next hunt. And it just so happens that stress resistance is good for aging. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1166:But then a peculiar thing happened. I became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the laboratory. The August sunlight came streaming in the great dusty fanlights and lay in yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the heat. Outside we could hear the cries of summer students playing touch football. In the course of an afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I became bewitched by the presence of the building; for minutes at a stretch I sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight. I called Harry’s attention to the presence but he shrugged and went on with his work. He was absolutely unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His abode was anywhere. It was all the same to him whether he catheterized a pig at four o’clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at midnight in Transylvania. He was actually like one of those scientists in the movies who don’t care about anything but the problem in their heads - now here is a fellow who does have a “flair for research” and will be heard from. Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. He could do research for a thousand years and never have an inkling of it. ~ Walker Percy, #NFDB
1167:How did nature manage to evolve such complicated architecture? Mandelbrot's point is that the complications exist only in the context of traditional Euclidean geometry. As fractals, branching structures can be described with transparent simplicity, with just a few bits of information. Perhaps the simplest transformations that gave rise to the shapes devised by Koch, Peano, and Sierpinski have their analogue in the coded instructions of an organism's genes. DNA surely cannot specify the vast number of bronchi, bronchioles, and alveoli or the particular spatial structure of the resulting tree, but it can specify a repeating process of bifurcation and development. Such processes suit nature's purposes. When E.I. Dupont de Nemours & Company and the United States Army finally began to produce a synthetic match for goose down, it was by finally realizing that the phenomenal air-trapping ability of the natural product came from the fractal nodes and branches of down's key protein, keratin. Mandelbrot glided matter-of-factly from pulmonary and vascular trees to real botanical trees, trees that need to capture sun and resist wind, with fractal branches and fractal leaves. And theoretical biologists began to speculate that fractal scaling was not just common but universal in morphogenesis. They argued that understanding how such patterns were encoded and processed had become a major challenge to biology. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
1168:Much of the literature on creativity focuses on how to trigger these moments of innovative synthesis; how to drive the problem phase toward its resolution. And it turns out that epiphanies often happen when we are in one of two types of environment. The first is when we are switching off: having a shower, going for a walk, sipping a cold beer, daydreaming. When we are too focused, when we are thinking too literally, we can’t spot the obscure associations that are so important to creativity. We have to take a step back for the “associative state” to emerge. As the poet Julia Cameron put it: “I learned to get out of the way and let that creative force work through me.”8 The other type of environment where creative moments often happen, as we have seen, is when we are being sparked by the dissent of others. When Kevin Dunbar, a psychologist at McGill University, went to look at how scientific breakthroughs actually happen, for example (he took cameras into four molecular biology labs and recorded pretty much everything that took place), he assumed that it would involve scientists beavering away in isolated contemplation. In fact, the breakthroughs happened at lab meetings, where groups of researchers would gather around a desk to talk through their work. Why here? Because they were forced to respond to challenges and critiques from their fellow researchers. They were jarred into seeing new associations. ~ Matthew Syed, #NFDB
1169:An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more. A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of “something else”—a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise. And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate.
Psychologists sometimes refer to this concept as the “hedonic treadmill”: the idea that we’re always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never feel very different.
This is why our problems are recursive and unavoidable. The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also what we lose. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences.
This is a difficult pill to swallow. We like the idea that there’s some form of ultimate happiness that can be attained. We like the idea that we can alleviate all of our suffering permanently. We like the idea that we can feel fulfilled and satisfied with our lives forever.
But we cannot. ~ Mark Manson,#NFDB
1170:Is Obama Anything but Black?
So lots of folk—mostly non-black—say Obama’s not black, he’s biracial, multiracial, black-and-white, anything but just black. Because his mother was white. But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass had white fathers. Imagine them saying they were not black.
Imagine Obama, skin the color of a toasted almond, hair kinky, saying to a census worker—I’m kind of white. Sure you are, she’ll say. Many American Blacks have a white person in their ancestry, because white slave owners liked to go a-raping in the slave quarters at night. But if you come out looking dark, that’s it. (So if you are that blond, blue-eyed woman who says “My grandfather was Native American and I get discrimination too” when black folk are talking about shit, please stop it already.) In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you. Barack Obama, looking as he does, would have had to sit in the back of the bus fifty years ago. If a random black guy commits a crime today, Barack Obama could be stopped and questioned for fitting the profile. And what would that profile be? “Black Man. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,#NFDB
1171:Can we listen to some Rush?” he said without looking up.
The Yes tape was Kimmy’s but she had all kinds of different music so she started digging through her gigantic purse to try to find something else to play. In her purse, tape shells clacked against one another while she dug; you could hear them scraping against each other, against keys, against pens and compacts, the sounds muffled in the purse’s puffy vinyl folds. To me it sounded like somebody shaking up dry bones. I closed my eyes and thought about those old bones in some girl’s purse and then I let my mind go: if you wanted to fit bones into your purse they’d have to be broken into pieces; you couldn’t fit a whole arm bone or a leg bone or a skull in there, just teeth, toes, and fingers; maybe kneecaps; but my imagination told me teeth would make a high sound, like pieces of glass, and toes would sound dull, like old crushed cans. That left fingers. I remembered biology class when we did anatomy. Distal phalanges, proximal phalanges, metacarpals. To walk around with a bag full of bones in the normal world would require a stone constitution. You could be a thief. You could be an actor, probably. Actors die young in ancient Rome, though. If it’s the present day and you’re Kimmy, and you’re carrying someone’s bones around in your purse, then I have a lot of questions for you, and I’ll probably never ask them, and you’ll have a secret that only I have guessed. ~ John Darnielle,#NFDB
1172:The basic principles of evolutionary biology would seem to dictate that any natural phenomenon as prominent in our lives as our experience of consciousness must necessarily have some discernible and quantifiable effect in order for it to exist, and to persist, in nature at all. It must, in other words, confer some selective advantage. And that raises an obvious question: What possible selective advantage could consciousness offer if it is only a functionless phantasm? How could consciousness ever have evolved in the first place if, in and of itself, it does nothing? Why, in short, did nature bother to produce beings capable of self-awareness and subjective inner experience? True, evolutionary biologists can trot out many examples of traits that have been carried along on the river of evolution although not specifically selected for (the evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called such traits spandrels, the architectural term for the elements between the exterior curve of an arch and the right angle of the walls around it, which were not intentionally built but were instead formed by two architectural traits that were "selected for"). But consciousness seems like an awfully prominent trait not to have been the target of some selection pressure. As James put it, "The conclusion that [consciousness] is useful is...quite justifiable. But if it is useful, it must be so through its causal efficaciousness. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1173:Clifford” is an important psychedelic researcher, group leader, and writer. He is currently writing a book of personal essays. Student days at the University of California at San Diego were a whirlwind blending of 1960s’ issues with the academic pressure necessary to enter postgraduate training of some sort. My personal choices were between psychology and medicine. My introduction to psychedelics had convinced me of their value. I was taking a biology course to prepare for medical school, and we were studying the development of the chick embryo. After the first meeting of the one-quarter-long course, I realized that in order to stay alert, a tiny dose of LSD could be useful. With that in mind, I licked a small, but very potent, tablet emblazoned with the peace sign before every class. This produced a barely noticeable brightening of colors and created a generalized fascination with the course and my professor, who was otherwise uninteresting to me. Unfortunately, when finals came around, my health disintegrated and I missed the final exam. The next day I called my professor and begged for mercy. She said, “No problem, come to my lab.” “When shall we schedule this?” She suggested immediately. With some dismay, I agreed that I would meet her within an hour. I reached into the freezer and licked the almost exhausted fragment of the tablet I had used for class. I decided that there was so little left I might as well swallow it all. At ~ James Fadiman, #NFDB
1174:In 1994 Stephen Porges, who was a researcher at the University of Maryland at the time we started our investigation of HRV, and who is now at the University of North Carolina, introduced the Polyvagal theory, which built on Darwin’s observations and added another 140 years of scientific discoveries to those early insights. (Polyvagal refers to the many branches of the vagus nerve – Darwin’s “pneumogastric nerve” – which connects numerous organs, including the brain, lungs, heart, stomach, and intestines.) The Polyvagal Theory provided us with a more sophisticated understanding of the biology of safety and danger, one based on the subtle interplay between the visceral experiences of our own bodies and the voices and faces of the people around us. It explained why a kind face or a soothing tone of voice can dramatically alter the way we feel. It clarified why knowing that we are seen and heard by the important people in our lives can make us feel calm and safe, and why being ignored or dismissed can precipitate rage reactions or mental collapse. It helped us understand why focused attunement with another person can shift us out of disorganized and fearful states.
In short, Porges’s theory made us look beyond the effects of fight or flight and put social relationships front and center in our understanding of trauma. It also suggested new approaches to healing that focus on strengthening the body’s system for regulating arousal. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk,#NFDB
1175:E. Raymond Hall, professor of biology at the University of Kansas, wrote the authoritative work on American wildlife, Mammals of North America. He stated as a biological law that, “two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area.” Prof. Hall explains that human races are biological subspecies, and that the law applied to them, too: “To imagine one subspecies of man living together on equal terms for long with another subspecies is but wishful thinking and leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other.”
In recent decades we have seen what Prof. Hall was writing about in the Balkans, Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Eastern Congo. We call it “ethnic cleansing.” In Zimbabwe there is a systematic effort to rid the country of whites, and some observers do not rule out similar efforts in South Africa and Namibia. Is it utterly unrealistic to imagine ethnic cleansing in the United States? Prof. Hall’s forebodings do not appear outlandish in some of our schools, prisons, and neighborhoods.
The demographic forces we have set in motion have created conditions that are inherently unstable and potentially violent. All other groups are growing in numbers and have a vivid racial identity. Only whites have no racial identity, are constantly on the defensive, and constantly in retreat. They have a choice: regain a sense of identity and the resolve to maintain their numbers, their traditions, and their way of life—or face oblivion. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
1176:She begins to strip like a roommate and climb into bed.
They have fallen asleep. Dean wakes first, in the early afternoon. He unfastens her stockings and slowly rolls them off. Her skirt is next and then her underpants. She opens her eyes. The garter belt he leaves on, to confirm her nakedness. He rests his head there.
Her hand touches his chest and begins to fall in excruciating slow designs.
He lies still as a dog beneath it, still as an idiot.
The next morning she is recovered. His prick is hard. She takes it in her hand. They always sleep naked. Their flesh is innocent and warm. In the end she is arranged across the pillows, a ritual she accepts without a word.
It is half an hour before they fall apart, spent, and call for breakfast. She eats both her rolls and one of his.
“There was a lot,” she says.
She glistens with it. The inside of her thighs is wet.
“How long does it take to make again?” she asks.
Dean tries to think. He is remembering biology.
“Two or three days,” he guesses.
“Non, non!” she cries. That is not what she meant.
She begins to make him hard again. In a few minutes he rolls her over and puts it in as if the intermission were ended. This time she is wild. The great bed begins creaking. Her breath becomes short. Dean has to brace his hands on the wall. He hooks his knees outside her legs and drives himself deeper.
“Oh,” she breathes, “that’s the best. ~ James Salter,#NFDB
1177:The 'Manifesto' being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and the oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the bourgeoisie—without, at the same time, and once for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.
This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. ~ Friedrich Engels,#NFDB
1178:However, I have a stronger hunch that the greatest part of the important biomedical research waiting to be done is in the class of basic science. There is an abundance of interesting fact relating to all our major diseases, and more items of information are coming in steadily from all quarters in biology. The new mass of knowledge is still formless, in complete, lacking the essential threads of connection, displaying misleading signals at every turn, riddled with blind alleys. There are fascinating ideas all over the place, irresistible experiments beyond numbering, all sorts of new ways into the maze of problems. But every next move is unpredictable, every outcome uncertain. It is a puzzling time, but a very good time.
I do not know how you lay out orderly plans for this kind of activity, but I suppose you could find out by looking through the disorderly records of the past hundred years. Somehow, the atmosphere has to be set so that a disquieting sense of being wrong is the normal attitude of the investigators. It has to be taken for granted that the only way in is by riding the unencumbered human imagination, with the special rigor required for recognizing that something can be highly improbable, maybe almost impossible, and at the same time true.
Locally, a good way to tell how the work is going is to listen in the corridors. If you hear the word, "Impossible!" spoken as an expletive, followed by laughter, you will know that someone's orderly research plan is coming along nicely. ~ Lewis Thomas,#NFDB
1179:In striving to fulfill our identities as women, it's important not to confound the various passages of life with each other. What we may need in girlhood or adolescence are not the same qualities we need in maturity. The task of adolescence is to leave home. And women in a sexist society have chronically found this hard to do. Our biology has reinforced the very dependence which our minds have been able to fly beyond. Patriarchal practices like arranged marriages, female sexual mutilation and the denial of abortion have encouraged us to glorify not-leaving as a self-protective strategy.
No wonder our creative heroines had to find strategies for leaving. Those who were heterosexual devised the strategy of falling for bad boys as a primal means of separation. We make a mistake in thinking they were only victims. They were adventurers first. That they became victims was not their intent. Sylvia Plath was not merely a masochist but a bold adventurer who perhaps got more than she bargained for.
As I get older, I come to understand that the seemingly self-destructive obsessions of my various younger lives were not only self-destructive. They were also self-creative. All through the stages of our lives, we go through transformations that may only manifest themselves when they are safely over. The rebels and bad boys I loved were the harbingers of my loving those very qualities in myself. I loved and left the bad boys, but I thank them for helping to make me the strong survivor I am today. ~ Erica Jong,#NFDB
1180:Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world. Today he is the thing he understands least. Physics and biology have come a long way, but there has been no comparable development of anything like a science of human behavior. Greek physics and biology are now of historical interest only (no modern physicist or biologist would turn to Aristotle for help), but the dialogues of Plato are still assigned to students and cited as if they threw light on human behavior. Aristotle could not have understood a page of modern physics or biology, but Socrates and his friends would have little trouble in following most current discussions of human affairs. And as to technology, we have made immense strides in controlling the physical and biological worlds, but our practices in government, education, and much of economics, though adapted to very different conditions, have not greatly improved. We can scarcely explain this by saying that the Greeks knew all there was to know about human behavior. Certainly they knew more than they knew about the physical world, but it was still not much. Moreover, their way of thinking about human behavior must have had some fatal flaw. Whereas Greek physics and biology, no matter how crude, led eventually to modern science, Greek theories of human behavior led nowhere. If they are with us today, it is not because they possessed some kind of eternal verity, but because they did not contain the seeds of anything better. ~ B F Skinner, #NFDB
1181:The modernist reaction to the Enlightenment came in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, whose brutalizing effects revealed that modern life had not become as mathematically perfect, or as certain, rational, or enlightened, as advances in the eighteenth century had led people to expect. Truth was not always beautiful, nor was it always readily recognized. It was frequently hidden from view. Moreover, the human mind was governed not only by reason but also by irrational emotion. As astronomy and physics inspired the Enlightenment, so biology inspired Modernism. Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species introduced the idea that human beings are not created uniquely by an all-powerful God but are biological creatures that evolved from simpler animal ancestors. In his later books, Darwin elaborated on these arguments and pointed out that the primary biological function of any organism is to reproduce itself. Since we evolved from simpler animals, we must have the same instinctual behavior that is evident in other animals. As a result, sex must also be central to human behavior. This new view led to a reexamination in art of the biological nature of human existence, as evident in Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe of 1863, perhaps the first truly modernist painting from both a thematic and stylistic point of view. Manet’s painting, at once beautiful and shocking in its depiction, reveals a theme central to the modernist agenda: the complex relationship between the sexes and between fantasy and reality. ~ Eric R Kandel, #NFDB
1182:There was something wrong with me.
The human body doesn’t want to get hurt. We’re programmed to feel squeamish at the sight of blood. Pain is a careful orchestration of chemical processes so that we keep our body alive. Studies have shown that people born with congenital analgesia — the inability to feel pain — bite off the tips of their tongues and scratch holes in their eyes and break bones.
We are a wonder of checks and balances to keep on running.
The human body doesn’t want to get hurt.
There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I didn’t care. There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I wanted it.
We fear death; we fear the void; we scrabble to keep our pulses.
I was the void.
What are you afraid of? Nothing.
You are not doing this you are not doing this you are not doing this
But my eyes were already clawing over the bathroom for ways out.
Trust you?
I wasn’t meant to live, probably. This was why I was wired this way. Biology formed me and then took a look and wondered what the hell it was thinking and put in a mental fail-safe.
In case of emergency pull cord.
I was crouching by the wall, breathing into my hands.
Victor had told me once that he’d never considered suicide, not even for a second, not even at his darkest moments. It’s the only life we have, he’d said.
Even when I was happy, I felt like I was always looking for the edges on life. The seams.
I was so perfectly born to die. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,#NFDB
1183:The discovery of nonlocality has shaken our notions of reality and the Cartesian divorce of mind from matter to their very foundations. “Many regard [the discovery of nonlocality] as the most momentous in the history of science,” the science historian Robert Nadeau and the physicist Menas Kafatos wrote in their wonderful 1999 book The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind. The reason, in large part, is that nonlocality overturns classical ontology. In both classical physics and (as you will recall from Chapter 1) Cartesian dualism, the inner realm of the human mind and the outer realm of the physical world lie on opposite sides of an unbridgeable chasm, leaving mind and physical reality entirely separate and no more capable of meaningful and coherent interactions than different species of salamander on opposite sides of the Grand Canyon. In a nonlocal universe, however, the separation between mind and world meets its ultimate challenge. As Nadeau and Kafatos put it, “The stark division between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics is not in accord with our scientific worldview. When non-locality is factored into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, then mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos.” An emergent phenomenon is one whose characteristics or behaviors cannot be explained in terms of the sum of its parts; if mind is emergent, then it cannot be wholly explained by brain. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1184:Let’s see what “multifactorial” means in a practical sense. Consider someone with frequent depression who is visiting a friend today, pouring her heart out about her problems. How much could you have predicted the global depression and today’s behavior by knowing about her biology? Suppose “knowing about her biology” consisted only of knowing what version of the serotonin transporter gene she has. How much predictive power does that give you? As we saw in chapter 8, not much—say, 10 percent. What if “knowing about her biology” consists of knowing the status of that gene plus knowing if one of her parents died when she was a child? More, maybe 25 percent. How knowing her serotonin transporter gene status + childhood adversity status + whether she is living alone in poverty? Maybe up to 40 percent. Add knowledge of the average level of glucocorticoids in her bloodstream today. Maybe a bit more. Toss in knowing if she’s living in an individualist or a collectivist culture. Some more predictability.fn11 Know if she is menstruating (which typically exacerbates symptoms in seriously depressed women, making it more likely that they’ll be socially withdrawn rather than reaching out to someone). Some more predictability. Maybe even above the 50 percent mark by now. Add enough factors, many of which, possibly most of which, have not yet been discovered, and eventually your multifactorial biological knowledge will give you the same predictive power as in the fractured-bone scenario. Not different amounts of biological causation; different types of causation. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
1185:I found myself drawn to biology, with all its frustrating yet fascinating complexities. When I was twelve, I remember reading about axolotls, which are basically a species of salamander that has evolved to remain permanently in the aquatic larval stage. They manage to keep their gills (rather than trading them in for lungs, like salamanders or frogs) by shutting down metamorphosis and becoming sexually mature in the water. I was completely flabbergasted when I read that by simply giving these creatures the “metamorphosis hormone” (thyroid extract) you could make the axolotl revert back into the extinct, land-dwelling, gill-less adult ancestor that it had evolved from. You could go back in time, resurrecting a prehistoric animal that no longer exists anywhere on Earth. I also knew that for some mysterious reason adult salamanders don’t regenerate amputated legs but the tadpoles do. My curiosity took me one step further, to the question of whether an axolotl—which is, after all, an “adult tadpole”—would retain its ability to regenerate a lost leg just as a modern frog tadpole does. And how many other axolotl-like beings exist on Earth, I wondered, that could be restored to their ancestral forms by simply giving them hormones? Could humans—who are after all apes that have evolved to retain many juvenile qualities—be made to revert to an ancestral form, perhaps something resembling Homo erectus, using the appropriate cocktail of hormones? My mind reeled out a stream of questions and speculations, and I was hooked on biology forever. I found mysteries and possibilities everywhere. ~ V S Ramachandran, #NFDB
1186:Have you ever seen a documentary about those birds that make gardens and towers and clearings in the bushes where they perform their mating dances? Did you know that the only ones that find a mate are the ones that make the best gardens, the best towers, the best clearings, the ones that perform the most elaborate dances? Haven't you ever seen those ridiculous birds that practically dance themselves to death to woo the female?
That's what Arturo Belano was like, a stupid, conceited peacock. And visceral realism was his exhausting dance of love for me. The thing was, I didn't love him anymore. You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold on to her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.
Why did I keep hanging out with the same people he hung out with for a while? Well, they were my friends too, my friends still, although it wasn't long before I got tired of them. Let me tell you something. The university was real, the biology department was real, my professors were real, my classmates were real. By that I mean tangible, with goals that were more or less clear, plans that were more or less clear. Those people weren't real. The great poet Alí Chumacero (who I guess shouldn't be blamed for having a name like that) was real, do you see what I mean?, what he left behind was real. What they left behind, on the other hand, wasn't real. Poor little mice hypnotized by Ulises and led to the slaughter by Arturo. Let me put it as concisely as I can: the real problem was that they were almost all at least twenty and they acted like they were barely fifteen. Do you see what I mean? ~ Roberto Bola o,#NFDB
1187:The aim of the next nine sections will be to present careful arguments to show that none of the loopholes (a), (b), and (c) can provide a plausible way to evade the contradiction of the robot. Accordingly, it, and we also, are driven to the unpalatable (d), if we are still insistent that mathematical understanding can be reduced to computation. I am sure that those concerned with artificial intelligence would find (d) to be as unpalatable as I find it to be. It provides perhaps a conceivable standpoint-essentially the A/D suggestion, referred to at the end of 1.3, whereby divine intervention is required for the implanting of an unknowable algorithm into each of our computer brains (by 'the best programmer in the business'). In any case, the conclusion 'unknowable'-for the very mechanisms that are ultimately responsible for our intelligence-would not be a very happy conclusion for those hoping actually to construct a genuinely artificially intelligent robot! It would not be a particularly happy conclusion, either, for those of us who hope to understand, in principle and in a scientific way, how human intelligence has actually arisen, in accordance with comprehensible scientific laws, such as those of physics, chemistry, biology, and natural selection-irrespective of any desire to reproduce such intelligence in a robot device. In my own opinion, such a pessimistic conclusion is not warranted, for the very reason that 'scientific comprehensibility' is a very different thing from 'computability'. The conclusion should be not that the underlying laws are incomprehensible, but that they are non-computable. ~ Roger Penrose, #NFDB
1188:What is the vril?” I asked. Therewith Zee began to enter into an explanation of which I understood very little, for there is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Faraday thus intimates under the more cautious term of correlation:— “I have long held an opinion,” says that illustrious experimentalist, “almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest, have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent that they are convertible, as it were into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action. These subterranean philosophers assert that by one operation of vril, which Faraday would perhaps call ‘atmospheric magnetism,’ they can influence the variations of temperature—in plain words, the weather; that by operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, &c., but applied scientifically, through vril conductors, they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics. To all such agencies they give the common name of vril. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton, #NFDB
1189:mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man needs is not homeostasis but what i call "noo-dynamics," i.e., the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it. And one should not think that this holds true only for normal conditions; in neurotic individuals, it is even more valid. If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life. ~ Viktor E Frankl, #NFDB
1190:In the secret places of her thymus gland Louise is making too much of herself. Her faithful biology depends on regulation but the white T-cells have turned bandit. They don't obey the rules. They are swarming into the bloodstream, overturning the quiet order of spleen and intestine. In the lymph nodes they are swelling with pride. It used to be their job to keep her body safe from enemies on the outside. They were her immunity, her certainty against infection. Now they are the enemies on the inside. The security forces have rebelled. Louise is the victim of a coup.
Will you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them as they come at you? Why can't I dam their blind tide that filthies your blood? Why are there no lock gates on the portal vein? The inside of your body is innocent, nothing has taught it fear. Your artery canals trust their cargo, they don't check the shipments in the blood. You are full to overflowing but the keeper is asleep and there's murder going on inside. Who comes here? Let me hold up my lantern. It's only the blood; red cells carrying oxygen to the heart, thrombocytes making sure of proper clotting. The white cells, B and T types, just a few of them as always whistling as they go.
The faithful body has made a mistake. This is no time to stamp the passports and look at the sky. Coming up behind are hundreds of them. Hundreds too many, armed to the teeth for a job that doesn't need doing. Not needed? With all that weaponry?
