#bio

I was standing in our dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, 'Susy was peacefully released today.' It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. ↗

— Mark Twain

#death-of-a-loved-one #death

I love it when people yell at me about the environment and then I tell 'em I'm burning 90% cleaner than them. ↗

— Neil Young

#clean-energy #ecology #environment #green #save-the-planet

What a mistake that had been, to create a construct [AI] that could suffer. He knew that now. Life, pain, death, they were no playthings. Biology was serious business, not for amateurs and foolish gods. ↗

— David Marusek

#biology #death-and-dying #suffering #business

What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether. ↗

— Jeremy Rifkin

#altogether #biological #boundaries #bypass #dna

A man choses. A slave obeys. ↗

— Andrew Ryan

#men #slave #men

Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest... The origin of species — Darwin’s problem — remains unsolved. ↗

— Scott F. Gilbert

#confessions-of-the-darwinists #darwin #darwinism #darwinist-confessions #evolution

Dans la nature rien ne se crée, rien ne se perd, tout change. In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes. ↗

— Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier

#change

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us. ↗

— Mark Kurlansky

#ecology #evolution #extinction #humans #natural-world

[...] we have in our treatise a series of fifty-seven examinations, almost exclusively of injuries of the human body forming a group of observations furnishing us with the earliest known nucleus of fact regarding the anatomy, physiology and pathology of the human body. Crude and elementary as they are, the method by which they were collected was scientific, and these observations, together with the diagnoses and the explanatory commentary in the ancient glosses, form the oldest body of science now extant. ↗

— James Henry Breasted

#ancient-egypt #ancient-medicine #biology #hieroglyphic #medical-history

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#science #business