Here they come, hurtling through the bloodstream trying to pick a fight. There's no-one to fight but you Louise. You're the foreign body now. ~ Jeanette Winterson,#NFDB
1191:Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions—between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, in contrast, is most powerful when it elucidates rules of organization—laws—that act as lenses through which to view and organize the world. Technologists seek to liberate us from the constraints of our current realities through those transitions. Science defines those constraints, drawing the outer limits of the boundaries of possibility. Our greatest technological innovations thus carry names that claim our prowess over the world: the engine (from ingenium, or “ingenuity”) or the computer (from computare, or “reckoning together”). Our deepest scientific laws, in contrast, are often named after the limits of human knowledge: uncertainty, relativity, incompleteness, impossibility. Of all the sciences, biology is the most lawless; there are few rules to begin with, and even fewer rules that are universal. Living beings must, of course, obey the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry, but life often exists on the margins and interstices of these laws, bending them to their near-breaking limit. The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. “It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe,” James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions, and excuses. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
1192:In universities and pharmaceutical labs around the world, computer scientists and computational biologists are designing algorithms to sift through billions of gene sequences, looking for links between certain genetic markers and diseases. The goal is to help us sidestep the diseases we're most likely to contract and to provide each one of us with a cabinet of personalized medicines. Each one should include just the right dosage and the ideal mix of molecules for our bodies. Between these two branches of research, genetic and behavioral, we're being parsed, inside and out. Even the language of the two fields is similar. In a nod to geneticists, Dishman and his team are working to catalog what they call our "behavioral markers." The math is also about the same. Whether they're scrutinizing our strands of DNA or our nightly trips to the bathroom, statisticians are searching for norms, correlations, and anomalies. Dishman prefers his behavioral approach, in part because the market's less crowded. "There are a zillion people looking at biology," he says, "and too few looking at behavior." His gadgets also have an edge because they can provide basic alerts from day one. The technology indicating whether a person gets out of bed, for example, isn't much more complicated than the sensor that automatically opens a supermarket door. But that nugget of information is valuable. Once we start installing these sensors, and the electronics companies get their foot in the door, the experts can start refining the analysis from simple alerts to sophisticated predictions-perhaps preparing us for the onset of Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's. ~ Gary F Marcus, #NFDB
1193:For what people of color quickly come to see—in a sense the primary epistemic principle of the racialized social epistemology of which they are the object—is that they are not seen at all. Correspondingly, the “central metaphor” of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is the image of the “veil,”20 and the black American cognitive equivalent of the shocking moment of Cartesian realization of the uncertainty of everything one had taken to be knowledge is the moment when for Du Bois, as a child in New England, “it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their [white] world by a vast veil.”21 Similarly, Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man, generally regarded as the most important twentieth-century novel of the black experience, is arguably in key respects—while a multi-dimensional and multi-layered work of great depth and complexity, not to be reduced to a single theme—an epistemological novel.22 For what it recounts is the protagonist’s quest to determine what norms of belief are the right ones in a crazy looking-glass world where he is an invisible man “simply because [white] people refuse to see me… . When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” And this systematic misperception is not, of course, due to biology, the intrinsic properties of his epidermis, or physical deficiencies in the white eye, but rather to “the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.”23 ~ Charles W Mills, #NFDB
1194:Of all the metals there is none more essential to life than iron. It is the
accumulation of iron in the center of a star which triggers a supernova
explosion and the subsequent scattering of the vital atoms of life
throughout the cosmos. It was the drawing by gravity of iron atoms to
the center of the primeval earth that generated the heat which caused the
initial chemical differentiation of the earth, the outgassing of the early
atmosphere, and ultimately the formation of the hydrosphere. It is molten
iron in the center of the earth which, acting like a gigantic dynamo, generates
the earth's magnetic field, which in turn creates the Van Allen radiation
belts that shield the earth's surface from destructive high-energypenetrating
cosmic radiation and preserve the crucial ozone layer from
cosmic ray destruction…
Without the iron atom, there would be no carbon-based life in the cosmos;
no supernovae, no heating of the primitive earth, no atmosphere or
hydrosphere. There would be no protective magnetic field, no Van Allen
radiation belts, no ozone layer, no metal to make hemoglobin [in human
blood], no metal to tame the reactivity of oxygen, and no oxidative
metabolism.
The intriguing and intimate relationship between life and iron, between
the red color of blood and the dying of some distant star, not only indicates
the relevance of metals to biology but also the biocentricity of the
cosmos…
This account clearly indicates the importance of the iron atom. The
fact that particular attention is drawn to iron in the Qur'an also emphasises
the importance of the element. ~ Harun Yahya,#NFDB
1195:Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry, history, rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy, hygiene, therapy, cosmetics, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, theology, agnosticism, skepticism, stoicism, epicureanism, ethics, politics, idealism, philanthropy, cynicism, tyranny, plutocracy, democracy: these are all Greek words for cultural forms seldom originated, but in many cases first matured for good or evil by the abounding energy of the Greeks. All the problems that disturb us today—the cutting down of forests and the erosion of the soil; the emancipation of woman and the limitation of the family; the conservatism of the established, and the experimentalism of the unplaced, in morals, music, and government; the corruptions of politics and the perversions of conduct; the conflict of religion and science, and the weakening of the supernatural supports of morality; the war of the classes, the nations, and the continents; the revolutions of the poor against the economically powerful rich, and of the rich against the politically powerful poor; the struggle between democracy and dictatorship, between individualism and communism, between the East and the West—all these agitated, as if for our instruction, the brilliant and turbulent life of ancient Hellas. There is nothing in Greek civilization that does not illuminate our own. We shall try to see the life of Greece both in the mutual interplay of its cultural elements, and in the immense five-act drama of its rise and fall. We shall begin with Crete and its lately resurrected civilization, because apparently from Crete, as well as from Asia, came that prehistoric culture of Mycenae ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
1196:During the war, Monod had joined the Communist Party as a matter of expediency, so that he could join the FTP. But he developed reservations about the Communists’ intolerance of other political views and quietly quit the Party after the war, at a time when many fellow citizens were joining. That might have been the end of Monod’s involvement with Communism, were it not for bizarre developments in the sphere of Soviet science. In the summer of 1948, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, Joseph Stalin’s anointed czar of Soviet agriculture, launched a broad attack on the science of genetics. Lysenko believed that virtually any modification could be made rapidly and permanently to any plant or animal and passed on to its offspring. His belief, while consistent with Soviet doctrine that nature and man could be shaped in any way and were unconstrained by history or heredity, flew in the face of the principles of genetics that had been established over the previous fifty years. Nevertheless, Lysenko demanded that classical genetics, and its supporters, be purged from Soviet biology. Lysenko’s outrageous statements were heralded in Communist-run newspapers in France. Monod responded with a devastating critique that ran on the front page of Combat. Monod exposed Lysenko’s stance on genetics as antiscientific dogma and decried Lysenko’s power as a demonstration of “ideological terrorism” in the Soviet Union. The public scrutiny damaged the credibility of Soviet socialism in France. The episode thrust Monod into the public eye and made him resolve to “make his life’s goal a crusade against antiscientific, religious metaphysics, whether it be from Church or State. ~ Sean B Carroll, #NFDB
1197:fasting also stimulates growth hormone, which signals the production of some new snazzy cell parts, giving our bodies a complete renovation. Since it triggers both the breakdown of old cellular parts and the creation of new ones, fasting may be considered one of the most potent anti-aging methods in existence. Autophagy also plays an important role in the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s is characterized by the abnormal accumulation of amyloid beta (Aß) proteins in the brain, and it’s believed that these accumulations eventually destroy the synaptic connections in the memory and cognition areas. Normally, clumps of Aß protein are removed by autophagy: the brain cell activates the autophagosome, the cell’s internal garbage truck, which engulfs the Aß protein targeted for removal and excretes it, so it can be removed by the blood and recycled into other protein or turned into glucose, depending upon the body’s needs. But in Alzheimer’s disease, autophagy is impaired and the Aß protein remains inside the brain cell, where eventual buildup will result in the clinical syndromes of Alzheimer’s disease. Cancer is yet another disease that may be a result of disordered autophagy. We’re learning that mTOR plays a role in cancer biology, and mTOR inhibitors have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of various cancers. Fasting’s role in inhibiting mTOR, thereby stimulating autophagy, provides an interesting opportunity to prevent cancer’s development. Indeed, some leading scientists, such as Dr. Thomas Seyfried, a professor of biology at Boston College, have proposed a yearly seven-day water-only fast for this very reason. ~ Jason Fung, #NFDB
1198:The Creation of Human Beings From Water
Allah created every [living] creature from water. Some of them go on
their bellies, some of them on two legs, and some on four. Allah creates
whatever He wills. Allah has power over all things. (Qur'an, 24:45)
Do those who disbelieve not see that the heavens and the Earth were
sewn together and then We unstitched them and that We made from
water every living thing? So won't they believe? (Qur'an, 21:30)
And it is He Who created human beings from water and then gave them
relations by blood and marriage. Your Lord is All-Powerful. (Qur'an,
25:54)
When we look at the verses concerned with the creation of human
beings and living things, we clearly see evidence of a miracle. One such
miracle is of the creation of living things from water. It was only possible
for people to come by that information, clearly expressed in those
verses, hundreds of years afterwards with the invention of the microscope.
Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an
165
The words "Water is the main component
of organic matter. 50-90% of the
weight of living things consists of water"
appear regularly in encyclopaedias.
Furthermore, 80% of the cytoplasm (basic cell
material) of a standard animal cell is described
as water in biology textbooks. The analysis of
cytoplasm and its appearance in textbooks took
place hundreds of years after the revelation of the
Qur'an. It is therefore impossible for this fact, now
accepted by the scientific community, to have been
known at the time the Qur'an was revealed. Yet, attention
was drawn to it in the Qur'an 1,400 years
before its discovery. ~ Harun Yahya,#NFDB
1199:Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? … Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? … Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it! ~ Sinclair Lewis, #NFDB
1200:there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people ~ Sinclair Lewis, #NFDB
1201:You know what the best course I ever took at college was? Biology. We studied evolution. And I learned something important.’ Now he included Leonard in his gaze. ‘It helped me choose my career. For thousands, no, millions of years we had these huge brains, the neo-cortex, right? But we didn’t speak to each other, and we lived like fucking pigs. There was nothing. No language, no culture, nothing. And then, suddenly, wham! It was there. Suddenly it was something we had to have, and there was no turning back. So why did it suddenly happen?’ Russell shrugged. ‘Hand of God?’ ‘Hand of God my ass. I’ll tell you why. Back then we all used to hang out together all day long doing the same thing. We lived in packs. So there was no need for language. If there was a leopard coming, there was no point saying, Hey man, what’s coming down the track? A leopard! Everyone could see it, everyone was jumping up and down and screaming, trying to scare it off. But what happens when someone goes off on his own for a moment’s privacy? When he sees a leopard coming, he knows something the others don’t. And he knows they don’t know. He has something they don’t, he has a secret, and this is the beginning of his individuality, of his consciousness. If he wants to share his secret and run down the track to warn the other guys, then he’s going to need to invent language. From there grows the possibility of culture. Or he can hang back and hope the leopard will take out the leadership that’s been giving him a hard time. A secret plan, that means more individuation, more consciousness.’ The band was starting to play a fast, loud number. Glass had to shout his conclusion, ‘Secrecy made us possible,’ and Russell raised his beer to salute the theory. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
1202:Papa, kilisenin insanın insan olmayan hayvanlardan geldiği şeklindeki görüşü kabul edebileceğini söylemekle birlikte, bu evrimsel sürecin bir yerinde "ontolojik bir sıçrama" olduğuny da sözlerine eklemiştir. (Bu ontolojik sıçramanın anlamıyla ilgili olarak ayrıca bkz. Ernan McMullin, "Biology and the Theology of the Human"...) İnsan ruhu doğrudan Tanrı tarafından yaratılmıştır. Dolayısıyla "kaynaklandıkları felsefelerle uyumlu olarak evrim kuramları, zihnin yaşayan doğanın güçlerinden ortaya çıktığını veya bu maddenin yan ürününden ibaret olduuğnu söyler ve bu, insanla ilgili gerçekle uyuşmaz." Papa sözlerine, "Ne de insanın onuruna bir dayanak sunamazlar." diyerek devam etmişti.
Bir başka deyişle Papa, insanın şempanze benzeri atalarıyla modern insanların ortaya çıkmaları arasında geçen beş milyon yılın belirli bir noktasında insan ruhunun, bugüne dek gizemini koruyan bir biçimde içimize yerleştirilmiş olduğunu söylemekteydi. Çağdaş fen bilimleri bu sürecin zamansal sıralamasını ortaya çıkarığ, bedensel karşılıklarını ayrıntılı bir biçmde açıklamayı başarabilir ama buna rağmen ne ruhun ne olduğunu ne de nasıl oluştuğunu bugüne kadar açıklamaya başaramamıştır. Kilise geride bıraktığımız iki yüzyıl boyunca modern fen bilimlerinden hiç kuşkusuz çok fazla şey öğrenmiş ve doktrinlerini de buna bağlı olarak uyarlamıştır. Fakat birçok fen bilimci kiliseden öğrenebilecekleri bir şeyler olduğu fikrine kahkahalarla gülecek olsa bile, Papa evrim kuramının şu andaki durumunun gerçekten çok zayıf bir noktasına işaret etmiştir ve bilimciler de bu konu üzerinde düşünüp taşınsalar hiç de fena olmaz. Modern fen bilimleri, insan olmanın ne anlama geldiği konusunda birçok bilim adamının sandığından çok daha az açıklama yapmıştır. ~ Francis Fukuyama,#NFDB
1203:The expression "fee thulumaatin thalaathin," translated into English
as "a threefold darkness," indicates three dark regions involved during
the development of the embryo. These are:
a) The darkness of the abdomen
b) The darkness of the womb
c) The darkness of the placenta
As we have seen, modern biology has revealed that the embryological
development of the baby takes place in the manner revealed in
the verse, in three dark regions. Moreover, advances in the science of
embryology show that these regions consist of three layers each.
The lateral abdominal wall comprises three layers: the external
oblique, the internal oblique, and transverses abdominis muscles.91
Similarly, the wall of the womb also consists of three layers: the
epimetrium, the myometrium and the endometrium.92
Similarly again, the placenta surrounding the embryo also consists
of three layers: the amnion (the internal membrane around the foetus),
the chorion (the middle amnion layer) and the decidua (outer amnion
layer.)93
It is also pointed out in this verse that a human being is created in
the mother's womb in three distinct stages.
Indeed, modern biology has also revealed that the baby's embryological
development takes place in three distinct regions in the mother's
womb. Today, in all the embryology textbooks studied in departments
of medicine, this subject is taken as an element of basic knowledge.
For instance, in Basic Human Embryology, a fundamental reference
text in the field of embryology, this fact is stated as follows:
The life in the uterus has three stages: pre-embryonic; first two and a half
weeks, embryonic; until the end of the eight week, and fetal; from the
eight week to labor. ~ Harun Yahya,#NFDB
1204:If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk. So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1205:Viewed this way, a technology is more than a mere means. It is a programming of phenomena for a purpose. A technology is an orchestration of phenomena to our use.
There is a consequence to this. I said in Chapter 1 that technology has no neat genetics. This is true, but that does not mean that technology possesses nothing quite like genes. Phenomena, I propose, are the "genes" of technology. The parallel is not exact of course, but still, I find it helpful to think this way. We know that biology creates its structures-proteins, cells, hormones, and the like-by activating genes. In the human case there are about 21,000 of these, and the number does not vary all that much between fruit flies and humans, or humans and elephants. Individual genes do not correspond to particular structures; there is no single gene that creates the eye or even eye color. Instead, modern biology understands that genes collectively act as the elements of a programming language for the creation of a huge variety of shapes and forms. They operate much as the fixed set of musical tones and rhythms and phrases act as programming language for the creation of very different musical structures. Organisms create themselves in many different shapes and species by using much the same set of genes "programmed" to activate in different sequences.
It is the same with technology. It creates its structures-individual technologies-by "programming" a fixed set of phenomena in many different ways. New phenomena-new technological "genes"-of course add to this fixed set as time progresses. And phenomena are not combined directly; first they are captured and expressed as technological elements which are then combined. There are probably fewer phenomena than biological genes in use, but still, the analogy applies. Biology programs genes into myriad structures, and technology programs phenomena to myriad uses. ~ W Brian Arthur,#NFDB
1206:The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face -- that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat -- that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1207:The wonder of evolution is that it works at all. I mean that literally: If you want to marvel at evolution, that’s what’s marvel-worthy. How does optimization first arise in the universe? If an intelligent agent designed Nature, who designed the intelligent agent? Where is the first design that has no designer? The puzzle is not how the first stage of the bootstrap can be super-clever and super-efficient; the puzzle is how it can happen at all. Evolution resolves the infinite regression, not by being super-clever and super-efficient, but by being stupid and inefficient and working anyway. This is the marvel. For professional reasons, I often have to discuss the slowness, randomness, and blindness of evolution. Afterward someone says: “You just said that evolution can’t plan simultaneous changes, and that evolution is very inefficient because mutations are random. Isn’t that what the creationists say? That you couldn’t assemble a watch by randomly shaking the parts in a box?” But the reply to creationists is not that you can assemble a watch by shaking the parts in a box. The reply is that this is not how evolution works. If you think that evolution does work by whirlwinds assembling 747s, then the creationists have successfully misrepresented biology to you; they’ve sold the strawman. The real answer is that complex machinery evolves either incrementally, or by adapting previous complex machinery used for a new purpose. Squirrels jump from treetop to treetop using just their muscles, but the length they can jump depends to some extent on the aerodynamics of their bodies. So now there are flying squirrels, so aerodynamic they can glide short distances. If birds were wiped out, the descendants of flying squirrels might reoccupy that ecological niche in ten million years, gliding membranes transformed into wings. And the creationists would say, “What good is half a wing? You’d just fall down and splat. How could squirrelbirds possibly have evolved incrementally? ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB
1208:Things changed after that between me and Mark. I stopped being mortified that people might mistake me for one of his acolytes. I was his Boswell, don’t you know. I interviewed him about his childhood—his father was a psychiarist in Beverly Hills. I cataloged the contents of his van. I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology—in finding a cure—but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. “The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,” Mark told me. “I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and suvivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit—in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.” Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave. ~ William Finnegan, #NFDB
1209:Here’s an example: DNA stores information very nicely, in a durable format that allows for exact duplication. A ribosome turns that stored information into a sequence of amino acids, a protein, which folds up into a variety of chemically active shapes. The combined system, DNA and ribosome, can build all sorts of protein machinery. But what good is DNA, without a ribosome that turns DNA information into proteins? What good is a ribosome, without DNA to tell it which proteins to make? Organisms don’t always leave fossils, and evolutionary biology can’t always figure out the incremental pathway. But in this case we do know how it happened. RNA shares with DNA the property of being able to carry information and replicate itself, although RNA is less durable and copies less accurately. And RNA also shares the ability of proteins to fold up into chemically active shapes, though it’s not as versatile as the amino acid chains of proteins. Almost certainly, RNA is the single A which predates the mutually dependent A* and B. It’s just as important to note that RNA does the combined job of DNA and proteins poorly, as that it does the combined job at all. It’s amazing enough that a single molecule can both store information and manipulate chemistry. For it to do the job well would be a wholly unnecessary miracle. What was the very first replicator ever to exist? It may well have been an RNA strand, because by some strange coincidence, the chemical ingredients of RNA are chemicals that would have arisen naturally on the prebiotic Earth of 4 billion years ago. Please note: evolution does not explain the origin of life; evolutionary biology is not supposed to explain the first replicator, because the first replicator does not come from another replicator. Evolution describes statistical trends in replication. The first replicator wasn’t a statistical trend, it was a pure accident. The notion that evolution should explain the origin of life is a pure strawman—more creationist misrepresentation. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB
1210:All scientists, regardless of discipline, need to be prepared to confront the broadest consequences of our work—but we need to communicate its more detailed aspects as well. I was reminded of this at a recent lunch I attended with some of Silicon Valley’s greatest technology gurus. One of them said, “Give me ten to twenty million dollars and a team of smart people, and we can solve virtually any engineering challenge.” This person obviously knew a thing or two about solving technological problems—a long string of successes attested to that—but ironically, such an approach would not have produced the CRISPR-based gene-editing technology, which was inspired by curiosity-driven research into natural phenomena. The technology we ended up creating did not take anywhere near ten to twenty million dollars to develop, but it did require a thorough understanding of the chemistry and biology of bacterial adaptive immunity, a topic that may seem wholly unrelated to gene editing. This is but one example of the importance of fundamental research—the pursuit of science for the sake of understanding our natural world—and its relevance to developing new technologies. Nature, after all, has had a lot more time than humans to conduct experiments! If there’s one overarching point I hope you will take away from this book, it’s that humans need to keep exploring the world around us through open-ended scientific research. The wonders of penicillin would never have been discovered had Alexander Fleming not been conducting simple experiments with Staphylococci bacteria. Recombinant DNA research—the foundation for modern molecular biology—became possible only with the isolation of DNA-cutting and DNA-copying enzymes from gut- and heat-loving bacteria. Rapid DNA sequencing required experiments on the remarkable properties of bacteria from hot springs. And my colleagues and I would never have created a powerful gene-editing tool if we hadn’t tackled the much more fundamental question of how bacteria fight off viral infections. ~ Jennifer A Doudna, #NFDB
1211:Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation already.
But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term "junk DNA." Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as "junk" merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how "non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development." Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it.
Or consider vestigial organs that later are found to have a function after all. Evolutionary biology texts often cite the human coccyx as a "vestigial structure" that hearkens back to vertebrate ancestors with tails. Yet if one looks at a recent edition of Gray’s Anatomy, one finds that the coccyx is a crucial point of contact with muscles that attach to the pelvic floor. The phrase "vestigial structure" often merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. The human appendix, formerly thought to be vestigial, is now known to be a functioning component of the immune system. ~ William A Dembski,#NFDB
1212:{On to contributions to evolutionary biology of 18th century French scientist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon}
He was not an evolutionary biologist, yet he was the father of evolutionism. He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems, problems that before Buffon had not been raised by anybody.... he brought them to the attention of the scientific world.
Except for Aristotle and Darwin, no other student of organisms [whole animals and plants] has had as far-reaching an influence.
He brought the idea of evolution into the realm of science. He developed a concept of the "unity of type", a precursor of comparative anatomy. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the acceptance of a long-time scale for the history of the earth. He was one of the first to imply that you get inheritance from your parents, in a description based on similarities between elephants and mammoths. And yet, he hindered evolution by his frequent endorsement of the immutability of species. He provided a criterion of species, fertility among members of a species, that was thought impregnable. ~ Ernst W Mayr,#NFDB
1213:For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a ‘misfiring of something useful’, it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive.
Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d’Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this “scientism” have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other “new atheists” – Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist – religion is the cause of the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and “poisons everything.” They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness.
But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because it could only work with natural explanations. Gould had no religious axe to grind; he described himself as an atheistically inclined agnostic, but pointed out that Darwin himself had denied he was an atheist and that other eminent Darwinians - Asa Gray, Charles D. Walcott, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky - had been either practicing Christians or agnostics. Atheism did not, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations that were proper to science. ~ Karen Armstrong,#NFDB
1214:Things I worried about on the bus: a snapshot of an anxious brain . . . Is that car slowing down? Is someone going to get out and kidnap me? It is slowing down. What if someone asks for directions? What if—Oh. They’re just dropping someone off. The bus is late. What if it doesn’t arrive? What if I’m late getting to school? Did I turn my straighteners off ? What if the bus isn’t running today and no one told me? Where’s the—oh. There’s the bus. Oh crap is that Rowan from Biology? What if he sees me? What if he wants to chat? Hide. Okay, he hasn’t seen me. He hasn’t seen me. What if he did see me and now he thinks I’m weird for not saying hi? Did I remember to clean out Rita’s bowl properly? What if she gets sick? One day Rita will die. One day I’ll die. One day everyone will die. What if I die today and everyone sees that my bra has a hole in it? What if the bus crashes? Where are the exits? Why is there an exit on the ceiling? What if that headache Dad has is a brain tumor? Would I live with Mum all the time if Dad died? Why am I thinking about my living arrangements instead of how horrible it would be if Dad died? What’s wrong with me? What if Rhys doesn’t like me? What if he does? What if we get together and we split up? What if we get together and don’t split up and then we’re together forever until we die? One day I’ll die. Did I remember to turn my straighteners off ? Yes. Yes. Did I? Okay my stop’s coming up. I need to get off in about two minutes. Should I get up now? Will the guy next to me get that I have to get off or will I have to ask him to move? But what if he’s getting off too and I look like a twat? What if worrying kills brain cells? What if I never get to go to university? What if I do and it’s awful? Should I say thank you to the driver on the way off ? Okay, get up, move toward the front of the bus. Go, step. Don’t trip over that old man’s stick. Watch out for the stick. Watch out for the—shit. Did anyone notice that? No, no one’s looking at me. But what if they are? Okay, doors are opening, GO! I didn’t say thank you to the driver. What if he’s having a bad day and that would have made it better? Am I a bad person? ~ Sara Barnard, #NFDB
1215:Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!"
"Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen."
"The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! ~ Sinclair Lewis,#NFDB
1216:Things I worried about on the bus: a snapshot of an anxious brain . . . Is that car slowing down? Is someone going to get out and kidnap me? It is slowing down. What if someone asks for directions? What if—Oh. They’re just dropping someone off. The bus is late. What if it doesn’t arrive? What if I’m late getting to school? Did I turn my straighteners off ? What if the bus isn’t running today and no one told me? Where’s the—oh. There’s the bus. Oh crap is that Rowan from Biology? What if he sees me? What if he wants to chat? Hide. Okay, he hasn’t seen me. He hasn’t seen me. What if he did see me and now he thinks I’m weird for not saying hi? Did I remember to clean out Rita’s bowl properly? What if she gets sick? One day Rita will die. One day I’ll die. One day everyone will die. What if I die today and everyone sees that my bra has a hole in it? What if the bus crashes? Where are the exits? Why is there an exit on the ceiling? What if that headache Dad has is a brain tumor? Would I live with Mum all the time if Dad died? Why am I thinking about my living arrangements instead of how horrible it would be if Dad died? What’s wrong with me? What if Rhys doesn’t like me? What if he does? What if we get together and we split up? What if we get together and don’t split up and then we’re together forever until we die? One day I’ll die. Did I remember to turn my straighteners off ? Yes. Yes. Did I? Okay my stop’s coming up. I need to get off in about two minutes. Should I get up now? Will the guy next to me get that I have to get off or will I have to ask him to move? But what if he’s getting off too and I look like a twat? What if worrying kills brain cells? What if I never get to go to university? What if I do and it’s awful? Should I say thank you to the driver on the way off ? Okay, get up, move toward the front of the bus. Go, step. Don’t trip over that old man’s stick. Watch out for the stick. Watch out for the—shit. Did anyone notice that? No, no one’s looking at me. But what if they are? Okay, doors are opening, GO! I didn’t say thank you to the driver. What if he’s having a bad day and that would have made it better? Am I a bad person? Yeah but did I actually turn my straighteners off ? ~ Sara Barnard, #NFDB
1217:Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.” “The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!” “Well, what if they are? ~ Sinclair Lewis, #NFDB
1218:As the leader of the international Human Genome Project, which had labored mightily over more than a decade to reveal this DNA sequence, I stood beside President Bill Clinton in the East Room of the White House...
Clinton's speech began by comparing this human sequence map to the map that Meriwether Lewis had unfolded in front of President Thomas Jefferson in that very room nearly two hundred years earlier.
Clinton said, "Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind." But the part of his speech that most attracted public attention jumped from the scientific perspective to the spiritual. "Today," he said, "we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift."
Was I, a rigorously trained scientist, taken aback at such a blatantly religious reference by the leader of the free world at a moment such as this? Was I tempted to scowl or look at the floor in embarrassment? No, not at all. In fact I had worked closely with the president's speechwriter in the frantic days just prior to this announcement, and had strongly endorsed the inclusion of this paragraph.
When it came time for me to add a few words of my own, I echoed this sentiment: "It's a happy day for the world. It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God."
What was going on here? Why would a president and a scientist, charged with announcing a milestone in biology and medicine, feel compelled to invoke a connection with God? Aren't the scientific and spiritual worldviews antithetical, or shouldn't they at least avoid appearing in the East Room together? What were the reasons for invoking God in these two speeches? Was this poetry? Hypocrisy? A cynical attempt to curry favor from believers, or to disarm those who might criticize this study of the human genome as reducing humankind to machinery? No. Not for me. Quite the contrary, for me the experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship. ~ Francis S Collins,#NFDB
1219:Why is it that we say we see something distinctive in these lives and not, say, in a politician hoping for our vote, or a lawyer doing her job, or even a soldier risking his life for the sake of his country? Because the scientists and philosophers are to this extent right, that people generally act on the basis of rational self-interest. Consciously or otherwise, we seek to hand on our genes to the next generation. Individually and as groups, tribes, nations and civilisations, we are engaged in a Darwinian struggle to survive. All this we know, and though the terminology may change from age to age, people have known it for a very long time indeed. But here and there we see acts, personalities, lives, that seem to come from somewhere else, that breathe a larger air. They chime with the story we read in chapter 1, about a God who creates in love, who has faith in us, who summons us to greatness and forgives us when, as from time to time we must, we fall, the God whose creativity consists in self-effacement, in making space for the otherness that is us. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the physical laws, Darwinian or otherwise, governing biology, and everything to do with the making of meaning out of the communion of souls linked in loyalty and love. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin see such flowerings of the spirit as ‘spandrels’, decorative motifs that have nothing to do with the weight-bearing architecture of life.15 Like most people, I see them as the redemption of life from mere existence to the fellowship of the divine. As Isaiah Berlin said, there are people tone deaf to the spirit. There is no reason to expect everyone to believe in God or the soul or the music of the universe as it sings the improbability of its existence. God is the distant voice we hear and seek to amplify in our systems of meaning, each particular to a culture, a civilisation, a faith. God is the One within the many; the unity at the core of our diversity; the call that leads us to journey beyond the self and its strivings, to enter into otherness and be enlarged by it, to seek to be a vehicle through which blessing flows outwards to the world, to give thanks for the miracle of being and the radiance that shines wherever two lives touch in affirmation, forgiveness and love. ~ Jonathan Sacks, #NFDB
1220:The world has been changing even faster as people, devices and information are increasingly connected to each other. Computational power is growing and quantum computing is quickly being realised. This will revolutionise artificial intelligence with exponentially faster speeds. It will advance encryption. Quantum computers will change everything, even human biology. There is already one technique to edit DNA precisely, called CRISPR. The basis of this genome-editing technology is a bacterial defence system. It can accurately target and edit stretches of genetic code. The best intention of genetic manipulation is that modifying genes would allow scientists to treat genetic causes of disease by correcting gene mutations. There are, however, less noble possibilities for manipulating DNA. How far we can go with genetic engineering will become an increasingly urgent question. We can’t see the possibilities of curing motor neurone diseases—like my ALS—without also glimpsing its dangers.
Intelligence is characterised as the ability to adapt to change. Human intelligence is the result of generations of natural selection of those with the ability to adapt to changed circumstances. We must not fear change. We need to make it work to our advantage.
We all have a role to play in making sure that we, and the next generation, have not just the opportunity but the determination to engage fully with the study of science at an early level, so that we can go on to fulfil our potential and create a better world for the whole human race. We need to take learning beyond a theoretical discussion of how AI should be and to make sure we plan for how it can be. We all have the potential to push the boundaries of what is accepted, or expected, and to think big. We stand on the threshold of a brave new world. It is an exciting, if precarious, place to be, and we are the pioneers.
When we invented fire, we messed up repeatedly, then invented the fire extinguisher. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and strong artificial intelligence, we should instead plan ahead and aim to get things right the first time, because it may be the only chance we will get. Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that wisdom wins. ~ Stephen Hawking,#NFDB
1221:There is one point in particular I would like to single out and stress, namely, the notion of evolution. It is common to assume that one of the doctrines of the perennial philosophy... is the idea of involution-evolution. That is, the manifest world was created as a "fall" or "breaking away" from the Absolute (involution), but that all things are now returning to the Absolute (via evolution). In fact, the doctrine of progressive temporal return to Source (evolution) does not appear anywhere, according to scholars as Joseph Campbell, until the axial period (i.e. a mere two thousand years ago). And even then, the idea was somewhat convoluted and backwards. The doctrine of the yugas, for example, sees the world as proceeding through various stages of development, but the direction is backward: yesterday was the Golden Age, and time ever since has been a devolutionary slide downhill, resulting in the present-day Kali-Yuga. Indeed, this notion of a historical fall from Eden was ubiquitous during the axial period; the idea that we are, at this moment, actually evolving toward Spirit was simply not conceived in any sort of influential fashion.
But sometime during the modern era-it is almost impossible to pinpoint exactly-the idea of history as devolution (or a fall from God) was slowly replaced by the idea of history as evolution (or a growth towards God). We see it explicitly in Schelling (1775-1854); Hegel (1770-1831) propounded the doctrine with a genius rarely equaled; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) made evolution a universal law, and his friend Charles Darwin (1809-1882) applied it to biology. We find it next appearing in Aurobindo (1872-1950), who gave perhaps its most accurate and profound spiritual context, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) who made it famous in the West.
But here is my point: we might say that the idea of evolution as return-to-Spirit is part of the perennial philosophy, but the idea itself, in any adequate form, is no more than a few hundred years old. It might be 'ancient' as timeless, but it is certainly not ancient as "old."...
This fundamental shift in the sense or form of the perennial philosophy-as represented in, say, Aurobindo, Hegel, Adi Da, Schelling, Teilhard de Chardin, Radhakrishnan, to name a few-I should like to call the "neoperennial philosophy." ~ Ken Wilber, The Eye Of Spirit,#NFDB
1222:The term ‘gender’ itself is problematic. It was first used in a sense that was not simply about grammar by sexologists – the scientists of sex such as John Money in the 1950s and 1960s – who were involved in normalising intersex infants.They used the term to mean the behavioural characteristics they considered most appropriate for persons of one or other biological sex. They applied the concept of gender when deciding upon the sex category into which those infants who did not have clear physical indications of one biological sex or another should be placed (Hausman, 1995).Their purpose was not progressive.These were conservative men who believed that there should be clear differences between the sexes and sought to create distinct sex categories through their projects of social engineering. Unfortunately, the term was adopted by some feminist theorists in the 1970s, and by the late 1970s was commonly used in academic feminism to indicate the difference between biological sex and those characteristics that derived from politics and not biology, which they called ‘gender’ (Haig, 2004).
Before the term ‘gender’ was adopted, the term more usually used to describe these socially constructed characteristics was ‘sex roles’. The word ‘role’ connotes a social construction and was not susceptible to the degeneration that has a afflicted the term ‘gender’ and enabled it to be wielded so effectively by transgender activists. As the term ‘gender’ was adopted more extensively by feminists, its meaning was transformed to mean not just the socially constructed behaviour associated with biological sex, but the system of male power and women’s subordination itself, which became known as the ‘gender hierarchy’ or ‘gender order’ (Connell, 2005; Mackinnon, 1989). Gradually, older terms to describe this system, such as male domination, sex class and sex caste went out of fashion, with the effect that direct identification of the agents responsible for the subordination of women – men – could no longer be named. Gender, as a euphemism, disappeared men as agents in male violence against women, which is now commonly referred to as ‘gender violence’. Increasingly, the term ‘gender’ is used, in official forms and legislation, for instance, to stand in for the term ‘sex’ as if ‘gender’ itself is biological, and this usage has overwhelmed the feminist understanding of gender. ~ Sheila Jeffreys,#NFDB
1223:Now consider this. A small number of invertebrate species, a mere 2 percent of all species of insects, is capable of social behaviors that do rival in complexity many human social achievements. Ants, bees, wasps, and termites are the prominent examples.10 Their genetically set and inflexible routines enable the survival of the group. They divide labor intelligently within the group to deal with the problems of finding energy sources, transform them into products useful for their lives, and manage the flow of those products. They do so to the point of changing the number of workers assigned to specific jobs depending on the energy sources available. They act in a seemingly altruistic manner whenever sacrifice is needed. In their colonies, they build nests that constitute remarkable urban architectural projects and provide efficient shelter, traffic patterns, and even systems of ventilation and waste removal, not to mention a security guard for the queen. One almost expects them to have harnessed fire and invented the wheel. Their zeal and discipline put to shame, any day, the governments of our leading democracies. These creatures acquired their complex social behaviors from their biology, not from Montessori schools or Ivy League colleges. But in spite of having come by these astounding abilities as early as 100 million years ago, ants and bees, individually or as colonies, do not grieve for the loss of their mates when they disappear and do not ask themselves about their place in the universe. They do not inquire about their origin, let alone their destiny. Their seemingly responsible, socially successful behavior is not guided by a sense of responsibility, to themselves or to others, or by a corpus of philosophical reflections on the condition of being an insect. It is guided by the gravitational pull of their life regulation needs as it acts on their nervous systems and produces certain repertoires of behavior selected over numerous evolving generations, under the control of their fine-tuned genomes. Members of a colony do not think as much as they act, by which I mean that upon registering a particular need—theirs, or the group’s, or the queen’s—they do not ponder alternatives for how to fulfill such a need in any way comparable to ours. They simply fulfill it. Their repertoire of actions is limited, and in many instances it is confined to one option. The general schema of their elaborate sociality does resemble that of human cultures, but it is a fixed schema. E. O. Wilson ~ Ant nio R Dam sio, #NFDB
1224:Among the most virulent of all such cultural parasite-equivalents is the religion-based denial of organic evolution. About one-half of Americans (46 percent in 2013, up from 44 percent in 1980), most of whom are evangelical Christians, together with a comparable fraction of Muslims worldwide, believe that no such process has ever occurred. As Creationists, they insist that God created humankind and the rest of life in one to several magical mega-strokes. Their minds are closed to the overwhelming mass of factual demonstrations of evolution, which is increasingly interlocked across every level of biological organization from molecules to ecosystem and the geography of biodiversity. They ignore, or more precisely they call it virtue to remain ignorant of, ongoing evolution observed in the field and even traced to the genes involved. Also looked past are new species created in the laboratory. To Creationists, evolution is at best just an unproven theory. To a few, it is an idea invented by Satan and transmitted through Darwin and later scientists in order to mislead humanity. When I was a small boy attending an evangelical church in Florida, I was taught that the secular agents of Satan are extremely bright and determined, but liars all, man and woman, and so no matter what I heard I must stick my fingers in my ears and hold fast to the true faith. We are all free in a democracy to believe whatever we wish, so why call any opinion such as Creationism a virulent cultural parasite-equivalent? Because it represents a triumph of blind religious faith over carefully tested fact. It is not a conception of reality forged by evidence and logical judgment. Instead, it is part of the price of admission to a religious tribe. Faith is the evidence given of a person’s submission to a particular god, and even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god. The cost to society as a whole of the bowed head has been enormous. Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere, at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time. The explicit denial of evolution presented as a part of a “creation science” is an outright falsehood, the adult equivalent of plugging one’s ears, and a deficit to any society that chooses to acquiesce in this manner to a fundamentalist faith. ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
1225:My cold-weather gear left a lot to be desired: black maternity leggings under boot-cut maternity jeans, and a couple of Marlboro Man’s white T-shirts under an extra-large ASU sweatshirt. I was so happy to have something warm to wear that I didn’t even care that I was wearing the letters of my Pac-10 rival. Add Marlboro Man’s old lumberjack cap and mud boots that were four sizes too big and I was on my way to being a complete beauty queen. I seriously didn’t know how Marlboro Man would be able to keep his hands off of me. If I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the feed truck, I’d shiver violently.
But really, when it came right down to it, I didn’t care. No matter what I looked like, it just didn’t feel right sending Marlboro Man into the cold, lonely world day after day. Even though I was new at marriage, I still sensed that somehow--whether because of biology or societal conditioning or religious mandate or the position of the moon--it was I who was to be the cushion between Marlboro Man and the cruel, hard world. That it was I who’d needed to dust off his shoulders every day. And though he didn’t say it, I could tell that he felt better when I was bouncing along, chubby and carrying his child, in his feed truck next to him.
Occasionally I’d hop out of the pickup and open gates. Other times he’d hop out and open them. Sometimes I’d drive while he threw hay off the back of the vehicles. Sometimes I’d get stuck and he’d say shit. Sometimes we’d just sit in silence, shivering as the vehicle doors opened and closed. Other times we’d engage in serious conversation or stop and make out in the snow.
All the while, our gestating baby rested in the warmth of my body, blissfully unaware of all the work that awaited him on this ranch where his dad had grown up. As I accompanied Marlboro Man on those long, frigid mornings of work, I wondered if our child would ever know the fun of sledding on a golf course hill…or any hill, for that matter. I’d lived on the ranch for five months and didn’t remember ever hearing about anyone sledding…or playing golf…or participating in any recreational activities at all. I was just beginning to wrap my mind around the way daily life unfolded here: wake up early, get your work done, eat, relax, and go to bed. Repeat daily. There wasn’t a calendar of events or dinner dates with friends in town or really much room for recreation--because that just meant double the work when you got back to work. It was hard for me not to wonder when any of these people ever went out and had a good time, or built a snowman.
Or slept past 5:00 A.M. ~ Ree Drummond,#NFDB
1226:Most obviously, they agreed, an autocatalytic set was a web of transformations among molecules in precisely the same way that an economy is a web of transformations among goods and services. In a very real sense, in fact, an autocatalytic set was an economy-a submicroscopic economy that extracted raw materials (the primordial "food" molecules) and converted them into useful products (more molecules in the set).
Moreover an autocatalytic set can bootstrap its own evolution in precisely the same way that an economy can, by growing more and more complex over time. This was a point that fascinated Kauffman. If innovations result from new combinations of old technologies, then the number of possible innovations would go up very rapidly as more and more technologies became available. In fact, he argued, once you get beyond a certain threshold of complexity you can expect a kind of phase transition analogous to the ones he had found in his autocatalytic sets. Below that level of complexity you would find countries dependent upon just a few major industries, and their economies would tend to be fragile and stagnant. In that case, it wouldn't matter how much investment got poured into the country. "If all you do is produce bananas, nothing will happen except that you produce more bananas." But if a country ever managed to diversify and increase its complexity above the critical point, then you would expect it to undergo an explosive increase in growth and innovation-what some economists have called an "economic takeoff."
The existence of that phase transition would also help explain why trade is so important to prosperity, Kauffman told Arthur. Suppose you have two different countries, each one of which is subcritical by itself. Their economies are going nowhere. But now suppose they start trading, so that their economies become interlinked into one large economy with a higher complexity. "I expect that trade between such systems will allow the joint system to become supercritical and explode outward."
Finally, an autocatalytic set can undergo exactly the same kinds of evolutionary booms and crashes that an economy does. Injecting one new kind of molecule into the soup could often transform the set utterly, in much the same way that the economy transformed when the horse was replaced by the automobile. This was part of autocatalysis that really captivated Arthur. It had the same qualities that had so fascinated him when he first read about molecular biology: upheaval and change and enormous consequences flowing from trivial-seeming events-and yet with deep law hidden beneath. ~ M Mitchell Waldrop,#NFDB
1227:Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions. We probably adopt this strategy not so much because of any lack of interest or power but because of a longstanding conviction that for much of human behavior there are no relevant antecedents. The function of the inner man is to provide an explanation which will not be explained in turn. Explanation stops with him. He is not a mediator between past history and current behavior, he is a center from which behavior emanates. He initiates, originates, and creates, and in doing so he remains, as he was for the Greeks, divine. We say that he is autonomous—and, so far as a science of behavior is concerned, that means miraculous. The position is, of course, vulnerable. Autonomous man serves to explain only the things we are not yet able to explain in other ways. His existence depends upon our ignorance, and he naturally loses status as we come to know more about behavior. The task of a scientific analysis is to explain how the behavior of a person as a physical system is related to the conditions under which the human species evolved and the conditions under which the individual lives. Unless there is indeed some capricious or creative intervention, these events must be related, and no intervention is in fact needed. The contingencies of survival responsible for man’s genetic endowment would produce tendencies to act aggressively, not feelings of aggression. The punishment of sexual behavior changes sexual behavior, and any feelings which may arise are at best by-products. Our age is not suffering from anxiety but from the accidents, crimes, wars, and other dangerous and painful things to which people are so often exposed. Young people drop out of school, refuse to get jobs, and associate only with others of their own age not because they feel alienated but because of defective social environments in homes, schools, factories, and elsewhere. We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behavior and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior. ~ B F Skinner, #NFDB
1228:This was not an academic matter. Biology, as George Wald had said, was a unique science because it could not define its subject matter. Nobody had a definition for life. Nobody knew what it was, really. The old definitions-- an organism that showed ingestion, excretion, metabolism, reproduction, and so on-- were worthless. One could always find exceptions. The group had finally concluded that energy conversion was the hallmark of life. All living organisms in some way took in energy-- as food, or sunlight-- and converted it to another form of energy, and put it to use. (Viruses were the exception to this rule, but the group was prepared to define viruses as nonliving.) For the next meeting, Leavitt was asked to prepare a rebuttal to the definition. He pondered it for a week, and returned with three objects: a swatch of black cloth, a watch, and a piece of granite. He set them down before the group and said, "Gentleman, I give you three living things." He then challenged the team to prove that they were not living. He placed the black cloth in the sunlight; it became warm. This, he announced, was an example of energy conversion-radiant energy to heat. It was objected that this was merely passive energy absorption, not conversion. It was also objected that the conversion, if it could be called that, was not purposeful. It served no function. "How do you know it is not purposeful?" Leavitt had demanded. They then turned to the watch. Leavitt pointed to the radium dial, which glowed in the dark. Decay was taking place, and light was being produced. The men argued that this was merely release of potential energy held in unstable electron levels. But there was growing confusion; Leavitt was making his point. Finally, they came to the granite. "This is alive," Leavitt said. "It is living, breathing, walking, and talking. Only we cannot see it, because it is happening too slowly. Rock has a lifespan of three billion years. We have a lifespan of sixty or seventy years. We cannot see what is happening to this rock for the same reason that we cannot make out the tune on a record being played at the rate of one revolution every century. And the rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan. To it, we are like flashes in the dark." He held up his watch. His point was clear enough, and they revised their thinking in one important respect. They conceded that it was possible that they might not be able to analyze certain life forms. It was possible that they might not be able to make the slightest headway, the least beginning, in such an analysis. ========== ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1229:Marc Goodman is a cyber crime specialist with an impressive résumé. He has worked with the Los Angeles Police Department, Interpol, NATO, and the State Department. He is the chief cyber criminologist at the Cybercrime Research Institute, founder of the Future Crime Institute, and now head of the policy, law, and ethics track at SU. When breaking down this threat, Goodman sees four main categories of concern. The first issue is personal. “In many nations,” he says, “humanity is fully dependent on the Internet. Attacks against banks could destroy all records. Someone’s life savings could vanish in an instant. Hacking into hospitals could cost hundreds of lives if blood types were changed. And there are already 60,000 implantable medical devices connected to the Internet. As the integration of biology and information technology proceeds, pacemakers, cochlear implants, diabetic pumps, and so on, will all become the target of cyber attacks.” Equally alarming are threats against physical infrastructures that are now hooked up to the net and vulnerable to hackers (as was recently demonstrated with Iran’s Stuxnet incident), among them bridges, tunnels, air traffic control, and energy pipelines. We are heavily dependent on these systems, but Goodman feels that the technology being employed to manage them is no longer up to date, and the entire network is riddled with security threats. Robots are the next issue. In the not-too-distant future, these machines will be both commonplace and connected to the Internet. They will have superior strength and speed and may even be armed (as is the case with today’s military robots). But their Internet connection makes them vulnerable to attack, and very few security procedures have been implemented to prevent such incidents. Goodman’s last area of concern is that technology is constantly coming between us and reality. “We believe what the computer tells us,” says Goodman. “We read our email through computer screens; we speak to friends and family on Facebook; doctors administer medicines based upon what a computer tells them the medical lab results are; traffic tickets are issued based upon what cameras tell us a license plate says; we pay for items at stores based upon a total provided by a computer; we elect governments as a result of electronic voting systems. But the problem with all this intermediated life is that it can be spoofed. It’s really easy to falsify what is seen on our computer screens. The more we disconnect from the physical and drive toward the digital, the more we lose the ability to tell the real from the fake. Ultimately, bad actors (whether criminals, terrorists, or rogue governments) will have the ability to exploit this trust. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
1230:All my life I have wondered about the possibility of life elsewhere. What would it be like? Of what would it be made? All living things on our planet are constructed of organic molecules—complex microscopic architectures in which the carbon atom plays a central role. There was once a time before life, when the Earth was barren and utterly desolate. Our world is now overflowing with life. How did it come about? How, in the absence of life, were carbon-based organic molecules made? How did the first living things arise? How did life evolve to produce beings as elaborate and complex as we, able to explore the mystery of our own origins? And on the countless other planets that may circle other suns, is there life also? Is extraterrestrial life, if it exists, based on the same organic molecules as life on Earth? Do the beings of other worlds look much like life on Earth? Or are they stunningly different—other adaptations to other environments? What else is possible? The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question—the search for who we are. In the great dark between the stars there are clouds of gas and dust and organic matter. Dozens of different kinds of organic molecules have been found there by radio telescopes. The abundance of these molecules suggests that the stuff of life is everywhere. Perhaps the origin and evolution of life is, given enough time, a cosmic inevitability. On some of the billions of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, life may never arise. On others, it may arise and die out, or never evolve beyond its simplest forms. And on some small fraction of worlds there may develop intelligences and civilizations more advanced than our own. Occasionally someone remarks on what a lucky coincidence it is that the Earth is perfectly suitable for life—moderate temperatures, liquid water, oxygen atmosphere, and so on. But this is, at least in part, a confusion of cause and effect. We earthlings are supremely well adapted to the environment of the Earth because we grew up here. Those earlier forms of life that were not well adapted died. We are descended from the organisms that did well. Organisms that evolve on a quite different world will doubtless sing its praises too. All life on Earth is closely related. We have a common organic chemistry and a common evolutionary heritage. As a result, our biologists are profoundly limited. They study only a single kind of biology, one lonely theme in the music of life. Is this faint and reedy tune the only voice for thousands of light-years? Or is there a kind of cosmic fugue, with themes and counterpoints, dissonances and harmonies, a billion different voices playing the life music of the Galaxy? Let ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1231:Jack coughed slightly and offered his hand. “Hi, uh. I’m Jack.”
Kim took it. “Jack what?”
“Huh?”
“Your last name, silly.”
“Jackson.”
She blinked at him. “Your name is Jack Jackson?”
He blushed. “No, uh, my first name’s Rhett, but I hate it, so…”
He gestured to the chair and she sat. Her dress rode up several inches, exposing pleasing long lines of creamy skin. “Well, Jack, what’s your field of study?”
“Biological Engineering, Genetics, and Microbiology. Post-doc. I’m working on a research project at the institute.”
“Really? Oh, uh, my apple martini’s getting a little low.”
“I’ve got that, one second.” He scurried to the bar and bought her a fresh one. She sipped and managed to make it look not only seductive but graceful as well.
“What do you want to do after you’re done with the project?” Kim continued.
“Depends on what I find.”
She sent him a simmering smile. “What are you looking for?”
Immediately, Jack’s eyes lit up and his posture straightened. “I started the project with the intention of learning how to increase the reproduction of certain endangered species. I had interest in the idea of cloning, but it proved too difficult based on the research I compiled, so I went into animal genetics and cellular biology. It turns out the animals with the best potential to combine genes were reptiles because their ability to lay eggs was a smoother transition into combining the cells to create a new species, or one with a similar ancestry that could hopefully lead to rebuilding extinct animals via surrogate birth or in-vitro fertilization. We’re on the edge of breaking that code, and if we do, it would mean that we could engineer all kinds of life and reverse what damage we’ve done to the planet’s ecosystem.”
Kim stared. “Right. Would you excuse me for a second?”
She wiggled off back to her pack of friends by the bar. Judging by the sniggering and the disgusted glances he was getting, she wasn’t coming back.
Jack sighed and finished off his beer, massaging his forehead. “Yes, brilliant move. You blinded her with science. Genius, Jack.”
He ordered a second one and finished it before he felt smallish hands on his shoulders and a pair of soft lips on his cheek. He turned to find Kamala had returned, her smile unnaturally bright in the black lights glowing over the room. “So…how did it go with Kim?”
He shot her a flat look. “You notice the chair is empty.”
Kamala groaned. “You talked about the research project, didn’t you?”
“No!” She glared at him.
“…maybe…”
“You’re so useless, Jack.” She paused and then tousled his hair a bit. “Cheer up. The night’s still young. I’m not giving up on you.”
He smiled in spite of himself. “Yet.”
Her brown eyes flashed. “Never. ~ Kyoko M,#NFDB
1232:What do woman say to little boys? " Stop fighting. Stop being so rough. Stop rough housing." They're boys you know, that's kinda what they're sapossed to do. So, men are sapossed to overcome all these biological drives and I'm just really interested in helping women overcome theirs caus' I think the spotlight of " Outgrow your bestial nature." has been pointed just a little bit too long at men and I think it's time to swivel that motherfucker around and point it at woman and say stop making yourself look like fucking sex clowns to milk money out of men's dicks. Stop lying about who you are and what you're about. Stop being flirty, manipulative, and trying to be sexy. Just stop doing it.
It's time for women to outgrow biology just as men have been instructed to for about the last 20,000 years to outgrow their biology. "Stop slamming doors. Stop yelling. Stop climbing trees. Stop being rude. Stop farting. Stop enjoying fart jokes. Just stop being men."
Ok, Well; women stop being women. Be people. Be people who have sex, absolutely but, don't be caricatures. Don't aim to be like a woman who looks like the outline of some playboy mudflap on a trucker's rig. Just be people. Be sexual. Enjoy your sexuality and bodies but, stop trying to bury us in tits so that we pass out and you can rifle through our bank accounts. Just stop doing that shit. I won't enable it anymore. Why does your face have to look like some half rained on Picasso water color? I don't need rainbows on the face of a woman. I don't need these weird butterfly wing goth eyebrows and shit like that.
Male sexuality is demonized and female sexuality is elevated. That's bullshit. Then women wonder why men prefer porn to them. It's caus' porn doesn't nag you for wanting stuff that's defined as "kinky" or "weird". Male sexuality is demonized and held in low esteem. Woman's sexuality is always beautiful.
Woman's sexuality is unremitting shallow. I'm not saying men's isn't but, we know that about men, right? What turns women on? Women say confidence. Do you know what that means? Money. Do women say " He is really confident about his sidewalk art. He is really confident about his subway busking. That's such a turn on!"
Why do men like looking at naked women and women get turned on looking at clothed men? Because if a man's clothes aren't on you don't know how expensive his wardrobe is.
This is what Mohammad Ali said. I'm going to throw on some old jeans and a old t-shirt and I'm just gonna walk down into some little town and find some woman who doesn't know who the hell I am and then when she's fallen in love with me and we get married, I'm going to take her to my million dollar mansion and my yacht. This is the reality. Once you start having money, once you start having power, then the true nature of massive swaths of female sexuality becomes clear. ~ Stefan Molyneux,#NFDB
1233:What troubles me most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience. Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don’t eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, she’ll make something special for me, in which case I’ll feel bad. On this matter I’m inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners. Even if the vegetarian is a more highly evolved human being, it seems to me he has lost something along the way, something I’m not prepared to dismiss as trivial. Healthy and virtuous as I may feel these days, I also feel alienated from traditions I value: cultural traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey, or even franks at the ballpark, and family traditions like my mother’s beef brisket at Passover. These ritual meals link us to our history along multiple lines—family, religion, landscape, nation, and, if you want to go back much further, biology. For although humans no longer need meat in order to survive (now that we can get our B-12 from fermented foods or supplements), we have been meat eaters for most of our time on earth. This fact of evolutionary history is reflected in the design of our teeth, the structure of our digestion, and, quite possibly, in the way my mouth still waters at the sight of a steak cooked medium rare. Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished. This isn’t to say we can’t or shouldn’t transcend our inheritance, only that it is our inheritance; whatever else may be gained by giving up meat, this much at least is lost. The notion of granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten—of predation—but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our identity—of our own animality. (This is one of the odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.) Not that the sacrifice of our animality is necessarily regrettable; no one regrets our giving up raping and pillaging, also part of our inheritance. But we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex—also now technically unnecessary for reproduction—a mere recreational preference. Rather, our meat eating is something very deep indeed. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
1234:After the plates are removed by the silent and swift waiting staff, General Çiller leans forward and says across the table to Güney, ‘What’s this I’m reading in Hürriyet about Strasbourg breaking up the nation?’
‘It’s not breaking up the nation. It’s a French motion to implement European Regional Directive 8182 which calls for a Kurdish Regional Parliament.’
‘And that’s not breaking up the nation?’ General Çiller throws up his hands in exasperation. He’s a big, square man, the model of the military, but he moves freely and lightly ‘The French prancing all over the legacy of Atatürk? What do you think, Mr Sarioğlu?’
The trap could not be any more obvious but Ayşe sees Adnan straighten his tie, the code for, Trust me, I know what I’m doing,
‘What I think about the legacy of Atatürk, General? Let it go. I don’t care. The age of Atatürk is over.’
Guests stiffen around the table, breath subtly indrawn; social gasps. This is heresy. People have been shot down in the streets of Istanbul for less. Adnan commands every eye.
‘Atatürk was father of the nation, unquestionably. No Atatürk, no Turkey. But, at some point every child has to leave his father. You have to stand on your own two feet and find out if you’re a man. We’re like kids that go on about how great their dads are; my dad’s the strongest, the best wrestler, the fastest driver, the biggest moustache. And when someone squares up to us, or calls us a name or even looks at us squinty, we run back shouting ‘I’ll get my dad, I’ll get my dad!’ At some point; we have to grow up. If you’ll pardon the expression, the balls have to drop. We talk the talk mighty fine: great nation, proud people, global union of the noble Turkic races, all that stuff. There’s no one like us for talking ourselves up. And then the EU says, All right, prove it. The door’s open, in you come; sit down, be one of us. Move out of the family home; move in with the other guys. Step out from the shadow of the Father of the Nation.
‘And do you know what the European Union shows us about ourselves? We’re all those things we say we are. They weren’t lies, they weren’t boasts. We’re good. We’re big. We’re a powerhouse. We’ve got an economy that goes all the way to the South China Sea. We’ve got energy and ideas and talent - look at the stuff that’s coming out of those tin-shed business parks in the nano sector and the synthetic biology start-ups. Turkish. All Turkish. That’s the legacy of Atatürk. It doesn’t matter if the Kurds have their own Parliament or the French make everyone stand in Taksim Square and apologize to the Armenians. We’re the legacy of Atatürk. Turkey is the people. Atatürk’s done his job. He can crumble into dust now. The kid’s come right. The kid’s come very right. That’s why I believe the EU’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us because it’s finally taught us how to be Turks.’
General Çiller beats a fist on the table, sending the cutlery leaping.
‘By God, by God; that’s a bold thing to say but you’re exactly right. ~ Ian McDonald,#NFDB
1235:he importance and influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can scarcely be exaggerated. A century after Darwin’s death, the great evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Ernst Mayr, wrote, ‘The worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859, when On the Origin of Species was published, was by necessity quite different from a worldview formed prior to 1859… The intellectual revolution generated by Darwin went far beyond the confines of biology, causing the overthrow of some of the most basic beliefs of his age.’1 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s biographers, contend, ‘Darwin is arguably the best known scientist in history. More than any modern thinker—even Freud or Marx—this affable old-world naturalist from the minor Shropshire gentry has transformed the way we see ourselves on the planet.’2 In the words of the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Almost no one is indifferent to Darwin, and no one should be. The Darwinian theory is a scientific theory, and a great one, but that is not all it is… Darwin’s dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even to themselves.’3 Dennett goes on to add, ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.’4 The editors of the Cambridge Companion to Darwin begin their introduction by stating, ‘Some scientific thinkers, while not themselves philosophers, make philosophers necessary. Charles Darwin is an obvious case. His conclusions about the history and diversity of life—including the evolutionary origin of humans—have seemed to bear on fundamental questions about being, knowledge, virtue and justice.’5 Among the fundamental questions raised by Darwin’s work, which are still being debated by philosophers (and others) are these: ‘Are we different in kind from other animals? Do our apparently unique capacities for language, reason and morality point to a divine spark within us, or to ancestral animal legacies still in evidence in our simian relatives? What forms of social life are we naturally disposed towards—competitive and selfish forms, or cooperative and altruistic ones?’6 As the editors of the volume point out, virtually the entire corpus of the foundational works of Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes to Kant to Hegel, has had to be re-examined in the light of Darwin’s work. Darwin continues to be read, discussed, interpreted, used, abused—and misused—to this day. As the philosopher and historian of science, Jean Gayon, puts it, ‘[T]his persistent positioning of new developments in relation to a single, pioneering figure is quite exceptional in the history of modern natural science. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
1236:Quantum physicists discovered that physical atoms are made up of vortices of energy that are constantly spinning and vibrating; each atom is like a wobbly spinning top that radiates energy. Because each atom has its own specific energy signature (wobble), assemblies of atoms (molecules) collectively radiate their own identifying energy patterns. So every material structure in the universe, including you and me, radiates a unique energy signature. If it were theoretically possible to observe the composition of an actual atom with a microscope, what would we see? Imagine a swirling dust devil cutting across the desert’s floor. Now remove the sand and dirt from the funnel cloud. What you have left is an invisible, tornado-like vortex. A number of infinitesimally small, dust devil–like energy vortices called quarks and photons collectively make up the structure of the atom. From far away, the atom would likely appear as a blurry sphere. As its structure came nearer to focus, the atom would become less clear and less distinct. As the surface of the atom drew near, it would disappear. You would see nothing. In fact, as you focused through the entire structure of the atom, all you would observe is a physical void. The atom has no physical structure—the emperor has no clothes! Remember the atomic models you studied in school, the ones with marbles and ball bearings going around like the solar system? Let’s put that picture beside the “physical” structure of the atom discovered by quantum physicists. No, there has not been a printing mistake; atoms are made out of invisible energy not tangible matter! So in our world, material substance (matter) appears out of thin air. Kind of weird, when you think about it. Here you are holding this physical book in your hands. Yet if you were to focus on the book’s material substance with an atomic microscope, you would see that you are holding nothing. As it turns out, we undergraduate biology majors were right about one thing—the quantum universe is mind-bending. Let’s look more closely at the “now you see it, now you don’t” nature of quantum physics. Matter can simultaneously be defined as a solid (particle) and as an immaterial force field (wave). When scientists study the physical properties of atoms, such as mass and weight, they look and act like physical matter. However, when the same atoms are described in terms of voltage potentials and wavelengths, they exhibit the qualities and properties of energy (waves). (Hackermüller, et al, 2003; Chapman, et al, 1995; Pool 1995) The fact that energy and matter are one and the same is precisely what Einstein recognized when he concluded that E = mc2. Simply stated, this equation reveals that energy (E) = matter (m, mass) multiplied by the speed of light squared (c2). Einstein revealed that we do not live in a universe with discrete, physical objects separated by dead space. The Universe is one indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled it is impossible to consider them as independent elements. ~ Bruce H Lipton, #NFDB
1237:If marriage is the great mystery of the City, the image of the Coinherence - if we do indeed become members one of another in it - then there is obviously going to be a fundamental need in marriage for two people to be able to get along with each other and with themselves. And that is precisely what the rules of human behavior are about. They are concerned with the mortaring of the joints of the City, with the strengthening of the ligatures of the Body. The moral laws are not just a collection of arbitrary parking regulations invented by God to make life complicated; they are the only way for human nature to be natural.
For example, I am told not to lie because in the long run lying destroys my own, and my neighbor's nature. And the same goes for murder and envy, obviously; for gluttony and sloth, not quite so obviously; and for lust and pride not very obviously at all, but just as truly. Marriage is natural, and it demands the fullness of nature if it is to be itself. But human nature. And human nature in one piece, not in twenty-three self-frustrating fragments. A man and a woman schooled in pride cannot simply sit down together and start caring. It takes humility to look wide-eyed at somebody else, to praise, to cherish, to honor. They will have to acquire some before they can succeed. For as long as it lasts, of course, the first throes of romantic love will usually exhort it from them, but when the initial wonder fades and familiarity begins to hobble biology, it's going to take virtue to bring it off.
Again, a husband and a wife cannot long exist as one flesh, if they are habitually unkind, rude, or untruthful. Every sin breaks down the body of the Mystery, puts asunder what God and nature have joined. The marriage rite is aware of this; it binds us to loving, to honoring, to cherishing, for just that reason. This is all obvious in the extreme, but it needs saying loudly and often. The only available candidates for matrimony are, every last one of them, sinners. As sinners, they are in a fair way to wreck themselves and anyone else who gets within arm's length of them. Without virtue, therefore, no marriage will make it. The first of all vocations, the ground line of the walls of the New Jerusalem is made of stuff like truthfulness, patience, love and liberality; of prudence, justice, temperance and courage; and of all their adjuncts and circumstances: manners, consideration, fair speech and the ability to keep one's mouth shut and one's heart open, as needed.
And since this is all so utterly necessary and so highly likely to be in short supply at the crucial moments, it isn't going to be enough to deliver earnest exhortations to uprightness and stalwartness. The parties to matrimony should be prepared for its being, on numerous occasions, no party at all; they should be instructed that they will need both forgiveness and forgivingness if they are to survive the festivities. Neither virtue, nor the ability to forgive the absence of virtue are about to force their presence on us, and therefore we ought to be loudly and frequently forewarned that only the grace of God is sufficient to keep nature from coming unstuck. Fallen man does not rise by his own efforts; there is no balm in Gilead. Our domestic ills demand an imported remedy. ~ Robert Farrar Capon,#NFDB
1238:To understand how shame is influenced by culture, we need to think back to when we were children or young adults, and we first learned how important it is to be liked, to fit in, and to please others. The lessons were often taught by shame; sometimes overtly, other times covertly. Regardless of how they happened, we can all recall experiences of feeling rejected, diminished and ridiculed. Eventually, we learned to fear these feelings. We learned how to change our behaviors, thinking and feelings to avoid feeling shame. In the process, we changed who we were and, in many instances, who we are now. Our culture teaches us about shame—it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren’t born craving perfect bodies. We weren’t born afraid to tell our stories. We weren’t born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable. We weren’t born with a Pottery Barn catalog in one hand and heartbreaking debt in the other. Shame comes from outside of us—from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from the inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate. We are wired for connection. It’s in our biology. As infants, our need for connection is about survival. As we grow older, connection means thriving—emotionally, physically, spiritually and intellectually. Connection is critical because we all have the basic need to feel accepted and to believe that we belong and are valued for who we are. Shame unravels our connection to others. In fact, I often refer to shame as the fear of disconnection—the fear of being perceived as flawed and unworthy of acceptance or belonging. Shame keeps us from telling our own stories and prevents us from listening to others tell their stories. We silence our voices and keep our secrets out of the fear of disconnection. When we hear others talk about their shame, we often blame them as a way to protect ourselves from feeling uncomfortable. Hearing someone talk about a shaming experience can sometimes be as painful as actually experiencing it for ourselves. Like courage, empathy and compassion are critical components of shame resilience. Practicing compassion allows us to hear shame. Empathy, the most powerful tool of compassion, is an emotional skill that allows us to respond to others in a meaningful, caring way. Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes—to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding. When we share a difficult experience with someone, and that person responds in an open, deeply connected way—that’s empathy. Developing empathy can enrich the relationships we have with our partners, colleagues, family members and children. In Chapter 2, I’ll discuss the concept of empathy in great detail. You’ll learn how it works, how we can learn to be empathic and why the opposite of experiencing shame is experiencing empathy. The prerequisite for empathy is compassion. We can only respond empathically if we are willing to hear someone’s pain. We sometimes think of compassion as a saintlike virtue. It’s not. In fact, compassion is possible for anyone who can accept the struggles that make us human—our fears, imperfections, losses and shame. We can only respond compassionately to someone telling her story if we have embraced our own story—shame and all. Compassion is not a virtue—it is a commitment. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1239:Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence.
But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence.
And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence.
Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe?
Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred? ~ Alan Sokal,#NFDB
1240:Why two (or whole groups) of people can come up with the same story or idea at the same time, even when across the world from each-other:
"A field is a region of influence, where a force will influence objects at a distance with nothing in between. We and our universe live in a Quantum sea of light. Scientists have found that the real currency of the universe is an exchange of energy. Life radiates light, even when grown in the dark. Creation takes place amidst a background sea of energy, which metaphysics might call the Force, and scientists call the "Field." (Officially the Zero Point Field) There is no empty space, even the darkest empty space is actually a cauldron of energies. Matter is simply concentrations of this energy (particles are just little knots of energy.) All life is energy (light) interacting. The universe is self-regenreating and eternal, constantly refreshing itself and in touch with every other part of itself instantaneously. Everything in it is giving, exchanging and interacting with energy, coming in and out of existence at every level. The self has a field of influence on the world and visa versa based on this energy.
Biology has more and more been determined a quantum process, and consciousness as well, functions at the quantum level (connected to a universe of energy that underlies and connects everything). Scientist Walter Schempp's showed that long and short term memory is stored not in our brain but in this "Field" of energy or light that pervades and creates the universe and world we live in.
A number of scientists since him would go on to argue that the brain is simply the retrieval and read-out mechanism of the ultimate storage medium - the Field. Associates from Japan would hypothesize that what we think of as memory is simply a coherent emission of signals from the "Field," and that longer memories are a structured grouping of this wave information. If this were true, it would explain why one tiny association often triggers a riot of sights, sounds and smells. It would also explain why, with long-term memory in particular, recall is instantaneous and doesn't require any scanning mechanism to sift through years and years of memory.
If they are correct, our brain is not a storage medium but a receiving mechanism in every sense, and memory is simply a distant cousin of perception.
Some scientists went as far as to suggest that all of our higher cognitive processes result from an interaction with the Field. This kind of constant interaction might account for intuition or creativity - and how ideas come to us in bursts of insight, sometimes in fragments but often as a miraculous whole. An intuitive leap might simply be a sudden coalescence of coherence in the Field.
The fact that the human body was exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation suggested something profound about the world. It hinted at human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper and more extended than we presently understand. It also blurred the boundary lines of our individuality - our very sense of separateness. If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a Field and sending out and receiving quantum information, where did we end and the rest of the world began? Where was consciousness-encased inside our bodies or out there in the Field?
Indeed, there was no more 'out there' if we and the rest of the world were so intrinsically interconnected. In ignoring the effect of the "Field" modern physicists set mankind back, by eliminating the possibility of interconnectedness and obscuring a scientific explanation for many kinds of miracles. In re-normalizing their equations (to leave this part out) what they'd been doing was a little like subtracting God. ~ Lynne McTaggart,#NFDB
1241:Sam’s the man who’s come to chop us up to bits. No wonder I kicked him out. No wonder I changed the locks. If he cannot stop death, what good is he? ‘Open the door. Please. I’m so tired,’ he says. I look at the night that absorbed my life. How am I supposed to know what’s love, what’s fear? ‘If you’re Sam who am I?’ ‘I know who you are.’ ‘You do?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Who?’ Don’t say wife, I think. Don’t say mother. I put my face to the glass, but it’s dark. I don’t reflect. Sam and I watch each other through the window of the kitchen door. He coughs some more. ‘I want to come home,’ he says. ‘I want us to be okay. That’s it. Simple. I want to come home and be a family.’ ‘But I am not simple.’ My body’s coursing with secret genes and hormones and proteins. My body made eyeballs and I have no idea how. There’s nothing simple about eyeballs. My body made food to feed those eyeballs. How? And how can I not know or understand the things that happen inside my body? That seems very dangerous. There’s nothing simple here. I’m ruled by elixirs and compounds. I am a chemistry project conducted by a wild child. I am potentially explosive. Maybe I love Sam because hormones say I need a man to kill the coyotes at night, to bring my babies meat. But I don’t want caveman love. I want love that lives outside the body. I want love that lives.
‘In what ways are you not simple?’ I think of the women I collected upstairs. They’re inside me. And they are only a small fraction of the catalog. I think of molds, of the sea, the biodiversity of plankton. I think of my dad when he was a boy, when he was a tree bud. ‘It’s complicated,’ I say, and then the things I don’t say yet. Words aren’t going to be the best way here. How to explain something that’s coming into existence? ‘I get that now.’ His shoulders tremble some. They jerk. He coughs. I have infected him. ‘Sam.’ We see each other through the glass. We witness each other. That’s something, to be seen by another human, to be seen over all the years. That’s something, too. Love plus time. Love that’s movable, invisible as a liquid or gas, love that finds a way in. Love that leaks. ‘Unlock the door,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to love you because I’m scared.’ ‘So you imagine bad things about me. You imagine me doing things I’ve never done to get rid of me. Kick me out so you won’t have to worry about me leaving?’ ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Right.’ And I’m glad he gets that. Sam cocks his head the same way a coyote might, a coyote who’s been temporarily confused by a question of biology versus mortality. What’s the difference between living and imagining? What’s the difference between love and security? Coyotes are not moral. ‘Unlock the door?’ he asks. This family is an experiment, the biggest I’ve ever been part of, an experiment called: How do you let someone in? ‘Unlock the door,’ he says again. ‘Please.’ I release the lock. I open the door. That’s the best definition of love. Sam comes inside. He turns to shut the door, then stops himself. He stares out into the darkness where he came from. What does he think is out there? What does he know? Or is he scared I’ll kick him out again? That is scary. ‘What if we just left the door open?’ he asks. ‘Open.’ And more, more things I don’ts say about the bodies of women. ‘Yeah.’ ‘What about skunks?’ I mean burglars, gangs, evil. We both peer out into the dark, looking for thees scary things. We watch a long while. The night does nothing. ‘We could let them in if they want in,’ he says, but seems uncertain still. ‘Really?’ He draws the door open wider and we leave it that way, looking out at what we can’t see. Unguarded, unafraid, love and loved. We keep the door open as if there are no doors, no walls, no skin, no houses, no difference between us and all the things we think of as the night. ~ Samantha Hunt,#NFDB
1242:My own observations had by now convinced me that the mind of the average Westerner held an utterly distorted image of Islam. What I saw in the pages of the Koran was not a ‘crudely materialistic’ world-view but, on the contrary, an intense God-consciousness that expressed itself in a rational acceptance of all God-created nature: a harmonious side-by-side of intellect and sensual urge, spiritual need and social demand. It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it.
For, indeed, it was Islam that had carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God’s creation and, thus, of His will. No demand had been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet’s message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared that ‘Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman’: and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. When they pondered the Prophet’s saying, ‘God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well’, they realised that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute to a fulfilment of God’s will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse, ‘We create every living thing out of water’ - and in their endeavour to penetrate to the meaning of these words, they began to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology. The Koran pointed to the harmony of the stars and their movements as witnesses of their Creator’s glory: and thereupon the sciences of astronomy and mathematics were taken up by the Muslims with a fervour which in other religions was reserved for prayer alone. The Copernican system, which established the earth’s rotation around its axis and the revolution of the planet’s around the sun, was evolved in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century (only to be met by the fury of the ecclesiastics, who read in it a contradiction of the literal teachings of the Bible): but the foundations of this system had actually been laid six hundred years earlier, in Muslim countries - for already in the ninth and tenth centuries Muslim astronomers had reached the conclusion that the earth was globular and that it rotated around its axis, and had made accurate calculations of latitudes and longitudes; and many of them maintained - without ever being accused of hearsay - that the earth rotated around the sun. And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all the other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that ‘If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the way to Paradise’; that ‘The scientist walks in the path of God’; that ‘The superiority of the learned man over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars’; and that ‘The ink of the scholars is more precious that the blood of martyrs’.
Throughout the whole creative period of Muslim history - that is to say, during the first five centuries after the Prophet’s time - science and learning had no greater champion than Muslim civilisation and no home more secure than the lands in which Islam was supreme. ~ Muhammad Asad,#NFDB
1243:Ms. Terwilliger didn’t have a chance to respond to my geological ramblings because someone knocked on the door. I slipped the rocks into my pocket and tried to look studious as she called an entry. I figured Zoe had tracked me down, but surprisingly, Angeline walked in.
"Did you know," she said, "that it’s a lot harder to put organs back in the body than it is to get them out?"
I closed my eyes and silently counted to five before opening them again. “Please tell me you haven’t eviscerated someone.”
She shook her head. “No, no. I left my biology homework in Miss Wentworth’s room, but when I went back to get it, she’d already left and locked the door. But it’s due tomorrow, and I’m already in trouble in there, so I had to get it. So, I went around outside, and her window lock wasn’t that hard to open, and I—”
"Wait," I interrupted. "You broke into a classroom?"
"Yeah, but that’s not the problem."
Behind me, I heard a choking laugh from Ms. Terwilliger’s desk.
"Go on," I said wearily.
"Well, when I climbed through, I didn’t realize there was a bunch of stuff in the way, and I crashed into those plastic models of the human body she has. You know, the life size ones with all the parts inside? And bam!" Angeline held up her arms for effect. "Organs everywhere." She paused and looked at me expectantly. "So what are we going to do? I can’t get in trouble with her."
"We?" I exclaimed.
"Here," said Ms. Terwilliger. I turned around, and she tossed me a set of keys. From the look on her face, it was taking every ounce of self-control not to burst out laughing. "That square one’s a master. I know for a fact she has yoga and won’t be back for the rest of the day. I imagine you can repair the damage—and retrieve the homework—before anyone’s the wiser.”
I knew that the “you” in “you can repair” meant me. With a sigh, I stood up and packed up my things. “Thanks,” I said.
As Angeline and I walked down to the science wing, I told her, “You know, the next time you’ve got a problem, maybe come to me before it becomes an even bigger problem.”
"Oh no," she said nobly. "I didn’t want to be an inconvenience."
Her description of the scene was pretty accurate: organs everywhere. Miss Wentworth had two models, male and female, with carved out torsos that cleverly held removable parts of the body that could be examined in greater detail. Wisely, she had purchased models that were only waist-high. That was still more than enough of a mess for us, especially since it was hard to tell which model the various organs belonged to.
I had a pretty good sense of anatomy but still opened up a textbook for reference as I began sorting. Angeline, realizing her uselessness here, perched on a far counter and swing her legs as she watched me. I’d started reassembling the male when I heard a voice behind me.
"Melbourne, I always knew you’d need to learn about this kind of thing. I’d just kind of hoped you’d learn it on a real guy."
I glanced back at Trey, as he leaned in the doorway with a smug expression. “Ha, ha. If you were a real friend, you’d come help me.” I pointed to the female model. “Let’s see some of your alleged expertise in action.”
"Alleged?" He sounded indignant but strolled in anyways.
I hadn’t really thought much about asking him for help. Mostly I was thinking this was taking much longer than it should, and I had more important things to do with my time. It was only when he came to a sudden halt that I realized my mistake.
"Oh," he said, seeing Angeline. "Hi."
Her swinging feet stopped, and her eyes were as wide as his. “Um, hi.”
The tension ramped up from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds, and everyone seemed at a loss for words. Angeline jerked her head toward the models and blurted out. “I had an accident.”
That seemed to snap Trey from his daze, and a smile curved his lips. Whereas Angeline’s antics made me want to pull out my hair sometimes, he found them endearing. ~ Richelle Mead,#NFDB
1244:had to instruct the announcers to say "'Dillan,' the way he himself pronounced
it". His middle name, Marlais, was given to him in honour of his great-uncle,
Unitarian minister William Thomas, whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles.
His childhood was spent largely in Swansea, with regular summer trips to visit his
maternal aunts' Carmarthenshire farms. These rural sojourns and the contrast
with the town life of Swansea provided inspiration for much of his work, notably
many short stories, radio essays, and the poem Fern Hill. Thomas was known to
be a sickly child who suffered from bronchitis and asthma. He shied away from
school and preferred reading on his own. He was considered too frail to fight in
World War II, instead serving the war effort by writing scripts for the
government. Thomas's formal education began at Mrs. Hole's Dame school, a
private school which was situated a few streets away on Mirador Crescent. He
described his experience there in Quite Early One Morning:
Never was there such a dame school as ours, so firm and kind and smelling of
galoshes, with the sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons drifting down
from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked
sat over undone sums, or to repent a little crime — the pulling of a girl's hair
during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature.
In October 1925, Thomas attended the single-sex Swansea Grammar School, in
the Mount Pleasant district of the city, where his father taught. He was an
undistinguished student. Thomas's first poem was published in the school's
magazine. He later became its editor. He began keeping poetry notebooks and
amassed 200 poems in four such journals between 1930 and 1934. He left school
at 16 to become a reporter for the local newspaper, the South Wales Daily Post,
only to leave the job under pressure 18 months later in 1932. After leaving the
job he filled his notebooks even faster. Of the 90 poems he published, half were
written during these first years. He then joined an amateur dramatic group in
Mumbles called Little Theatre (Now Known as Swansea Little Theatre), but still
continued to work as a freelance journalist for a few more years.
Thomas spent his time visiting the cinema in the Uplands, walking along
Swansea Bay, visiting a theatre where he used to perform, and frequenting
Swansea's pubs. He especially patronised those in the Mumbles area such the
Antelope Hotel and the Mermaid Hotel. A short walk from the local newspaper
where he worked was the Kardomah Café in Castle Street, central Swansea. At
the café he met with various artist contemporaries, such as his good friend the
poet Vernon Watkins. These writers, musicians and artists became known as 'The
Kardomah Gang'. In 1932, Thomas embarked on what would be one of his
various visits to London.
In February 1941, Swansea was bombed by the German Luftwaffe in a "three
nights' blitz". Castle Street was just one of the many streets in Swansea that
suffered badly; the rows of shops, including the 'Kardomah Café', were
destroyed. Thomas later wrote about this in his radio play Return Journey Home,
in which he describes the café as being "razed to the snow". Return Journey
Home was first broadcast on 15 June 1947, having been written soon after the
bombing raids. Thomas walked through the bombed-out shell of the town centre
with his friend Bert Trick. Upset at the sight, he concluded: "Our Swansea is
dead". The Kardomah Café later reopened on Portland Street, not far from the
original location
Career and Family
It is often commented that Thomas was indulged like a child and he was, in fact,
still a teenager when he published many of the poems he would become famous
for: “And death shall have no dominion" “Before I Knocked” and “The Force That
Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower". "And death shall have no dominion",
appeared in the New English Weekly in May 1933 and further work appeared in
The Listener in 1934 catching the attention of two of the most senior poets of the
day T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender. His highly acclaimed first poetry volume, 18
Poems, was published on 18 December 1934, and went on to win a contest run
by The Sunday Referee, netting him new admirers from the London poetry world,
including Edith Sitwell. The anthology was published by Fortune Press, which did
not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies
themselves. A similar arrangement would later be used by a number of other
new authors, including Philip Larkin.
His passionate musical lyricism caused a sensation in these years of desiccated
Modernism; the critic Desmond Hawkins said it was “the sort of bomb that bursts
no more than once in three years”. In all, he wrote half of his poems while living
at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive before he moved to London.It was also the time that
Thomas's reputation for heavy drinking developed.
In the spring of 1936, ~ Dylan Thomas
met dancer Caitlin Macnamara in the
Wheatsheaf pub, in the Fitzrovia area of London's West End. They were
introduced by Augustus John, who was Macnamara's lover at the time (there
were rumours that she continued her relationship with John after she married
Thomas). A drunken Thomas proposed to Macnamara on the spot, and the two
began a courtship. On 11 July 1937, Thomas married Macnamara in a register
office in Penzance, Cornwall. In 1938, the couple rented a cottage in the village
of Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, West Wales. Their first child, Llewelyn Edouard,
was born on 30 January 1939 (d. 2000). Their daughter, Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis,
was born on 3 March 1943 (d. 2009). A second son, Colm Garan Hart, was born
on 24 July 1949.
Wartime and After
At the outset of the Second World War, Thomas was designated C3, which meant
that although he could, in theory, be called up for service he would be in one of
the last groups to be so. He was saddened to see his friends enter active service
leaving him behind and drank whilst struggling to support his family. He lived on
tiny fees from writing and reviewing and borrowed heavily from friends and
acquaintances, writing begging letters to random literary figures in hope of
support, envisaging this as a plan of long term regular income. He wrote to the
director of the films division of the Ministry of Information asking for employment
but after a rebuff eventually ended up working for Strand Films. Strand produced
films for the Ministry of Information and Thomas scripted at least five in 1942
with titles such as This Is Colour (about dye), New Towns For Old, These Are The
Men and Our Country (a sentimental tour of Britain). He actively sought to build
a reputation as a raconteur and outrageous writer, heavy drinker and wit.
The publication of Deaths and Entrances in 1946 was a major turning point for
Thomas. Poet and critic W. J. Turner commented in The Spectator "This book
alone, in my opinion, ranks him as a major poet". Thomas was well known for
being a versatile and dynamic speaker, best known for his poetry readings. He
made over 200 broadcasts for the BBC.
Often considered his greatest single work, Under Milk Wood, a radio play
featuring the characters of Llareggub, is set in a fictional Welsh fishing village
('Llareggub' is 'Bugger All' backwards, implying that there is absolutely nothing
to do there). The BBC credited their producer Stella Hillier with ensuring the play
actually materialised. Assigned "some of the more wayward characters who were
then writing for the BBC", she dragged the notoriously unreliable Thomas out of
the pub and back to her office to finish the work. The play took several years to
write, the first half mostly in South Leigh, Oxford, in 1948, whilst the second half
was mostly written in America in May 1953. Fewer than 300 lines were written in
Laugharne, according to one account, which also explains the influence of New
Quay on the play.
New York
John Malcolm Brinnin invited Thomas to New York and in 1950 embarked on a
lucrative three month tour of arts centres and campuses in the States. He toured
there again in 1952, this time with Caitlin, who discovered that he had been
unfaithful on his 1950 trip. They both drank heavily, as if in competition,
Thomas's health beginning to suffer with gout and lung problems. Thomas
performed a 'work in progress' version of Under Milk Wood solo for the first time
on 3 May at Harvard during his early 1953 US tour, and then with a cast at the
Poetry Centre in New York on 14 May. He worked on the play further in Wales,
where in its completed form it premiered the Lyric Theatre, Carmarthen, Wales
on 8 October 1953, just 12 miles away from Laugharne. It was said Thomas gave
a 'supreme virtuoso performance'. He then travelled to London and on the 19
October he flew to America. He died in New York on 5 November 1953 before the
BBC could record the play. Richard Burton starred in the first broadcast in 1954
and was joined by Elizabeth Taylor in a subsequent film.
Thomas's last collection Collected Poems, 1934–1952, published when he was
38, won the Foyle poetry prize. He wrote "Do not go gentle into that good night",
a villanelle, to his dying father, who passed away in 1952, one of the poet's last
poems.
Death
Thomas arrived in New York on 20 October 1953, to take part in a performance
of Under Milk Wood at the city's prestigious Poetry Centre. He was already ill and
had a history of blackouts and heart problems, using an inhaler in New York to
help his breathing. Thomas had liked to boast of his addiction to drinking, saying
"An alcoholic is someone you don't like, who drinks as much as you do." He
"liked the taste of whisky" and had a powerful reputation for his drinking. The
writer Elizabeth Hardwick recalled how intoxicating a performer he was and how
the tension would build before a performance: “Would he arrive only to break
down on the stage? Would some dismaying scene take place at the faculty party?
Would he be offensive, violent, obscene? These were alarming and yet exciting
possibilities.” His wife Caitlin said in her embittered memoir “Nobody ever needed
encouragement less, and he was drowned in it.” Thomas “exhibited the excesses
and experienced the adulation which would later be associated with rock stars,”
however the amount he is supposed to have drunk in his lifetime and in New
York before his death, may well have been exaggerated as Thomas became
mythologised.
On the evening of 27 October 1953, Thomas's 39th birthday, the poet attended a
party in his honour but felt so unwell that he returned to his hotel. On 28 October
1953, he took part in Poetry And The Film, a recorded symposium at Cinema 16,
which included panellists Amos Vogel, Maya Deren, Parker Tyler, and Willard
Maas. The director of the Poetry Centre, John Brinnin, was also Thomas's tour
agent. Brinnin didn't travel to New York, remaining at home in Boston and
handed responsibility to his assistant, Liz Reitell. Reitell met Thomas at Idlewild
Airport (now JFK airport) and he told her that he had had a terrible week, had
missed her terribly and wanted to go to bed with her. Despite Reitell's previous
misgivings about their relationship they spent the rest of the day and night
together at the Chelsea Hotel. The next day she invited him to her apartment but
he declined, saying that he was not feeling well and retired to his bed for the rest
of the afternoon. After spending the night at the hotel with Thomas, Reitell went
back to her own apartment for a change of clothes. At breakfast Herb Hannum
noticed how sick Thomas looked and suggested a visit to a Dr. Feltenstein before
the performance of Under Milk Wood that evening. The doctor went to work with
his needle, and Thomas made it through the two performances of Under Milk
Wood, but collapsed straight afterwards. Reitell would later describe Feltenstein
as a wild doctor who believed injections could cure anything.
A turning point came on 2 November. Air pollution in New York had risen
significantly and exacerbated chest illnesses, such as Thomas had. By the end of
the month, over two hundred New Yorkers had died from the smog. On 3
November Thomas spent most of that day in bed drinking He went out in the
evening to keep two drink appointments. After returning to the hotel, he went
out again for a drink at 2am. After drinking at the White Horse Tavern, a pub
he'd found through Scottish poet Ruthven Todd, Thomas returned to the Hotel
Chelsea, declaring, "I've had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the
record!" The barman and the owner of the pub who served Thomas at the time
later commented that Thomas couldn't have imbibed more than half that
amount. Thomas had an appointment to visit a clam house in New Jersey on 4
November. When phoned at the Chelsea that morning, he said that he was
feeling awful and asked to take a rain-check. Later, he did go drinking with
Reitell at the White Horse and, feeling sick again, returned to the hotel. Dr.
Feltenstein came to see him three times that day, on the third call prescribing
morphine, which seriously affected Thomas's breathing. At midnight on 5
November, his breathing became more difficult and his face turned blue. Reitell
unsuccessfully tried to get hold of Feltenstein.
Thomas was admitted to the emergency ward at nearby St Vincent's hospital.
The medical notes state that he arrived in a coma at 1.58am, and that the
"impression upon admission was acute alcoholic encephalopathy damage to the
brain by alcohol, for which the patient was treated without response". The duty
doctors found bronchitis in all parts of his bronchial tree, both left and right
sides. An X-ray showed pneumonia, and a raised white cell count confirmed the
presence of an infection. Caitlin in Laugharne was sent a telegram on 5
November, notifying her that Dylan was in hospital. She flew to America the
following day and was taken, with a police escort, to the hospital. Her alleged
first words were "Is the bloody man dead yet?" The pneumonia worsened and
Thomas died, whilst in coma, at noon on 9 November.
Poetry
Thomas's verbal style played against strict verse forms, such as in the villanelle
Do not go gentle into that good night. His images were carefully ordered in a
patterned sequence, and his major theme was the unity of all life, the continuing
process of life and death and new life that linked the generations. Thomas saw
biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity, and in his
poetry he sought a poetic ritual to celebrate this unity. He saw men and women
locked in cycles of growth, love, procreation, new growth, death, and new life
again. Therefore, each image engenders its opposite. Thomas derived his closely
woven, sometimes self-contradictory images from the Bible, Welsh folklore and
preaching, and Freud. Thomas's poetry is notable for its musicality, most clear in
poems such as Fern Hill, In Country Sleep, Ballad of the Long-legged Bait or In
the White Giant's Thigh from Under Milkwood:
Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house
and heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,
the scurrying, furred small friars squeal in the dowse
of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed
Thomas once confided that the poems which had most influenced him were
Mother Goose rhymes which his parents taught him when he was a child:
I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in
love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could
read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone.
What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance. [...] I fell in love,
that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of
words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I
think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and
then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I
began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses
and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that
could be ever.
A Child's Christmas In Wales
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town
corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I
sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it
snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for
twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and
headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the
rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and
bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued
ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs.
Prothero and the firemen.
It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's
garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing
at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were
no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped
in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horriblewhiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white backgarden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined
trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at
the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared.
We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the
eternal snows - eternal, ever since Wednesday - that we never heard Mrs.
Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it
at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the
neighbor's polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder.
"Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.
And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house;
and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was
bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii.
This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We
bounded into the house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of
the smoke-filled room.
Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept
there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in
the middle of the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and smacking at the smoke
with a slipper.
"Call the fire brigade," cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong.
"There won't be there," said Mr. Prothero, "it's Christmas."
There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero standing in
the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting.
"Do something," he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke - I think
we missed Mr. Prothero - and ran out of the house to the telephone box.
"Let's call the police as well," Jim said. "And the ambulance." "And Ernie Jenkins,
he likes fires."
But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall
men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in
time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve.
And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky
room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim
and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the
right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets,
standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said,
"Would you like anything to read?"
Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and
birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when
we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday
afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones
of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel,
before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback,
it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I
made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother
down and then we had tea."
"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from
white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam
and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew
overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely
-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb
thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."
"Were there postmen then, too?"
"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they
crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the
children could hear was a ringing of bells."
"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"
"I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them."
"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."
"There were church bells, too."
"Inside them?"
"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks.
And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the
powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the
churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for
Christmas, on our fence."
"Get back to the postmen"
"They were just ordinary postmen, found of walking and dogs and Christmas and
the snow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles ...."
"Ours has got a black knocker...."
"And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches and
huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot
like small boys wanting to go out."
"And then the presents?"
"And then the Presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, with a
rose on his button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly
glinting hill. He went in his ice-bound boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs. "He
wagged his bag like a frozen camel's hump, dizzily turned the corner on one foot,
and, by God, he was gone."
"Get back to the Presents."
"There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and
mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that
could be tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like
patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of
head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there
were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any
skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas,
no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though
warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and
drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why."
"Go on the Useless Presents."
"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose
and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell;
never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet;
10
and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a
mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a
painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals
any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red
field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge
and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh
for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could
always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy HobbiGames for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo!
And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make
him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet
of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the
street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking
a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the
balloons."
"Were there Uncles like in our house?"
"There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles. And on Christmas
morning, with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the swatched
town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post
Office or by the white deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires
out. Men and women wading or scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses
and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos, huddles their stiff black jarring feathers
against the irreligious snow. Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front
parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the
dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires; and the highheaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers. Some few
large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly,
trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning
them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting
for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor
anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and
brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers."
Not many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, fawnbowlered, yellow-gloved and, at this time of year, with spats of snow, would take
his constitutional to the white bowling green and back, as he would take it wet or
fire on Christmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes two hale young men, with big
pipes blazing, no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking,
down to the forlorn sea, to work up an appetite, to blow away the fumes, who
knows, to walk into the waves until nothing of them was left but the two furling
smoke clouds of their inextinguishable briars. Then I would be slap-dashing
11
home, the gravy smell of the dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the
pudding and mince, coiling up to my nostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side
lane would come a boy the spit of myself, with a pink-tipped cigarette and the
violet past of a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch, leering all to himself.
I hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle to my
lips and blow him off the face of Christmas when suddenly he, with a violet wink,
put his whistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so high, so exquisitely loud, that
gobbling faces, their cheeks bulged with goose, would press against their tinsled
windows, the whole length of the white echoing street. For dinner we had turkey
and blazing pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened
all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little
and slept. Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens. Auntie
Bessie, who had already been frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse,
whimpered at the sideboard and had some elderberry wine. The dog was sick.
Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port,
stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed
thrush. I would blow up balloons to see how big they would blow up to; and,
when they burst, which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled. In the rich
and heavy afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow
descending, I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates
and try to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little
Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar.
Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to
the seaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still
streets, leaving huge footprints on the hidden pavements.
"I bet people will think there's been hippos."
"What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?"
"I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill
and then I'd tickle him under the ear and he'd wag his tail."
"What would you do if you saw two hippos?"
Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding
snow toward us as we passed Mr. Daniel's house.
"Let's post Mr. Daniel a snow-ball through his letter box."
"Let's write things in the snow."
"Let's write, 'Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel' all over his lawn."
Or we walked on the white shore. "Can the fishes see it's snowing?"
The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind
travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their
12
necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying "Excelsior." We returned home
through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers
in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we
trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the
whirling bay. And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice
cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced
her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.
Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a
diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my
shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs and the gas meter
ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the
shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a
drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive
that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case,
and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as
of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached
the black bulk of the house. "What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?"
"No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas. I'll count three." One, two three, and we
began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness
round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together,
near the dark door. Good King Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen ...
And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a
long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of
the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running
we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the
hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the
town.
"Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said.
"Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading.
"Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did that.
Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin
sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in
the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song
about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart
was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to
bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the
unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the
other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady
falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the
close and holy darkness, and then I slept.
13
~ Dylan Thomas,#NFDB
25 Christianity
14 Science
13 Integral Yoga
11 Integral Theory
7 Occultism
6 Psychology
5 Fiction
1 Education
1 Cybernetics
25 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
5 The Mother
5 H P Lovecraft
5 Carl Jung
5 Aleister Crowley
3 Sri Aurobindo
3 Satprem
3 Nolini Kanta Gupta
2 George Van Vrekhem
11 The Phenomenon of Man
9 The Future of Man
5 Magick Without Tears
5 Lovecraft - Poems
5 Let Me Explain
3 The Secret Doctrine
3 The Practice of Psycho therapy
2 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
2 Preparing for the Miraculous
0 0.01 - Introduction, #Agenda Vol 1, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
- and it is terribly disturbing for all those who still climb trees in the old, millennial way. Perhaps it is even a heresy. Unless it is some cerebral disorder? A first man in his little clearing had to have a great deal of courage. Even this little clearing was no longer so sure. A first man is a perpetual question. What am I, then, in the midst of all that? And where is my law? What is the law? And what if there were no more laws? ... It is terrifying. Mathematics - out of order. Astronomy and Biology, too, are beginning to respond to mysterious influences. A tiny point huddled in the center of the world's great clearing. But what is all this, what if I were 'mad'? And then, claws all around, a lot of claws against this uncommon creature. A first man ... is very much alone. He is quite unbearable for the pre-human 'reason.' And the surrounding tribes growled like red monkies in the twilight of Guiana.
One day, we were like this first man in the great, stridulant night of the Oyapock. Our heart was beating with the rediscovery of a very ancient mystery - suddenly, it was absolutely new to be a man amidst the diorite cascades and the pretty red and black coral snakes slithering beneath the leaves. It was even more extraordinary to be a man than our old confirmed tribes, with their infallible equations and imprescriptible biologies, could ever have dreamed. It was an absolutely uncertain 'quantum' that delightfully eluded whatever one thought of it, including perhaps what even the scholars thought of it. It flowed otherwise, it felt otherwise. It lived in a kind of flawless continuity with the sap of the giant balata trees, the cry of the macaws and the scintillating water of a little fountain. It 'understood' in a very different way. To understand was to be in everything. Just a quiver, and one was in the skin of a little iguana in distress. The skin of the world was very vast.
0 1962-07-14, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ever since Einstein's Theory of Relativity, we have known that such an experience of time's relative nature is "physically" feasible. We need only consider the example of time aboard a spaceship approaching the speed of light: time "slows down," and the same event will take less time aboard the spaceship than on earth. In this instance, speed is what makes time slow down. In Mother's experience (which is every bit as "physical"), the "intensity of the Presence" seems to be the origin of time change. In other words, consciousness is what makes time slow down. Thus we are witnessing two experiences with identical physical results, but formulated in different languages. In one, we speak of "speed," in the other of "consciousness." But what is speed, after all?... (Moreover, the implications of this "language" difference are quite colossal, for it would indeed be simpler to press on a "consciousness button" than on an accelerator that had to take us to the speed of light.) Speed is a question of distance. Distance is a question of two legs or two wings: it implies a limited phenomenon or a limited being. When we say "at the speed of light," we imagine our two legs or our two wings moving very, very fast. And all the phenomena of the universe are seen and conceived of in relation to these two legs, these two wings or this rocketship they are creations of our present-day biped Biology. But for a being (a supramental being, of the future Biology) containing everything within himself, who is immediately everywhere, without distance, where is "speed"? ... The only "speed of light" is biped. Speed increases and time slows down, they say. The future Biology says: consciousness intensifies and time slows down or ceases to existdistances are abolished, the body doesn't age. And the world's whole physical cage collapses. "Time is a rhythm of consciousness," says Mother. We change rhythm and the physical world changes. Might this be the whole problem of transformation?
Asked later about this unfinished sentence, Mother said, "I stopped because it was an impression and not a certainty. We'll talk about it again later." Was Mother hinting at a stage when she would live in both times simultaneously?...
0 1964-09-26, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There is a domain in which disease and cure no longer exist, but only disorder, confusion, and harmony, organization. A domain in which everything, but everything that takes place in the body works in that way, and necessarily, first of all, everything that involves the functioning of the organs themselves (disorder in the organs themselves). And there, there is a whole way of seeing things that leads you very close to the Truth. There remain only the diseases that come from outside, like diseases that are contagious through germs, microbes, bacilli, all that business, viruses thats still under the aspect of attacks from adverse forces, its another plane of action. But there is a point where it all meets. I would like, oh, I would very much like to discuss certain things or certain details of the bodys functioning and organization with a man who thoroughly knows anatomy, Biology, physical and bodily chemistryall those things thoroughly and who UNDERSTANDS, who is ready to understand that all those things are a projection of other forces, subtler forces; who is able to feel things as I feel them in my own body. That would be very interesting.2
(silence)
0 1968-01-12, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There may be here some debate on this true sense: some, along with the religions we know, will tell you that the true sense isnt here, but in goodness knows what heaven beyond. Its a point of view, but if this material evolution does not hold its own sense within itself, it means we are in the presence of a sinister farce invented by goodness knows what divine masochist. If God exists, he must be a little less foolish than that, and we are entitled to think that this material evolution has a divine sense and that it is the field of a divine manifestation in Matter. Our spiritual discipline must therefore aim at gaining this divine man or perhaps that other, still unknown being who will emerge from us just as we emerged from hominid infancy. What is the place of the sexual function in this evolution? Until now, the progress of consciousness has made use of the progress of species, which means that sexual reproduction has been the key to the proliferation of species so as to reach the form most fit for the manifestation of consciousness. Since the appearance of man two or three million years ago, Nature hasnt produced new species, as if she had found in man the fittest mode of expression. But evolution cannot remain stagnant, or else it no longer is evolution. So it means that the key of evolution no longer lies in the proliferation of species by means of sexual reproduction, but directly in the very power of consciousness. Before man, consciousness was still too buried in its material support; with man, it has disengaged itself sufficiently to assume its true mastery over material Nature and work out its own mutations by itself. From the standpoint of evolutionary Biology, this is the end of sexuality. We have reached the stage at which we can switch from natural evolution through sexual power to spiritual evolution through the power of consciousness. Nature generally does not let organs linger that no longer serve her evolutionary design, so we can foresee that the sexual function will atrophy in those who will be able to channel their energy no longer for reproduction but to develop their consciousness. Quite obviously, not all of us have reached that stage, and for a long time Nature will still need sexual power to pursue her evolution in the midst of the human species, that is to say, to lead the rather brute man we still are to a more conscious man, more capable of grasping the true sense of his evolution, and finally wholly capable of switching from natural to spiritual evolution. The inequality of development in individuals is the obvious reason why we cannot make general rules or hand out infallible prescriptions. To each stage its law. But after however long a time, it is equally obvious that, from the point of view of evolutionary Biology, the sexual function comes to its end when it has fulfilled its purpose, that is, when it has succeeded in giving birth to a sufficiently conscious man. So we cannot reasonably base a spiritual discipline of accelerated evolution on a principle that runs counter to evolution. Moreover, anyone who has even barely crossed the difficult line, the point X of the transition from natural to spiritual evolution, cannot but realize that all the pseudo-mystic attempts to prettify the sexual relations between man and woman are shams. I have nothing against sexual relations (God knows!), but trying to coat them with a yogic or mystic phraseology is a deceitful illusion, a self-deception. Therefore, in that sense, there is no key to be recoveredit does not exist.
There is a key in the relationship between man and woman, but not in their sexual relations. The so-called left-hand Tantrics (of the Vama Marga) are to true Tantrism what Boccaccios tales are to Christianity, or what the sodden Roman Bacchus is to Dionysos of the Greek mysteries. I know Tantrism, to say the least. As for the Cathars, whom I hold in the highest esteem, it would be doing them little honor to believe that they followed a sort of yoga of sexuality. Through my own experience I have often had the feeling of reliving the Cathars experience, and I see plainly that if some of them attempted to mix sexual relations into the true relationship between man and woman, they soon realized their error. It is a dead-end road, or rather its only end is to show you that it leads you nowhere forward. The Cathars were too sincere and conscious men to persist in a burdening experience. For ultimately, and that is the crux of the matter, the sexual experience in its very nature (whether or not there is backward flow or whatever its mode) automatically fastens you again to the old animal vibrations there is nothing you can do about it: however much love you may put into it, the very function is tied to millennia of animality. It is as if you wanted to plunge into a swamp without stirring up any mudit cannot be done, the milieu is like that. And when one knows how much transparency, clarification and inner stillness it takes to slowly rise to a higher consciousness, or to allow a higher light to enter our waters without being instantly darkened, one fails to see how sexual activity can help you attain that still limpidity in which things can start happening??? The union, the oneness of two beings, the true and complete meeting of two beings does not take place at that level or through those means. That is all I can say. But I have seen that in the silent tranquillity of two beings who have the same aspiration, who have overcome the difficult transition, something quite unique slowly takes place, of which one can have no inkling as long as one is still stuck in the struggles of the flesh, to use a preachers language! I think the Cathars experience begins after that transition. After it, the man-woman couple assumes its true meaning, its effectiveness, if I may say so. Sex is only a first mode of meeting, the first device invented by Nature to break the shell of individual egosafterwards, one grows and discovers something else, not through inhibition or repression, but because something different and infinitely richer takes over. Those who are so eager to preserve sex and to mystify it in order to move on to the second stage of evolution are very much like children clinging to their scootersit isnt more serious than that. There is nothing in it to do a yoga with, nothing also to be indignant about or raise ones eyebrows at. So I have nothing to criticize, I am merely observing and putting things in their place. All depends on the stage one has reached. As for those who want to use sex for such and such a sublime or not-so-sublime reason, well, let them have their experience. As Mother told me on the very same subject no later than yesterday, To tell the truth, the Lord makes use of everything. One is always on the way towards something. One is always on the way, through any means, but what is necessary is, as much as possible, to keep ones lucidity and not to deceive oneself.
03.05 - The Spiritual Genius of India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Keeping this difference in view, we may at once point out that Europe, when she is non-materialist, is primarily religious and only secondarily spiritual, but India is always primarily spiritual and only secondarily religious. The vein of real spirituality in European culture runs underground and follows narrow and circuitous by-paths; rarely does it appear on the top in sudden and momentary flashes and even then only to dive back again into its subterranean hiding-place; upon the collective life and culture it acts more as an indirect influence, an auxiliary leaven than as a direct and dynamic Force. In India there is an abundance, a superfluity even, of religious paraphernalia, but it is the note of spirituality that rings clear and high above all lesser tones and wields a power vivid and manifest. We could say in terms of modern Biology that spirituality tends to be a recessive character in European culture, while in India, it is dominant.
But when we say that India is spiritual, we do not mean that all or most Indians, or even a very large minority among them, are adepts in spirituality, or that the attachment to life, the passion for earthly possessions, the sway of the six ripus are in any way less prevalent in the Indian character. On the contrary, it may well seem to the casual onlooker whose eyes are occupied with the surface actualities of the situation, that the Indian nature, as it is today, shut out from this world's larger spaces, cut off from its deeper channels and movements of greater magnitude, has been given over more and more to petty worldlinesses that hardly fill the same space even in the life of peoples who are notorious for their worldly and unspiritual temperament.
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
model, something like the "pattern of behaviour" in Biology. Cf. "On the Nature
of the Psyche," sec. 7.
--
chology, however, is neither Biology nor physiology nor any
other science than just this knowledge of the psyche.
1.01 - Newtonian and Bergsonian Time, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
time of evolution and Biology, in which there is always some-
thing new. The realization that the Newtonian physics was not
the proper frame for Biology was perhaps the central point in the
old controversy between vitalism and mechanism; although this
1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
of Biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again,
the law of ' complexification V
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
Jung believed that many complexes had an archetypal (or universal) basis, rooted in Biology, and that this
rooting had something specifically to do with memory. It appears that the truth is somewhat more
1.02 - THE WITHIN OF THINGS, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
doing we have access to the world of Biology.
In sum, all the rest of this essay wiLl be nothing but the story
1.03 - Some Aspects of Modern Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
Nor, again, is it merely instinctual or biological. If it were, it could verywell be just a chapter in a text-book of Biology. It has an immensely
important social and cultural aspect without which we could not imagine a
1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
of the stars, so the science of Biology, by the com-
parative study of living forms, has been able to
--
parative Biology suggests the cause. The immense social distur-
bances which today so trouble the world appear to signify that
--
physics, Biology and ethics, even our religion, into this new sphere,
and this we are in process of doing. We can no more return to that
1.03 - The Phenomenon of Man, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
words, Biology is quite naturally incorporated into physics.
If in fact, as universal experience shows us, life represents a
1.04 - SOME REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
called upon by Biology to consider the effects of synthesis, it is be-
ginning to perceive that, parallel with the phenomenon of corpus-
1.05 - 2010 and 1956 - Doomsday?, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
ize Biology, wrote Sagan in his best-selling Cosmos. For
the first time, the biologists will know what other kinds of
1.05 - Problems of Modern Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
doctor has taken over from natural science and Biology. It is this that has
largely contri buted to the divorce between modern psychology and the
1.06 - A Summary of my Phenomenological View of the World, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
genesis - entering it, this time, through Biology and the
energetics of evolution.
1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
in cosmology and physics, then in Biology.
The intellectual adventure of the Renaissance evolving
1.06 - LIFE AND THE PLANETS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
tronomy, geology and Biology? That is what I propose to discuss
here: not from the viewpoint of Sirius, as the saying is that is to say,
--
gap between Biology and physics. The wide distinction, which for
philosophical reasons it has been thought necessary to draw between
1.07 - Medicine and Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
of instinct and the findings of Biology in connection with the symbiotic
relationship between plant and insect have long made us familiar with
--
disturbances is not surprising. But, as Biology shows, instincts are by no
means blind, spontaneous, isolated impulses; they are on the contrary
1.07 - THE GREAT EVENT FORESHADOWED - THE PLANETIZATION OF MANKIND, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
for modern Biology and biochemistry to disclose this contrast,
which lay observation could do no more than perceive, in all its
--
bridges between Biology and itself. But once we have accepted the
general Law of Recurrence linking the growth of consciousness to
--
of chemistry and Biology are continued without a break in the so-
cial sphere. This accounts for the tendency which has been insuf-
1.08 - The Three Schools of Magick 3, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
What is true for every School is equally true for every individual. Success in life, on the basis of the Law of Thelema, implies severe self-discipline. Each being must progress, as Biology teaches, by strict adaptation to the conditions of the organism. If, as the Black School continually asserts, the cause of sorrow is desire, we can still escape the conclusion by the Law of Thelema. What is necessary is not to seek after some fantastic ideal, utterly unsuited to our real needs, but to discover the true nature of those needs, to fulfill them, and rejoice therein.
This process is what is really meant by initiation; that is to say, the going into oneself, and making one's peace, so to speak, with all the forces that one finds there.
1.10 - THE FORMATION OF THE NOOSPHERE, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
sphere and its attendant Biology as here propounded, is no
more opposed to the Divine Transcendence, to Grace, to
--
cernment and a profound knowledge of Biology, the procedure is
in danger of lapsing into puerile and sterile subtleties. But pro-
--
idle hands. Why do they not look a little more to Biology for
guidance and enlightenment? In its progress through a million
--
And it is here, an inevitable intrusion in terms of Biology, and
in its proper place in terms of science, that we come to the prob-
--
find in Biology a complement to the physics of matter. On the one
hand, I repeat, the stuff of the world dispersing through the radi-
1.10 - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The researches of Comparative Religion although they cannot yet constitute a science, should at least follow as far as possible the lines & methods adopted by the physical Sciences, especially of Biology; they should therefore consist mainly, apart from the mere collection of data, first, in the tracing of existing or later forms to their earlier history & origins, if possible, to their embryonic origins and, secondly, in the careful comparison both of the origins & later history of similar forms in different environments. In India [incomplete]
Nietzsche stands perhaps on a different plane because he had something of the
11.15 - Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Such then are the stages in the progression of consciousness; they are clearly observable and admitted practically on all hands. Only Sri Aurobindo points out two crucial characters of this movement. First: Matter, Life, Mind-Intelligence these are not distinct or separate entities, one coming after another, the succeeding one simply adding itself to the preceding, coming we do now know from where. Not so, for something cannot come out of nothing. If life came out of Matter, it is because life was there hidden in Matter, Matter was secretly housing, was instinct with life. That only can evolve which was involved. So, again, if Mind came out of life, it is because Mind was involved in life and therefore also in Matter although at a farther remove. Yet again, vital mind developed into Intelligence and consciousness proper, and it could be only because that too was its secret nature and hence the secret nature of Life and even brute Matter. Thus the whole chain of gradation is linked together indissolubly and the binding reality that runs through all is consciousness, overt or covert. It is indeed consciousness that lies at the root of existence the basic substance, Matter is nothing but consciousness become unconscious; and the whole scheme or processus of the cosmos is the increasing manifestation and expression of that consciousness. Secondly, the other character is that at each cross-over, there is not only a rise in consciousness but also a reversal of consciousness, that is to say, the level attained turns back upon the preceding levels, influencing and moulding them as far as possible in its own mode and law of existence. When life appeared in Matter, wherever there was material life, the matter thus taken up by life behaved differently from dead matter: an organic body does not follow the strict mechanical laws of inanimate bodies. Likewise a life endowed with mind has a different functioning than mere life. And a body which houses a life and mind, which has, as it were, flowered into life and mind moves and acts in another way than an inert body or even a vitalised body. Man's intelligence and reason have reoriented or tend to reorient his vital instincts and reactions, even his bodily functions and forms. A conscious regulation, even refashioning of his life and body is the very essence of human consciousness, the urge of his nature, instead of a spontaneous laissez-faire movement of pure vitality or the mechanical go-round of the material base. These three major provinces or layers of consciousness Matter, Life and Mindman has taken up into himself and in the light of his consciousness his Intelligencehas studied and classified them arranging them serially as the well-known sciences of Physics Biology and Psychology.
Now, Sri Aurobindo says, evolution marches onward and will rise beyond mind to another status of consciousness which he calls Supermind. In the earthly scheme there will thus manifest a new type, a higher functioning of consciousness and a new race or species will appear on earth with this new consciousness as the ruling principle. Out of the rock and mineral came the plant, out of the plant the animal, out of the mere animal man has come and out of man the Superman will come inevitably.
1.13 - THE HUMAN REBOUND OF EVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
laws of Biology, are now showing themselves not metaphorically
but literally to be a condition of survival for the human race. In
--
ist school, which still refuses to examine human Biology, it is undeni-
able that in Man the external drive of Life tends to be transformed
1.14 - TURMOIL OR GENESIS?, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
profusion of living forms now known to Biology. Formerly "in-
stinct" could be treated as a sort of homogeneous quantity varying
--
equivalent organism from the domain of Biology: the "Noo-
spheric" human unity gradually achieved by the totalizing and
1.15 - THE DIRECTIONS AND CONDITIONS OF THE FUTURE, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
ation, to talk as though Biology in its forecasts can
behave like astronomy. But it is surely no less ex-
1.16 - The Suprarational Ultimate of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Let us then look at this vital instinct and life dynamism in its own being and not merely as an occasion for ethical or religious development and see whether it is really rebellious in its very nature to the Divine. We can see at once that what we have described is the first stage of the vital being, the infrarational, the instinctive; this is the crude character of its first native development and persists even when it is trained by the growing application to it of the enlightening reason. Evidently it is in this natural form a thing of the earth, gross, earthy, full even of hideous uglinesses and brute blunders and jarring discords; but so also is the infrarational stage in ethics, in aesthetics, in religion. It is true too that it presents a much more enormous difficulty than these others, more fundamentally and obstinately resists elevation, because it is the very province of the infrarational, a first formulation of consciousness out of the Inconscient, nearest to it in the scale of being. But still it has too, properly looked at, its rich elements of power, beauty, nobility, good, sacrifice, worship, divinity; here too are highreaching gods, masked but still resplendent. Until recently, and even now, reason, in the garb no longer of philosophy, but of science, has increasingly proposed to take up all this physical and vital life and perfect it by the sole power of rationalism, by a knowledge of the laws of Nature, of sociology and physiology and Biology and health, by collectivism, by State education, by a new psychological education and a number of other kindred means. All this is well in its own way and in its limits, but it is not enough and can never come to a truly satisfying success. The ancient attempt of reason in the form of a high idealistic, rational, aesthetic, ethical and religious culture achieved only an imperfect discipline of the vital man and his instincts, sometimes only a polishing, a gloss, a clothing and mannerising of the original uncouth savage. The modern attempt of reason in the form of a broad and thorough rational, utilitarian and efficient instruction and organisation of man and his life is not succeeding any better for all its insistent but always illusory promise of more perfect results in the future. These endeavours cannot indeed be truly successful if our theory of life is right and if this great mass of vital energism contains in itself the imprisoned suprarational, if it has, as it then must have, the instinctive reaching out for something divine, absolute and infinite which is concealed in its blind strivings. Here too reason must be overpassed or surpass itself and become a passage to the Divine.
The first mark of the suprarational, when it intervenes to take up any portion of our being, is the growth of absolute ideals; and since life is Being and Force and the divine state of being is unity and the Divine in force is God as Power taking possession, the absolute vital ideals must be of that nature. Nowhere are they wanting. If we take the domestic and social life of man, we find hints of them there in several forms; but we need only note, however imperfect and dim the present shapes, the strivings of love at its own self-finding, its reachings towards its absolute the absolute love of man and woman, the absolute maternal or paternal, filial or fraternal love, the love of friends, the love of comrades, love of country, love of humanity. These ideals of which the poets have sung so persistently, are not a mere glamour and illusion, however the egoisms and discords of our instinctive, infrarational way of living may seem to contradict them. Always crossed by imperfection or opposite vital movements, they are still divine possibilities and can be made a first means of our growth into a spiritual unity of being with being. Certain religious disciplines have understood this truth, have taken up these relations boldly and applied them to our souls communion with God; and by a converse process they can, lifted out of their present social and physical formulas, become for us, not the poor earthly things they are now, but deep and beautiful and wonderful movements of God in man fulfilling himself in life. All the economic development of life itself takes on at its end the appearance of an attempt to get rid of the animal squalor and bareness which is what obligatory poverty really means, and to give to man the divine ease and leisure of the gods. It is pursued in a wrong way, no doubt, and with many ugly circumstances, but still the ideal is darkly there. Politics itself, that apparent game of strife and deceit and charlatanism, can be a large field of absolute idealisms. What of patriotism,never mind the often ugly instincts from which it starts and which it still obstinately preserves,but in its aspects of worship, self-giving, discipline, self-sacrifice? The great political ideals of man, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, apart from the selfishnesses they serve and the rational and practical justifications with which they arm themselves, have had for their soul an ideal, some half-seen truth of the absolute and have carried with them a worship, a loyalty, a loss of self in the idea which have made men ready to suffer and die for them. War and strife themselves have been schools of heroism; they have preserved the heroic in man, they have created the katriys tyaktajvit of the Sanskrit epic phrase, the men of power and courage who have abandoned their bodily life for a cause; for without heroism man cannot grow into the Godhead; courage, energy and strength are among the very first principles of the divine nature in action. All this great vital, political, economic life of man with its two powers of competition and cooperation is stumbling blindly forward towards some realisation of power and unity,in two divine directions, therefore. For the Divine in life is Power possessed of self-mastery, but also of mastery of His world, and man and mankind too move towards conquest of their world, their environment. And again the Divine in fulfilment here is and must be oneness, and the ideal of human unity however dim and far off is coming slowly into sight. The competitive nation-units are feeling, at times, however feebly as yet, the call to cast themselves into a greater unified cooperative life of the human race.
1.22 - THE END OF THE SPECIES, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
physics, 69; and Biology, 100
Pithecanthropus, 60
1.27 - Structure of Mind Based on that of Body, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Who shall help us here? Not the sonorous Vedas, not the Upanishads, Not Apollonius, Plotinus, Ruysbroeck, Molinos; not any gleaner in the field of priori; no, a mere devotee of natural history and Biology: Ernst Haeckel.
Enormous, elephantine, his work's bulk is almost incredible; for us his one revolutionary discovery is pertinent to this matter of Sammasati and the revelations of one's inmost subtle structure.
1.67 - Faith, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Nothing in that to contradict the official view, is there? Nothing in Biology either.
Or in Blake:
1.69 - Original Sin, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
This statement is the first need of the world to-day for we are plagued with Meddlesome Matties, male and female, whose one overmastering passion is to mind other peoples' business. They can think of nothing but "control." They aim at an Ethic like that of the convict Prison; at a civilization like that of the Bees or the Termites. But neither history nor Biology acquaint us with any form of progress achieved by any of these communities. Penal settlements and Pall Mall Clubs have not even made provision for the perpetuation of their species; and all such "well-ordered" establishments are quite evidently defenceless against any serious change in their environment. They have failed to comply with the first requirements of Biology; at best, they stagnate, they achieve nothing, they never "get anywhere."
A settled society is useful at certain periods; when, for instance, it is advisable to consolidate the gains gotten by pioneer adventurers; but history shows with appalling clarity that the very qualities which serve to protect must inevitably destroy the very conditions which they aim to preserve.
1.79 - Progress, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
I have no patience whatever with Utopia-mongers. Biology simply shouts at us that the happy contented community, everyone with his own (often highly specialized) job, nobody in need, nobody in danger, is necessarily stagnant. Termites and other ants, bees, beavers; these and many another have produced perfect systems. What is the first characteristic? Stupidity. "Where there is no vision, the people shall perish." What is the Fighter Termite to do, after he has been blocked out of his home? None of these communities possess any resource at all against any unforeseen unfavourable change of circumstance. (We look rather like that just now at the end of 1944 e.v.) Nor does anyone of them show any achievement; having got to the end of their biological tether, they stay out, without an aim, an idea, an effort. The leech, an insufferable pest in its belt it has killed off tiger, rhinoceros, anything with a nostril! is the curse of our military station at Lebong or was when I was there. At Darjeeling, a few hundred feet higher, devil a one! They have no one to think: now how can we flourish up higher? Those old forlorn-hope Miss-Sahibs how wide are their nostrils! Then how?
Consider for a moment our own Empire. How did that spread all over the planet? It was the imaginative logic, the audacity, the adroit adaptability, of the Adventurer that blasted the road.
--
In my not very maternal remarks on Mother-love, was included the substance of the one wise saying of my pet American lunatic "You can't get past their Biology." This is so true, and so disheartening, that it arouses me to combat. Must we for ever be bound to the inconvenient habit of sows and cabbages? I pick up the glove.
Isn't it Aldous Huxley who says somewhere that some species or other can never develop higher powers because its brain is shut in by its carapace? I thought this too, long ago; and I went into interminable conferences with my old friend, Professor Buckmaster; I wanted to extend brain surgery to produce the phenomena of Yoga. Also, I wondered what would happened if we wedged apart the sections of the cranium at, or shortly after, birth, so as to prevent them closing and giving the brain a chance to grow.
--
Anyhow, all that I really want you to get into your head "sunning over with little curls" is that Progress demands Anarchy tempered by Common Sense, and that the most formidable obstacle is this Biology.
The experience of the Magician and the Yogi does suggest that there is room in the human brain as at present constituted for almost limitless expansion. At least our system of Training is more immediately practical than digging up our Corpora Quadragenina and planting them in a Monkey's Medulla just to see what will come of it. So put down that bread-knife!
1955-05-18 - The Problem of Woman - Men and women - The Supreme Mother, the new creation - Gods and goddesses - A story of Creation, earth - Psychic being only on earth, beings everywhere - Going to other worlds by occult means, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother, what is the real reason for the appearance of sex? Because in the study of Biology we see that first the unicellular animals were sexless; sex appeared later.
Thatit is Nature, my child, who has tried all kinds of methods. These are all means employed by Nature; she wanted It would seem that for the perfection of the species the dividing was necessary from the point of view of the material evolution; it seems so because obviously it was adopted later. This Nature I think she has tried every possible thing, everything.
1f.lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
men from the UniversityPabodie, Lake of the Biology department, Atwood
of the physics department (also a meteorologist), and I representing
--
Biology and geology. His preliminary sledging and boring journey of
January 1118 with Pabodie and five othersmarred by the loss of two
--
press. Will mean to Biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics
and physics. Joins up with my previous work and amplifies
--
that was achieved left us all awed and bewildered. Existing Biology
would have to be wholly revised, for this thing was no product of any
1f.lovecraft - Deaf, Dumb, and Blind, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
universe through physics, chemistry, and Biology, the logical mind will
classify it as a singular product of dementiaa dementia communicated
1f.lovecraft - The Horror at Red Hook, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
of Biology which they may never understand. As of old, more people
enter Red Hook than leave it on the landward side, and there are
1f.lovecraft - The Whisperer in Darkness, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
been a notable student of mathematics, astronomy, Biology,
anthropology, and folklore at the University of Vermont. I had never
1f.lovecraft - Winged Death, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
York, Professor of Invertebrate Biology in Columbia University, New
York, N.Y. Prepared to be read after my death, for the satisfaction of
2.01 - THE ADVENT OF LIFE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
connection between the two worlds of physics and Biology. The
cell is the natural granule oj lijc in the same way as the atom is
--
systematic Biology. Moreover, there is no difficulty on the
chronological side. In any case the length of time separating the
2.02 - Evolutionary Creation and the Expectation of a Revelation, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
veil of Biology. Upon the thinking entity that we have be-
come by hominization, it is now possible for it to radiate
2.02 - THE EXPANSION OF LIFE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the microscopic organisms. In Biology, as in navigation, a certain
size is physically necessary for certain movements. Thanks to it
--
systematic Biology tries to express in names.
Considered as a whole, life's advances go hand in hand with
--
motor-cars, aeroplanes or cinemas ? In Biology, in civilisation, in
linguistics, as in all things, time, like a draughtsman with an
--
to systematic Biology. Two other branches, and two only,
besides the vertebrate, contribute to forming the main ramifi-
--
a (dimensional) condition which all hypotheses of physics or Biology must
henceforth satisfy. Biologists and palaeontologists are still arguing today
2.03 - DEMETER, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
systematic Biology, but it also confers on the tree of life a sharp-
ness of feature, an impetus, which is incontcstably the hall-mark
--
(still too often ignored) between a Biology of small units and a Biology of big
complexes in the same way as there is a physics of the infinitesimal and another
--
front of Biology. For obvious practical reasons we are led to
make use of the variations in their fossihsablc parts to follow the
2.06 - Revelation and the Christian Phenomenon, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
genesis - entering it, this time, through Biology and the
energetics of evolution.
2.14 - The Unpacking of God, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
It is the old Spinozist move, the other pole-the Eco pole-of the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm (in the form of the Romantic rebellion). It thinks that the enemy is atomism, and that the central problem is simply to be able to prove or demonstrate once and for all that the universe is a great and unified holistic System or Order or Web. It marshals a vast amount of scientific evidence, from physics to Biology, and offers extensive arguments, all geared to objectively proving the holistic nature of the universe. It fails to see that if we take a bunch of egos with atomistic concepts and teach them that the universe is holistic, all we will actually get is a bunch of egos with holistic concepts.
Precisely because this monological approach, with its unskillful interpretation of an otherwise genuine intuition, ignores or neglects the "I" and the "we" dimensions, it doesn't understand very well the exact nature of the inner transformations that are necessary in the first place in order to be able to find an identity that embraces the manifest All. Talk about the All as much as we want, nothing fundamentally changes.
--
This split the world of science into two utterly incompatible halves: a Biology describing the world winding up, and a physics describing a world winding down. The "two arrows" of time . . .
With this, of course, we have come full circle, come to the point where we began our account in chapter 1. This wasn't just subtle reductionism-the collapse of the Kosmos into the empirical interlocking order-this was gross reductionism-the further collapse of the interlocking order into its atomistic components, a situation that can fairly be described as complete psychotic insanity. (If the Kosmos is the wondrous multidimensional reality anything similar to that described from Plotinus to Schelling, from Mahayana Buddhism to Vedanta Hinduism, or even from
2.1.5.1 - Study of Works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You may profitably teach Biology. And at the same time continue your study of Sri Aurobindo.
It is better to do what you do thoroughly and most seriously, than to multiply your occupations.
2.21 - 1940, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: I had a talk again with G about the Rigveda and the Aryan-Dravidian question. He gave two arguments: In Indian families, the fact of different children having different colours is a positive argument according to Biology that the race of the parents is a mixed one. Secondly, in the Rigveda itself there is a mention of dark-skinned people and ansah. I replied that ansah figures only in one Rik out of more than ten thousand, and it may not mean noseless or flat-nosed.
Sri Aurobindo: Ansah is not flat-nosed. It is noseless.
3.01 - THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
atom. Biology has been able to impose some sort of order on
the constructions of life. Supported both by physics and Biology,
anthropology in its turn docs its best to explain the structure of
--
general rules of Biology. But, by the exaggeration of a variable
that had remained negligible in the animals, it simply brings
3.03 - THE MODERN EARTH, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
under the influence of Biology, that the light dawned at last,
revealing the irreversible coherence of all that exists. First the
--
to be so closely linked with Biology ; in the formation and dis-
semination of languages, in the development and specialisation
--
and precisely under the two forms that Biology has divined and
between which it hesitates : on the one hand we have mutations
--
of plants and animals, Biology has not yet found a way of recon-
ciling in phy ogenesis the spontaneous activity of individuals
33.16 - Soviet Gymnasts, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Our society is based on blood or parental relations. But the Russians themselves have tried to set up another set of relationship - social instead of parental. Taking the children away from their parents they are rearing them in socialized crches, schools or kindergartens. To them the parents are but secondary instruments. The child belongs to the State, to the service of the almighty State. The average parents have neither the ability nor the resources such as the State possesses. Now, if instead of the secular State we think of a spiritual group, or use the word 'God', a new and altogether different possibility opens up: not the link of Biology but the closeness of the spirit within which is the same in all, a relationship in terms of Reality or the Divine. How deep and intimately satisfying such a relationship, based on Truth, can be - I think our Soviet gymnasts had a glimpse of that truth here in the Ashram. And they naturally wondered.
(3)
3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Several of the teachers are applying the basic ideas of the seminar in their own teaching and are reporting quite significant results in terms of student motivation and technical performance. The flexibility of the approach is suggested by the fact that teachers in many different fields and grade levels are using some adaptation of it. For instance, William Eblen and his associates in Wilton, Connecticut, use their own variation of this approach in their high school and college ecology project, Total Education for a Total Environment (TETE). Professor Rossalie Pinkham, Director of Laboratory Schools, Southern Connecticut State College, and Chairman, Consortium on Systems Education, New Haven, uses it as a springboard into, and as a frame of reference for, linguistic and social science subject areas. Chemistry teachers in high school use the periodic table as a springboard into interdisciplinary units. Biology teachers can use the general model as a functional framework for integrating the study of evolution in all the traditional sub-fields of Biology and for relating evolution theory to psycho-social studies. Historians and anthropologists use it as a functional basis for explaining the process of change.
Being an economist who had already developed a broad economizing model for interpreting the universe of organized energy before meeting Mr. Haskell two years ago, I have blended his model into the economizing framework. A brief sketch of that master model will set the stage for describing the nature and importance of the task of developing a meta-language of the sciences, and for describing the particular approach we are developing at the SCSC Center for I-D Creativity.
--
Into this leadership vacuum rush the ideologists--people such as the totalitarian democrats and various fascistic racists, whose worldviews were prematurely unified in the nineteenth century; unified before the rise of modern physics, chemistry, Biology, genetics, or any other modern science; and by non-scientists at that. Their misinterpretations of history, genetics, psychology, and so forth are, however, systematic and mutually reinforcing. This gives them the confidence which our traditional leaders lack, and therewith the power to mislead the Majority disastrously.44
How have we found out that they are misleading our education and our culture a In the same way that physical and biological scientists find out when they are misled: by making theoretical models and subjecting them to experimental verification. "The verification of a model such as occurred with Rutherford's nuclear atom can greatly extend the range and scope of the physicist's understanding," say physicists Kendall and Panofsky. "It is through the interplay of observation, prediction, and comparison that the laws of nature are slowly clarified."45
--
Two Biology departments, being markedly different from the rest, are underlined: ecology and paleontology. They deal with whole s stems of the most important kind, natural empires. They are outstanding because, as Ulrich Sonnemann points out, A whole [system], whether encountered by the physicist or the social scientist [or the ecologist], is a lawful context which gives significance to each particular part-phenomenon that articulates itself within it; what makes its inner lawfulness understandable, however, is its own overall significance which it derives from the broader [systemic] context in which it is embedded and to which it refers." Sonnemann, who is writing on The Specialist as a Psychological Problem, then goes on to anticipate our discussion of what may be called the organized specialist and the generalist: "The true academician's [the generalist's] subject matter, in principle, becomes the universe: whatever he encounters--and it may lie in exceedingly small sectors of fieldsoccurs to him in such ways as to represent a universal order. Such a universal order, since it already determines the phenomenal structure under the scientist's observation, is inseparable from the structure."
Sonnemann then characterizes the rest of the departments shown and implied in Figures IV-9 and 10 as follows: "To the extent, then, to which it [the whole system] drops out of sight, to the extent to which his [the specialist's] preconceived procedure interferes with the self articulation of any subject under his attack, phenomenal structure will escape, first his eye, ultimately his theories."50 These people's departments deal with sections of systems. And, as Sonnemann points out, "Implicit in all sectional science, the arbitrariness of primary determination of subj ect matters which of their own natures are universes [systems] does not, apparently, make a science any more analytical; the typical specialistic approach . . . is characterized at least as much by his blindness for relevant detail as for wholes."
--
Unified Science's absolutes are permanent. So future shock--the fear that permanence is dead--has lost its sting.8 Jonas' book, from which I have been quoting, bears a predictive sub-title: Toward A Philosophy of Biology. In its Epilogue, he defines the objective toward which his work is directed, and clearly points the road by which it has here been reached: "Ontology as the ground of ethics was the original tenet of philosophy. Their divorce, which is the divorce of the `objective' and `subjective' realms, is the modern destiny. Their reunion can be affected, if at all, only from the `objective' end, that is to say, through a revision of the idea of nature. And it is becoming, rather than abiding, nature which would hold out any such promise."
Unified Science is a profound revision of most peoples' idea of nature; and it is stated in terms precisely of process, of becoming. The insight which Jonas then shows us is prophetic: "From the immanent direction of its total evolution there may be elicited a destination of man by whose terms the person, in the act of fulfilling himself, would at the same time realize a concern of universal substance." Unified Science proclaims this immanent direction to be increasing organization; and its destination, ectropy's highest region, to be . "Hence," Jonas continues, "would result a principle of ethics which is ultimately grounded neither in the autonomy of the self nor in the needs of the community, but in an objective assignment by the nature of things (what theology used to call the ordo creationis) such as could still be kept faith with by the last of a dying mankind in his solitude." p. 283.2 Some call this principle Omega, others call it God.
--
Partial syntheses--syntheses of groups of sciences such as physics, chemistry and Biology, or psychology and sociology--do not resolve the ontological problem. Quine implies this as follows:
"All that is required toward a function is an open sentence with two free variables, provided that it is fulfilled by exactly one value of the first variable for each object of the old universe [one discipline] as value of the second variable [another discipline] ." Such a function is implicit throughout the System-hierarchy. It is implied, for instance, in Figure II-1. "But the point is that it is only in the background theory, with its inclusive universe, that we can hope to write such a sentence and have the right values at our disposal for its variables." p. 58.46 That is the theory of Unified Science.
--
2. Jonas, Hans, The Phenomenon of Life--Toward a Philosophy of Biology, Bell Publ. Co., New York, 1968.
3. This diagram, based upon Two Modes of Thought by James B. Conant is taken from my xeroxed book Unified Science--Assembly of the Sciences into A Single Discipline, Volume I, Scientia Generalis, Chap. 7. It has been used as a textbook at the New School for Social Research in New York and Southern Connecticut State College in New Haven, and is being readied for publication. (See, Conant, James, B., Two Modes of Thought, Trident Press, New York, 1964. Haskell, Edward, Unified--of the Sciences into a Single Discipline, Vol. I, Scientia Generalis. Preface and a chapter by Harold G. Cassidy. Offset-printed by N.I.H. 1968; xeroxed by IBM Systems Res. Inst., New York, 1969.)
--
Taxonomic System (of Biology) A system of classification of plants and animals based upon the genetic descent of organisms, but without regard to their habitats (q.v.). This classification is a precondition for and is incorporated in the taxonomic system of Unified Science (q.v.). C.f. Characteristic numbers.
Technogeny (coined term) Forms of control (q.v.) such as manufacture, transport, agriculture, communication, simulation, etc. the capacity to do which is transmitted, not mentally, but genetically. E.g. nest construction by termites. C.f. Technology.
--
THE CONCEPT of type specimens or paradigm cases of theoretical constructs is commonplace in traditional astronomy, geology, Biology and chemistry. In chemistry, pure samples of a chemical element listed in the Periodic Table of chemical elements, samples say of hydrogen or uranium, are type specimens or paradigm cases of the theoretical classes in question. In traditional Biology, each species and sub-species of plants or animals listed in the taxonomic classification is keyed to one or more type specimens carefully preserved in cases, bottles, presses, and so forth, in various museums and other institutions. In astrophysics and geology, type specimens (paradigm cases of theoretical classes) are keyed to specific geoid bodies or geophysical entities.
There is, however, a strategic difference between the chemical classification and most others: The chemical classification includes both quantitative and qualitative, both Stratum-Period and Group characteristics, while the traditional biological and geoid classifications omit the latter. This happened because the atomic Groups are classes of coaction potentialities between the atom in question and its chemical habitat (classes of so-called chemical properties), whereas traditional taxonomic classifications are confined to entities and omit their habitats. They stop short of the next necessary step, classifying the coactions between them. Since coactions are traditionally called moral relations, it is their omission that deprives these traditional disciplines of moral force; and, of course, it is their inclusion which confers upon Unified Science and its organised disciplines their moral force (see Glossary). This will become very clear when we discuss human cultures, where moral relations have long been recognised.
3.7.1.03 - Rebirth, Evolution, Heredity, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The materialistic assumptionit is no more than a hypothetical assumption, for it has never been provedis that development of non-living matter results under certain unknown conditions in a phenomenon of unconscious life which is in its real nature only an action and reaction of material energy, and the development of that again under certain unknown conditions in a phenomenon of conscious mind which is again in its real nature only an action and reaction of material energy. The thing is not proved, but that, it is argued, does not matter; it only means that we do not yet know enough; but one day we shall know,the necessary physiological reaction called by us an intuition or train of reasoning crowned by discovery having, I suppose, taken place in a properly constituted nervous body and the more richly convoluted brain of a Galileo of Biology, and then this great and simple truth will be proved, like many other things once scoffed at by the shallow common sense of humanity. But the difficulty is that it seems incapable of proof. Even with regard to life, which is by a great deal the lesser difficulty, the discovery of certain chemical or other physical and mechanical conditions under which life can be stimulated to appear, will prove no more than that these are the favourable or necessary conditions for the manifestation of life in body,such conditions there must be in the nature of things,but not that life is not another new and higher power of the force of universal being. The connection of life responses with physical conditions and stimuli proves very clearly that life and matter are connected and that, as indeed they must do to coexist, the two kinds of energy act on each other,a very ancient knowledge; but it does not get rid of the fact that the physical response is accompanied by an element which seems to be of the nature of a nervous excitement and an incipient or suppressed consciousness and is not the same thing as the companion physical reaction.
When we come to mind, we seehow could it be otherwise in an embodied mind?a response, interaction, connection, a correspondence if you will; but no amount of correspondence can show how a physical response can be converted into or amount to or by itself constitute in result a conscious operation, a perception, emotion, thought-concept, or prove that love is a chemical product or that Platos theory of ideas or Homers Iliad or the cosmic consciousness of the Yogin was only a combination of physiological reactions or a complex of the changes of grey brain matter or a flaming marvel of electrical discharges. It is not only that common sense and imagination boggle at these theories,that objection may be disregarded,not only that perception, reason and intuition have to be thrust aside in favour of a forced and too extended inference, but that there is a gulf of difference here between the thing to be explained and the thing by which it is sought to explain it which cannot be filled up, however much we may admit nervous connections and psycho-physical bridges. And if the physical scientist points to a number of indicative facts and hopes one day to triumph over these formidable difficulties, there is growing up on the other side an incipient mass of psychical phenomena which are likely to drown his theory in fathomless waters. The insuperability of these always evident objections is beginning to be more widely recognised, but since the past still holds considerable sway, it is necessary to insist on them so that we may have the clear right to go on to more liberal hypotheses which do not try prematurely to reduce to a mechanical simplicity the problem of our being.
4.01 - THE COLLECTIVE ISSUE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
new functions. For identical reasons Biology would not be able
to generalise itself on the dimensions of the whole of life without
4.02 - BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE - THE HYPER-PERSONAL, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
that physics and Biology look to find the eternal and the Great
Stability.
4.03 - Prayer to the Ever-greater Christ, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
8. The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind
(i947)
--
1. Physics and Biology: the Problem
172
--
xviii. Can Biology, Taken to its Extreme Limit, Enable us to
Emerge into the Transcendent? (195 1)
4.03 - THE ULTIMATE EARTH, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
by Biology (assault on the laws and springs of heredity, use of hormones, etc.,
sec pp. 249-50).
--
trary, thought. At the end of its constructions, Biology, if it
takes its discoveries to their logical conclusion, finds itself forced
--
physics, all Biology and all psychology, a science of human energetics.
It is in the course of that creation, already obscurely begun,
5.01 - EPILOGUE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
veil of Biology. Upon the thinking entity that we have become
by hominisation, it is now possible for it to radiate from the one
--
the scope of Biology) the structural relationship noted here
between complexity and consciousness is experimentally incon-
--
It is too often forgotten that there should be, and is, a special Biology of the
' infinitely complex '.
--
comparable with those of Biology. Naturally, it is admitted,
mankind has always been increasing, which forces it to make
5 - The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
historical angle. In psychology as in Biology we cannot afford to
overlook or underestimate this question of origins, although the
--
For this reason Biology should never forget the question of pur-
pose, for only by answering that can we get at the meaning of a
Blazing P3 - Explore the Stages of Postconventional Consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
paleontology, geology, Biology, and ecology to form the field of evolution which, in its turn,
paved the way for chaos theory, evolutionary Biology, evolutionary psychology. Albert
Einstein (1950) co-ordinated the paradigm of non-Euclidian geometry with the paradigms of
BOOK II. -- PART III. ADDENDA. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
the light of Biology and modern Philosophy."
We find the same conclusions arrived at in still another excellent volume of another Russian deep
--
(Principles of Biology, Vol. I., p. 345.)
Next Section
--
"natural selection," and all the other physical causes of organic differentiation are present. Biology and
palaeontology find their province here in investigating the many physical agencies which contri bute so
BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
terms our principles, or "metaphysical concepts," but "the primitive Biology or physiology of the
Soul," does not invalidate our argument. The lecturer touches on only two keys, those that unlock the
BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
De Quatrefages and several others in those of anthropology, Biology, etc., etc.) that, in their efforts to
support their individual hypotheses and systems, the majority of the eminent and learned materialists
--
As Biology and Physiology now deny, in toto, the existence of a "vital principle," this extract,
together with de Quatrefages' admission, is a clear confirmation that there are men of science who
--
achieved in physiology, and even -- to a degree -- in Biology. But man's inner, spiritual, psychic, or
even moral, nature cannot be left to the tender mercies of an ingrained materialism; for not even the
--
This is the eminent Huxley, the king of physiology and Biology, who is proven playing at blind man's
buff with premisses and facts. What may not the "smaller fry" of science do after this!
BS 1 - Introduction to the Idea of God, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Where does the information thats in the dream come from? It has to come from somewhere. You could think of it as a revelation, because its like it springs out of the void, and its new knowledge. You didnt produce it; it just appears. Im scientifically minded, and Im quite a rational person. I like to have an explanation of things thats rational and empirical, before I look for any other kind of explanation. I dont want to say that everything that's associated with divinity can be reduced, in some manner, to Biology, an evolutionary history, or anything like that. But, insofar as its possible to do that reduction, Im going to do that. Im going to leave the other phenomena floating in the air, because they cant be pinned down. In that category, I would put the category of mystical or religious experience, which we dont understand, at all.
Artists observe one another, and they observe people. Then they represent what they see, and transmit the message of what they see, to us. That teaches us to see. We dont necessarily know what it is that were learning from them, but were learning somethingor, at least, were acting like were learning something. We go to movies; we watch stories; we immerse ourselves in fiction, constantly. Thats an artistic production, and, for many people, the world of the arts is a living world. Thats particularly true if youre a creative person.
DS4, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
right now. They are more like the overlays in a Biology textbook, overlays to which we give
coherence by our own set of perceptions, delusions though they may be. Thus, the term punyaskandha means body of merit and not heap of merit or store of merit. The importance and
Liber 111 - The Book of Wisdom - LIBER ALEPH VEL CXI, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Biology, for all Development is Structuralization; that is, a
Limitation and Specialization of an originally indeterminate
--
Thelema is justified also of Biology and of Social Science. It is the
true Way of Nature, the Right Strategy in the War of man with his
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
with current trends in Biology and experimental psychology, and are
rather technical. There is an unavoidable difference in style between the
--
sciences like chemistry through biochemistry to Biology, then through
medicine which is, alas, a much less exact science to psychology,
--
tool of modern physics and Biology, not to mention the insurance
business. 'It is remarkable', wrote Laplace, 'that a science which began
--
from Biology; but the same kind of perverse- or reverse-logic can also
be found operating in other branches of science and art.
--
most definite experiments in the history of Biology'. Loewi again
isolated two frog hearts, the first with its nerves, the second without.
--
astronomy had to embrace theology, Soviet Biology was wedded to a
crude form of Lamarckism. The development of science cannot be
--
wrote in 1932, 'they form the central problem of Biology, and Biology
will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognized. The hierarchy of
--
another, in Biology, embryology, neuro-physiology, and in psycho-
logy itself. But only when the new terms 'Gestalt', 'configuration', and
--
sided development in the history of science and philosophy. In Biology
or theoretical physics there are no clean-cut distinctions between
--
20, Nordenskiold, History of Biology, p. 42, quoted by Himmelfarb, op. cit., p. 153.
21, British Medical Journal, 4.8.1956". 22, Himmelfarb, op. cit., p. 156. 23, Origin,
--
Loewi, O., in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Vol. IV., No. l. Chicago Univ.
Press, i960.
--
Nordenskioeld, E. History of Biology. New York: K. Paul, 1928.
Olds, J., in Proceedings of ike First International Congress of Neuro-Pharmacology.
--- Overview of noun biology
The noun biology has 3 senses (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (4) biology, biological science ::: (the science that studies living organisms)
2. biology ::: (characteristic life processes and phenomena of living organisms; "the biology of viruses")
3. biota, biology ::: (all the plant and animal life of a particular region)
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun biology
3 senses of biology
Sense 1
biology, biological science
=> life science, bioscience
=> natural science
=> science, scientific discipline
=> discipline, subject, subject area, subject field, field, field of study, study, bailiwick
=> knowledge domain, knowledge base, domain
=> content, cognitive content, mental object
=> cognition, knowledge, noesis
=> psychological feature
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
biology
=> life
=> organic phenomenon
=> natural phenomenon
=> phenomenon
=> process, physical process
=> physical entity
=> entity
Sense 3
biota, biology
=> collection, aggregation, accumulation, assemblage
=> group, grouping
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun biology
1 of 3 senses of biology
Sense 1
biology, biological science
=> biogeography
=> botany, phytology
=> cryobiology
=> cytology
=> ecology, bionomics, environmental science
=> embryology
=> exobiology, space biology, astrobiology
=> forestry
=> genetics, genetic science
=> microbiology
=> molecular biology
=> morphology
=> neurobiology
=> paleobiology, palaeobiology
=> physiology
=> radiobiology
=> sociobiology
=> zoology, zoological science
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun biology
3 senses of biology
Sense 1
biology, biological science
=> life science, bioscience
Sense 2
biology
=> life
Sense 3
biota, biology
=> collection, aggregation, accumulation, assemblage
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun biology
3 senses of biology
Sense 1
biology, biological science
-> life science, bioscience
=> biology, biological science
=> biomedical science
=> biometrics, biometry, biostatistics
=> craniology
=> dermatoglyphics
=> dietetics
=> eugenics
=> dysgenics, cacogenics
=> euthenics
=> medical science
Sense 2
biology
-> life
=> biology
=> aerobiosis
Sense 3
biota, biology
-> collection, aggregation, accumulation, assemblage
=> procession
=> pharmacopoeia
=> string
=> wardrobe
=> wardrobe
=> population, universe
=> armamentarium
=> art collection
=> backlog
=> battery
=> block
=> book, rule book
=> book
=> bottle collection
=> bunch, lot, caboodle
=> coin collection
=> collage
=> content
=> ensemble, tout ensemble
=> corpus
=> crop
=> tenantry
=> findings
=> flagging
=> flinders
=> pack
=> hand, deal
=> long suit
=> herbarium
=> stamp collection
=> statuary
=> sum, summation, sum total
=> agglomeration
=> gimmickry
=> nuclear club
=> pile, heap, mound, agglomerate, cumulation, cumulus
=> mass
=> combination
=> congregation
=> hit parade
=> Judaica
=> kludge
=> library, program library, subroutine library
=> library
=> mythology
HAS INSTANCE=> Nag Hammadi, Nag Hammadi Library
=> biota, biology
=> fauna, zoology
=> petting zoo
=> set
=> Victoriana
=> class, category, family
=> job lot
=> package, bundle, packet, parcel
=> defense, defence, defense team, defense lawyers
=> prosecution
=> planting
=> signage
=> generally accepted accounting principles, GAAP
=> pantheon
=> Free World
=> Third World
=> Europe
=> Asia
=> North America
=> Central America
=> South America
=> Oort cloud
=> galaxy
=> galaxy, extragalactic nebula
=> fleet
=> fleet
=> fleet
=> repertoire, repertory
=> repertory, repertoire
=> assortment, mixture, mixed bag, miscellany, miscellanea, variety, salmagundi, smorgasbord, potpourri, motley
=> batch, clutch
=> batch
=> rogue's gallery
=> exhibition, exposition, expo
=> convoy
=> traffic
=> aviation, air power
=> vegetation, flora, botany
=> law, jurisprudence
=> menagerie
=> data, information
=> ana
=> mail, post
=> treasure
=> treasure trove
=> trinketry
=> troponymy, troponomy
=> smithereens
HAS INSTANCE=> Wise Men, Magi
--- Grep of noun biology
agrobiology
astrobiology
biology
biology department
biology lab
biology laboratory
cryobiology
department of biology
exobiology
microbiology
molecular biology
neurobiology
palaeobiology
paleobiology
radiobiology
sociobiology
space biology
Wikipedia - Advertising in biology -- Use of displays by organisms to signal for selective advantage
Wikipedia - Aerobiology
Wikipedia - African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Wikipedia - Agar -- Thickening agent used in microbiology and food
Wikipedia - Agent-based model in biology
Wikipedia - Agni Vlavianos Arvanitis -- Greek professor and researcher in biology
Wikipedia - Agricultural science -- Academic field within biology
Wikipedia - Alison Mary Smith -- Professor and Programme Leader in Metabolic Biology
Wikipedia - Alta Schrock -- Biology professor and community activist
Wikipedia - Altruism (biology)
Wikipedia - American Biology Teacher
Wikipedia - Anfinsen's dogma -- Molecular biology hypothesis
Wikipedia - Angela McLean (biologist) -- British zoologist and Professor of Mathematical Biology
Wikipedia - Animal Diversity Web -- Online database of animal natural history, distribution, classification, and conservation biology
Wikipedia - Animal science -- Interdisciplinary science dealing with the biology of animals
Wikipedia - Anne Osbourn -- Professor of biology
Wikipedia - Anne Ridley -- Professor of Cell Biology
Wikipedia - Antarctic Benthic Deep-Sea Biodiversity Project -- An international project to investigate deep-water biology of the Scotia and Weddell seas
Wikipedia - Antenna (biology)
Wikipedia - Anthecology -- The study of pollination biology
Wikipedia - Antibiotic sensitivity testing -- Microbiology test used in medicine
Wikipedia - Anya Oko Anya -- Nigerian professor of Biology
Wikipedia - ArcLight (biology) -- Genetically-encoded voltage indicator
Wikipedia - Aristotle's biology
Wikipedia - Astrobiology Field Laboratory -- A canceled Mars rover concept by NASA
Wikipedia - Astrobiology (journal)
Wikipedia - Astrobiology Magazine
Wikipedia - Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets
Wikipedia - Astrobiology Society of Britain
Wikipedia - Astrobiology -- Science concerned with life in the universe
Wikipedia - Autolysis (biology)
Wikipedia - Barbara Wold -- Professor of Molecular Biology at CalTech
Wikipedia - Basel Computational Biology Conference
Wikipedia - Benita Katzenellenbogen -- American professor of physiology and cell biology
Wikipedia - Beta dispersion -- Cell biology
Wikipedia - Bibliography of biology -- Wikipedia bibliography
Wikipedia - Bibliography of ecology -- List of publications on the topic of biology
Wikipedia - Bibliography of encyclopedias: biology -- Wikipedia bibliography
Wikipedia - Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech -- Research organization for computational biology and related fields
Wikipedia - Bioelectronics -- Field of research in the convergence of biology and electronics
Wikipedia - Bioethics -- Study of ethics brought about by advances in biology and medicine
Wikipedia - Biofact (biology) -- Dead material of a once-living organism
Wikipedia - Biolinguistics -- The study of the biology and evolution of language
Wikipedia - Biology and Philosophy
Wikipedia - Biology and political orientation -- Correlation between human biology and political tendencies
Wikipedia - Biology and sexual orientation
Wikipedia - Biology Direct
Wikipedia - Biology in fiction
Wikipedia - Biology Monte Carlo method -- Method for simulating ion transport
Wikipedia - Biology of bipolar disorder
Wikipedia - Biology of Diptera -- Order of winged insects commonly known as flies.
Wikipedia - Biology > Philosophy
Wikipedia - Biology (song) -- 2005 single by Girls Aloud
Wikipedia - Biology Today: An Issues Approach -- Book by Edwin Harris Colbert
Wikipedia - Biology -- Science that studies life and living organisms
Wikipedia - Biomedical engineering -- Application of engineering principles and design concepts to medicine and biology for healthcare, healthfood and health purposes
Wikipedia - Biopython -- Collection of open-source Python software tools for computational biology
Wikipedia - Biosemiotics -- a field of semiotics and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, or production and interpretation of signs and codes
Wikipedia - Bleb (cell biology) -- Bulge in the plasma membrane of a cell
Wikipedia - Branches of biology
Wikipedia - Callus (cell biology) -- Growing mass of unorganized plant parenchyma cells
Wikipedia - Canopy (biology) -- Aboveground portion of a plant community or crop
Wikipedia - Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology
Wikipedia - Carol Mason -- Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology
Wikipedia - Catagenesis (biology)
Wikipedia - Category:Astrobiology
Wikipedia - Category:Biology experiments
Wikipedia - Category:Biology lists
Wikipedia - Category:Biology-related lists
Wikipedia - Category:Biology theories
Wikipedia - Category:Biology
Wikipedia - Category:Building biology
Wikipedia - Category:Computational biology
Wikipedia - Category:Developmental biology
Wikipedia - Category:Ethnobiology
Wikipedia - Category:Evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Category:Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology
Wikipedia - Category:History of biology
Wikipedia - Category:History of evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Category:Marine biology
Wikipedia - Category:Molecular biology
Wikipedia - Category:Philosophy of biology
Wikipedia - Category:Sociobiology
Wikipedia - Category:Tissues (biology)
Wikipedia - Catherine Nobes -- Professor of Cell Biology
Wikipedia - Cathy Drennan -- Professor of Chemistry and Biology
Wikipedia - CD64 (biology) -- Integral membrane glycoprotein
Wikipedia - Cell (biology) -- Basic structural and functional unit of organisms
Wikipedia - Cell biology -- Scientific discipline that studies cells
Wikipedia - Cell Proliferation (journal) -- Cell biology journal
Wikipedia - Cells (biology)
Wikipedia - Cell survival curve -- Curve in radiobiology
Wikipedia - Cellular biology
Wikipedia - Cellular microbiology
Wikipedia - Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
Wikipedia - Central dogma of molecular biology -- Explanation of the flow of genetic information within a biological system
Wikipedia - Cheating (biology) -- Exploitive behavior in behavioral ecology
Wikipedia - Chemical biology -- Scientific discipline
Wikipedia - Chenghua Gu -- Professor of Neurobiology
Wikipedia - Chimera (molecular biology) -- A single nucleic acid sequence created from fragments that are normally separated
Wikipedia - ChIP-on-chip -- Molecular biology method
Wikipedia - Chronobiology
Wikipedia - Cirrus (biology) -- Long, thin structures in both vertebrate and invertebrate animals
Wikipedia - Civic Biology -- Biology textbook by George William Hunter
Wikipedia - Cladistics -- A method of biological systematics in evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Clinical microbiology
Wikipedia - Clone (cell biology) -- Group of identical cells that share a common ancestry
Wikipedia - Clumping (biology) -- Biological behavior
Wikipedia - Cognitive biology -- Emerging science
Wikipedia - Coincidence detection in neurobiology
Wikipedia - Colegio de Biologos del Peru -- A professional association of biology graduates
Wikipedia - Colony (biology) -- Term in biology
Wikipedia - Competition (biology) -- Interaction where the fitness of one organism is lowered by the presence of another organism
Wikipedia - Complement (biology)
Wikipedia - Computational Biology Department
Wikipedia - Computational Biology
Wikipedia - Computational biology
Wikipedia - Computational systems biology
Wikipedia - Conservation biology -- The study of threats to biological diversity
Wikipedia - Continuous Plankton Recorder -- Marine biology monitoring programming
Wikipedia - Corpus (museum) -- Dutch human biology museum
Wikipedia - Court jester hypothesis -- Hypothesis in evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Cryobiology
Wikipedia - Current Opinion in Neurobiology
Wikipedia - Current Opinion in Structural Biology
Wikipedia - Current research in evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Dawn R. Bazely -- Biology professor
Wikipedia - Deneb Karentz -- Marine biology professor
Wikipedia - Detention center (cell biology) -- region of the cell
Wikipedia - Developmental biology -- The study of the process by which animals and plants grow and develop
Wikipedia - Developmental psychobiology
Wikipedia - Devolution (biology) -- The notion that species can revert to supposedly more primitive forms over time
Wikipedia - Didier Raoult -- French biology researcher
Wikipedia - Directionality (molecular biology) -- End-to-end chemical orientation of a single strand of nucleic acid
Wikipedia - Discovery Investigations -- A series of scientific cruises and shore-based investigations into the biology of whales in the Southern Ocean
Wikipedia - Do-it-yourself biology -- Biotechnological social movement
Wikipedia - Domain (biology) -- Taxonomic rank
Wikipedia - Electroporation -- method in molecular biology to introduce DNA into other hosts
Wikipedia - Elisabeth Lloyd -- American philosopher of biology
Wikipedia - Embryology -- Branch of biology studying prenatal biology
Wikipedia - Endogeny (biology)
Wikipedia - Energy (psychological) -- Concept of a postulated unconscious mental functioning on a level between biology and consciousness
Wikipedia - Epigenesis (biology) -- Process of development
Wikipedia - Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology -- Annual award from Science magazine
Wikipedia - ERIBA -- European Research Institute for the Biology of Ageing
Wikipedia - Erika Zavaleta -- American professor of ecology and evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Escalation hypothesis -- Theory in evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Ethnobiology
Wikipedia - European Astrobiology Network Association
Wikipedia - European Conference on Computational Biology
Wikipedia - European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Wikipedia - European Molecular Biology Organization -- Organization of researchers in the life science
Wikipedia - European Society for Evolutionary Biology -- Organisation to support the study of organic evolution
Wikipedia - Evolutionary Bioinformatics -- A peer-reviewed open access scientific journal focusing on computational biology in the study of evolution
Wikipedia - Evolutionary biology -- The study of the processes that produced the diversity of life
Wikipedia - Evolutionary developmental biology -- Field of research that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to infer the ancestral relationships
Wikipedia - Evolutionary game theory -- The application of game theory to evolving populations in biology
Wikipedia - Evolutionary psychiatry -- Discipline of psychiatry based on evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Evolution (journal) -- Monthly journal in the science of evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Exobiology Radiation Assembly
Wikipedia - Exobiology
Wikipedia - ExoMars -- An astrobiology program studying Mars
Wikipedia - EXPOSE -- An external facility on the ISS dedicated to astrobiology experiments
Wikipedia - Extracellular space -- Biology term
Wikipedia - Family (biology) -- Taxonomic rank between genus and order
Wikipedia - Feminist biology
Wikipedia - FEMS Microbiology Letters -- Academic journal
Wikipedia - Fitness (biology) -- Expected reproductive success
Wikipedia - Fleming Prize Lecture -- Scientific award in microbiology
Wikipedia - Folasade Ogunsola -- Nigerian professor of medical microbiology
Wikipedia - Food microbiology
Wikipedia - Forensic biology -- Forensic application of the study of biology
Wikipedia - Freshwater biology -- The scientific study of freshwater ecosystems and biology
Wikipedia - Friday Harbor Laboratories -- Marine biology field station of the University of Washington
Wikipedia - Frontiers in Microbiology
Wikipedia - Functional integration (neurobiology)
Wikipedia - Function (biology)
Wikipedia - Galaxy (computational biology)
Wikipedia - Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology -- Public-private organization for vaccine development
Wikipedia - Genome Biology and Evolution
Wikipedia - Geobiology
Wikipedia - Geomicrobiology -- Intersection of microbiology and geology
Wikipedia - Glossary of biology -- List of definitions of terms and concepts commonly used in the study of biology
Wikipedia - Glossary of evolutionary biology -- Wikipedia glossary
Wikipedia - Glossary of invasion biology terms -- Wikipedia glossary
Wikipedia - G-quadruplex -- Structure in molecular biology
Wikipedia - Gram stain -- Investigative procedure in biology
Wikipedia - Granule (cell biology) -- small particle, often in plants
Wikipedia - Graziella Pellegrini -- Italian Professor of Cell Biology
Wikipedia - Green-beard effect -- Hypothesis for altruism in evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Gregory Hannon -- British professor of molecular cancer biology (born 1964)
Wikipedia - Group living -- Discussion of term "Group living" in the context of ethology and evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Hal E. Broxmeyer -- Professor of Microbiology and Immunology
Wikipedia - Helen Matusevich Oujesky -- American professor of microbiology
Wikipedia - Heliobiology
Wikipedia - Hill-topping (biology)
Wikipedia - History of biology -- History of the study of life from ancient to modern times
Wikipedia - History of evolutionary thought -- The history of evolutionary thought in biology
Wikipedia - History of marine biology -- Aspect of history
Wikipedia - History of molecular biology
Wikipedia - History of RNA biology
Wikipedia - Holdfast (biology) -- Root-like structure that anchors aquatic sessile organisms, such as seaweed
Wikipedia - Homing (biology)
Wikipedia - Homogamy (biology) -- Four-sense biological term referring to either inbreeding, or synchronous reproductive maturation, or flower type, or preferential mating
Wikipedia - Homology (biology) -- Shared ancestry between a pair of structures or genes in different taxa
Wikipedia - Homonym (biology) -- Scientific name that is identical in spelling to a name with a different type
Wikipedia - Host (biology) -- Organism that harbours another organism
Wikipedia - Human biology
Wikipedia - Human development (biology)
Wikipedia - Human evolutionary developmental biology -- Evolution of developmental processes in humans
Wikipedia - H. Vasken Aposhian -- Toxicologist and emeritus professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Arizona
Wikipedia - Hybrid (biology) -- Offspring of cross-species reproduction
Wikipedia - Hybridization (biology)
Wikipedia - ICES Journal of Marine Science -- A peer-reviewed scientific journal covering oceanography and marine biology. It is published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea
Wikipedia - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Wikipedia - Inbreeding avoidance -- Evolutionary biology concept of prevention of negative inbreeding effects
Wikipedia - Index of biology articles -- Alphabetic listing of articles about biology topics
Wikipedia - Index of evolutionary biology articles
Wikipedia - Index of molecular biology articles -- Wikipedia index
Wikipedia - Index of neurobiology articles
Wikipedia - Inheritance (biology)
Wikipedia - Inhibitor protein -- Cell biology
Wikipedia - Institute of Arctic Biology -- University of Alaska high-latitude bioresearch facility
Wikipedia - Institute of Food and Radiation Biology -- Research institute in Bangladesh
Wikipedia - Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology
Wikipedia - Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology
Wikipedia - International Journal of Astrobiology
Wikipedia - International Microbiology
Wikipedia - International Society for Computational Biology Student Council
Wikipedia - International Society for Computational Biology
Wikipedia - International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology -- International academic organization
Wikipedia - International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Wikipedia - Inversion (evolutionary biology) -- Hypothesis that during the course of chordate evolution, the structures along the dorsoventral axis have taken on an orientation opposite that of the ancestral form
Wikipedia - Iodine in biology -- Description of the element's function as an essential trace element
Wikipedia - Jack D. Keene -- Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology
Wikipedia - Jane Endicott -- Professor of Cancer Structural Biology
Wikipedia - J. D. Bernal -- Irish scientist, pioneer of X-ray crystallography in biology
Wikipedia - John Graham White -- Professor Emeritus of Anatomy and Molecular Biology
Wikipedia - Journal of Applied Ichthyology -- A peer-reviewed scientific journal on ichthyology, marine biology, and oceanography published by Wiley-Blackwell
Wikipedia - Journal of Computational Biology
Wikipedia - Journal of Crustacean Biology
Wikipedia - Journal of Evolutionary Biology -- Bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal
Wikipedia - Journal of Experimental Biology
Wikipedia - Journal of Molecular Biology
Wikipedia - Journal of the History of Biology
Wikipedia - Journal of Theoretical Biology
Wikipedia - Juliet Daniel -- Canadian biology professor
Wikipedia - Karen Mohlke -- Researcher in Biology
Wikipedia - Kathleen Ann Campbell -- New Zealand geology and astrobiology academic
Wikipedia - Kathryn Ayscough -- Professor of Molecular Cell Biology
Wikipedia - Kingdom (biology) -- Taxonomic rank
Wikipedia - Klotho (biology) -- Human enzyme
Wikipedia - Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Wikipedia - Lai-Ming Ching -- New Zealand cellular biology academic
Wikipedia - Larry Sandler Memorial Award -- Biology award
Wikipedia - Leann Tilley -- Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Wikipedia - Lei Stanley Qi -- Chemical and systems biology researcher
Wikipedia - Leonard Adleman -- American theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science and molecular biology at the University of Southern California
Wikipedia - List of biology awards -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of biology journals -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of biology websites -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - List of Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology
Wikipedia - List of members of the National Academy of Sciences (Biophysics and computational biology)
Wikipedia - List of members of the National Academy of Sciences (Cellular and developmental biology)
Wikipedia - List of members of the National Academy of Sciences (Evolutionary biology)
Wikipedia - List of members of the National Academy of Sciences (Microbial biology)
Wikipedia - List of members of the National Academy of Sciences (Plant biology)
Wikipedia - List of omics topics in biology
Wikipedia - List of unsolved problems in biology -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - Lotka-Volterra equations -- Pair of equations modelling predator-prey cycles in biology
Wikipedia - Magnetobiology -- The study of biological effects of magnetic fields
Wikipedia - Margaret Frame (biologist) -- Professor of Molecular Cell Biology
Wikipedia - Marginal distribution (biology) -- Discussion of factors limiting the occurrence of a species
Wikipedia - Marine biology -- The scientific study of organisms that live in the ocean
Wikipedia - Marjory Stephenson Prize -- Prize of the Microbiology Society
Wikipedia - Mars Astrobiology Explorer-Cacher -- A cancelled NASA Mars rover concept
Wikipedia - Mary Voytek -- Director of NASA Astrobiology Program and USGS microbiologist
Wikipedia - Masanori Baba -- Japanese professor of microbiology
Wikipedia - Mathematical and theoretical biology -- Branch of biology which employs theoretical analysis, mathematical models and abstractions of the living organisms
Wikipedia - Mathematical biology
Wikipedia - Matthias Heinemann -- Professor of molecular systems biology (b. 1972)
Wikipedia - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology -- Research institute located in Plon, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
Wikipedia - Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology
Wikipedia - Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics
Wikipedia - Mechanism (biology)
Wikipedia - Medical microbiology -- Branch of medical science concerned with the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases
Wikipedia - Medusa (biology)
Wikipedia - Metamerism (biology)
Wikipedia - Michael Levitt -- Nobel laureate, biophysicist and professor of structural biology
Wikipedia - Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews
Wikipedia - Microbiology of oxygen minimum zones -- Alternative respiratory strategies in hypoxic waters
Wikipedia - Microbiology Society Prize Medal -- Microbiology award
Wikipedia - Microbiology Society -- Learned society specialising in microbiology
Wikipedia - Microbiology -- The study of microscopic organisms
Wikipedia - Model organism -- Organisms used to study biology across species
Wikipedia - Modularity (biology)
Wikipedia - Molecular Biology of the Cell (book) -- 1983 book by Bruce Alberts
Wikipedia - Molecular Biology of the Cell
Wikipedia - Molecular Biology
Wikipedia - Molecular biology -- Branch of biology which studies biological activity at the molecular level
Wikipedia - Molecular ecology -- A field of evolutionary biology that applies molecular population genetics, molecular phylogenetics, and genomics to traditional ecological questions
Wikipedia - Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden -- Swedish infection biology research institute
Wikipedia - Molecular Neurobiology
Wikipedia - Molecular Systems Biology
Wikipedia - Morphogenetic field -- Developmental biology concept
Wikipedia - Morphology (biology) -- In biology, the form and structure of organisms
Wikipedia - MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology -- Research institute in Cambridge, England
Wikipedia - Mueller-Hinton agar -- Culture medium used in microbiology
Wikipedia - Multilocus sequence typing -- Technique in molecular biology
Wikipedia - Mutualism (biology) -- A relationship between organisms of different species in which each individual benefits from the activity of the other
Wikipedia - Nancy Huntly -- Professor of Biology
Wikipedia - Nanobiotechnology -- Intersection of nanotechnology and biology
Wikipedia - NASA Astrobiology Institute
Wikipedia - NAS Award in Molecular Biology
Wikipedia - National Standard Examination in Biology -- Examination for secondary school students in India
Wikipedia - Naturalisation (biology) -- Ecological processes
Wikipedia - Nature versus nurture -- Debate regarding biology vs. sociology
Wikipedia - Neena Schwartz -- American biology researcher (1926-2018)
Wikipedia - Neontology -- Branch of biology that studies living organisms
Wikipedia - Network biology
Wikipedia - Neurobiology of Aging -- Scientific journal
Wikipedia - Neurobiology of Disease -- Peer-reviewed medical journal
Wikipedia - Neurobiology
Wikipedia - Nicola Stanley-Wall -- Professor of Molecular Microbiology
Wikipedia - Nomenclature codes -- Rulebooks of taxonomic nomenclature, in biology
Wikipedia - Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution
Wikipedia - Nur (biology) -- Family of orphan nuclear receptors which act as transcription factors in neuron development and maintenance.
Wikipedia - Offspring -- In biology, the product of reproduction of an organism
Wikipedia - On the Origin of Species -- 1859 book on evolutionary biology by Charles Darwin
Wikipedia - O/OREOS -- NASA nanosatellite with 2 astrobiology experiments on board
Wikipedia - Order (biology) -- Taxonomic rank
Wikipedia - Outline of biology -- Hierarchical outline list of articles related to biology
Wikipedia - Outline of cell biology
Wikipedia - Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World
Wikipedia - P. A. L. Chapman-Rietschi -- Scholar and research writer in the field of history of astronomy, ancient astral sciences, archaeoastronomy, and astrobiology
Wikipedia - Paleobiology
Wikipedia - Paleoneurobiology
Wikipedia - Paleozoology -- Branch of paleontology, paleobiology, or zoology
Wikipedia - Patricia Lindop -- British professor of radiation biology
Wikipedia - Peppered moth evolution -- significance of the peppered moth in evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Pharmacology -- branch of biology concerning drugs
Wikipedia - Philosophy of biology
Wikipedia - Pierce Biotechnology -- American biotechnology company focused on protein biology
Wikipedia - Pierre Corvol -- French doctor and biology researcher
Wikipedia - Pincer (biology) -- Organ used by anthropods
Wikipedia - Placido Navas Lloret -- Spanish Professor of Cell Biology
Wikipedia - Plant evolutionary developmental biology -- The study of developmental programs and patterns in plants from an evolutionary perspective
Wikipedia - PLOS Biology
Wikipedia - PLOS Computational Biology
Wikipedia - Polymorphism (biology)
Wikipedia - Population biology -- Biological study of animal populations
Wikipedia - Portal:Biology
Wikipedia - Portal:Evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Potassium in biology -- Description of the element's function as an essential mineral micronutrient
Wikipedia - Prix Paul Doistau-Emile Blutet -- French Academy of Sciences award in mathematics, physics, and biology
Wikipedia - Promoter (biology)
Wikipedia - Psychobiology
Wikipedia - Punctuated equilibrium -- Theory in evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Quantum biology -- Application of quantum mechanics and theoretical chemistry to biological objects and problems
Wikipedia - Race (biology) -- Informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy, below the level of subspecies
Wikipedia - Radhika Nair (researcher) -- Indian cancer biology researcher
Wikipedia - Radiation biology
Wikipedia - Radiobiology -- Study of the scientific principles, mechanisms, and effects of the interaction of ionizing radiation with living matter
Wikipedia - Regeneration (biology) -- Biological process of renewal, restoration, and tissue growth
Wikipedia - Regina Lamendella -- American Professor of Microbiology
Wikipedia - Reporter gene -- Technique in molecular biology
Wikipedia - Reproductive biology -- Branch of biology studying reproduction
Wikipedia - Research in Computational Molecular Biology -- Annual bioinformatics conference
Wikipedia - Resource (biology)
Wikipedia - Richard Dixon (biologist) -- Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of North Texas
Wikipedia - RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center -- Japanese research center
Wikipedia - RNA Biology
Wikipedia - Roger Everett Summons -- Professor of geobiology
Wikipedia - Sabra Klein -- Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology
Wikipedia - Saltation (biology)
Wikipedia - Sara Rankin -- Professor of Leukocyte and Stem Cell Biology
Wikipedia - Segmentation (biology) -- The division of some animal and plant body plans into a series of segments
Wikipedia - Selection (biology)
Wikipedia - Selenium in biology -- An essential micro-nutrient for animals
Wikipedia - Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology
Wikipedia - Sense (molecular biology) -- Property of nucleic acid strands with respect to their translatability into protein
Wikipedia - Sequence (biology)
Wikipedia - Sexy son hypothesis -- Postulate in biology
Wikipedia - Shoaling and schooling -- In biology, any group of fish that stay together for social reasons
Wikipedia - Society for Conservation Biology -- Environmental organization
Wikipedia - Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine -- Nonprofit scientific society
Wikipedia - Society for the Study of Social Biology
Wikipedia - Society of Biology
Wikipedia - Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
Wikipedia - Sociobiology
Wikipedia - Soil biology
Wikipedia - Soil microbiology -- Soil micro organisms
Wikipedia - Space biology
Wikipedia - Spandrel (biology)
Wikipedia - Spanish Astrobiology Center
Wikipedia - Spawn (biology) -- Process of aquatic animals releasing sperm and eggs into water
Wikipedia - Station biologique de Roscoff -- A French marine biology and oceanography research and teaching center
Wikipedia - Stele (biology)
Wikipedia - Sterilization (microbiology) -- Process that eliminates or kills all biological agents on an object or in a volume
Wikipedia - Stimulated Raman spectroscopy -- Form of spectroscopy employed in physics, chemistry, biology, and other fields
Wikipedia - Stress (biology) -- Organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition or a stimulus
Wikipedia - Structural Biology
Wikipedia - Structural biology -- Study of molecular structures in biology
Wikipedia - Structuralism (biology)
Wikipedia - Substrate (biology)
Wikipedia - Sue Jinks-Robertson -- American professor of genetics and microbiology
Wikipedia - Susan Rosser -- Professor of Synthetic Biology
Wikipedia - Symmetry in biology
Wikipedia - Sympathetic nervous system -- Term in biology
Wikipedia - Synthetic biology -- Interdisciplinary branch of biology and engineering
Wikipedia - Systematic biology
Wikipedia - Systems Biology Ontology
Wikipedia - Systems Biology
Wikipedia - Systems biology -- Computational and mathematical modeling of complex biological systems
Wikipedia - Tamily Weissman -- Neurobiology professor
Wikipedia - Tanpopo (mission) -- ISS astrobiology experiment investigating the potential interplanetary transfer of life, organic compounds, and possible terrestrial particles in the low Earth orbit
Wikipedia - Taxonomy (biology) -- Science of naming, defining and classifying organisms
Wikipedia - Teleology in biology -- The use of language of goal-directedness in the context of evolutionary adaptation
Wikipedia - Template talk:Astrobiology
Wikipedia - Template talk:Biology nav
Wikipedia - Template talk:Branches of biology
Wikipedia - Template talk:Ethnobiology
Wikipedia - Template talk:Evolutionary biology
Wikipedia - Template talk:History of biology
Wikipedia - Template talk:Philosophy of biology
Wikipedia - Template talk:Sociobiology
Wikipedia - Template talk:TopicTOC-Biology
Wikipedia - TERRA (biology) -- Telomeric repeat-containing RNA
Wikipedia - Test (biology) -- Hard shell of some spherical marine animals
Wikipedia - Tetraploid complementation assay -- A technique in biology in which cells of two mammalian embryos are combined to form a new embryo.
Wikipedia - The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology
Wikipedia - Theoretical biology
Wikipedia - The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man
Wikipedia - The Quarterly Review of Biology
Wikipedia - The Structure and Biology of Arctic Flowering Plants -- English language scientific monograph series on arctic flowering plants
Wikipedia - Timeline of biology and organic chemistry
Wikipedia - Tina Henkin -- Professor of microbiology
Wikipedia - Tissue (biology) -- | Cellular organization level between cell and organ
Wikipedia - Toxicology -- Branch of biology, chemistry, and medicine
Wikipedia - Tracy Palmer -- Professor of Molecular Microbiology
Wikipedia - Trait (biology)
Wikipedia - Transcription (biology) -- Process of copying a segment of DNA into RNA
Wikipedia - Translation (biology) -- Cellular process of protein synthesis
Wikipedia - Tree of life (biology) -- Metaphor of relationships between species of organisms
Wikipedia - Trends (journals) -- A series of journals that publish review articles in a range of areas of biology and chemistry
Wikipedia - Trypticase soy agar -- Culture medium used in microbiology
Wikipedia - Turing pattern -- Concept from evolutioonary biology
Wikipedia - Type (biology) -- Specimen(s) to which a scientific name is formally attached
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Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980 - 1980) - Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is an educational television series written and narrated by astronomer and writer Carl Sagan in 1980, and was also published in book form. It is best known for its presentation of a wide variety of scientific topics astronomy, physics, biology, evolution, environmentalism...
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Demi-chan wa Kataritai -- -- A-1 Pictures -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Vampire Fantasy School Seinen -- Demi-chan wa Kataritai Demi-chan wa Kataritai -- High school biology teacher Tetsuo Takahashi may look like your average everyday instructor, but beneath his gentle appearance lies something less ordinary: his fascination for the "Ajin," more commonly known as "Demi." Although these half-human, half-monster beings have integrated into human society, Takahashi believes that much about them will remain unknown unless he interacts with them firsthand. -- -- Demi-chan wa Kataritai follows Takahashi's daily life in Shibasaki High School together with his three Demi students—Hikari Takanashi, an energetic vampire; Kyouko Machi, a gentle dullahan; and Yuki Kusakabe, the shy snow woman. Along the way, Takahashi also meets fellow teacher Sakie Satou, a succubus with an aversion towards men. To fulfill his goal of learning more about the Demi, Takahashi decides to conduct casual interviews with the girls to learn more about their abilities, psyche, and interaction with human society. As Takahashi strengthens his bond with his students, he soon discovers that the Demi are not as unusual as he initially believed. -- -- 328,868 7.60
Demi-chan wa Kataritai -- -- A-1 Pictures -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Vampire Fantasy School Seinen -- Demi-chan wa Kataritai Demi-chan wa Kataritai -- High school biology teacher Tetsuo Takahashi may look like your average everyday instructor, but beneath his gentle appearance lies something less ordinary: his fascination for the "Ajin," more commonly known as "Demi." Although these half-human, half-monster beings have integrated into human society, Takahashi believes that much about them will remain unknown unless he interacts with them firsthand. -- -- Demi-chan wa Kataritai follows Takahashi's daily life in Shibasaki High School together with his three Demi students—Hikari Takanashi, an energetic vampire; Kyouko Machi, a gentle dullahan; and Yuki Kusakabe, the shy snow woman. Along the way, Takahashi also meets fellow teacher Sakie Satou, a succubus with an aversion towards men. To fulfill his goal of learning more about the Demi, Takahashi decides to conduct casual interviews with the girls to learn more about their abilities, psyche, and interaction with human society. As Takahashi strengthens his bond with his students, he soon discovers that the Demi are not as unusual as he initially believed. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Crunchyroll, Funimation -- 328,868 7.60
Hellsing: The Dawn -- -- Graphinica -- 3 eps -- Manga -- Action Horror Seinen Supernatural Vampire -- Hellsing: The Dawn Hellsing: The Dawn -- During the height of World War II, Nazi Germany seeks to strengthen their soldiers with technology crafted under the influence of vampiric biology. Out of fear of this technology turning the tide of war in the Axis's favor, Sir Arthur Hellsing enlists his butler and soldier Walter C. Dornez and vampire Alucard to put a stop to the German plot, sending the two men into a conflict that will scar them both forever. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- Special - Jul 27, 2011 -- 76,452 7.18
Hellsing: The Dawn -- -- Graphinica -- 3 eps -- Manga -- Action Horror Seinen Supernatural Vampire -- Hellsing: The Dawn Hellsing: The Dawn -- During the height of World War II, Nazi Germany seeks to strengthen their soldiers with technology crafted under the influence of vampiric biology. Out of fear of this technology turning the tide of war in the Axis's favor, Sir Arthur Hellsing enlists his butler and soldier Walter C. Dornez and vampire Alucard to put a stop to the German plot, sending the two men into a conflict that will scar them both forever. -- -- Special - Jul 27, 2011 -- 76,452 7.18
Inugami-san to Nekoyama-san -- -- Seven -- 12 eps -- 4-koma manga -- Comedy School Shoujo Ai -- Inugami-san to Nekoyama-san Inugami-san to Nekoyama-san -- Yachiyo Inugami, a cat-loving extrovert, and Suzu Nekoyama, a dog-loving introvert, are unexpectedly cast into a relationship on a day like any other. The pair find themselves drawn together through an inexplicable attraction of their opposite personalities. As they quickly begin to understand one another, Inugami's hardened resolve to gain Nekoyama's favor only leads to frenzied responses. Soon after their momentous union, the two begin to spend more time with one another, growing closer all the while. -- -- Their combined antics gain the attention of the mousy Mikine Nezu, a classmate of Inugami, and soon they join the "biology" club. There, they meet Ushikawa Ukiji, a passive, cow-like upperclassmen. Nezu and Nekoyama soon begin to build upon their relationship and a game of cat and mouse soon begins. -- -- Wild, explosive, and vibrant, Inugami-san to Nekoyama-san tells the comedic tale of two high school girls and their less-than-normal relationship. -- -- TV - Apr 11, 2014 -- 65,263 6.56
Monster Musume no Oishasan -- -- Arvo Animation -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Comedy Romance Ecchi Fantasy -- Monster Musume no Oishasan Monster Musume no Oishasan -- After years of conflict, humans and monsters have settled their differences and are now at peace. This post-war era led to the foundation of Lindworm—a town which has since become the focal point of racial harmony. -- -- As a human doctor specializing in monster biology, Glenn Litbeit runs a small clinic alongside his partner, Saphentite Neikes, who is a half-snake monster known as a lamia. He uses his knowledge to tend to any monsters who seek his aid. Whatever affliction, concern, or injury it may be, he will always be there, ready to help. -- -- 126,010 6.50
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