#bio

Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of us—from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator—molecules called DNA— but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#science #science

These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve. ↗

— Jerry A. Coyne

#conclusion-before-evidence #confessions-of-the-darwinists #conjecture #darwin #darwinism

What was up with class today? It was watered-down porn. He practically had you and Patch on top of your lab table, horizontal, minus your clothes, doing the Big Deed. ↗

— Becca Fitzpatrick

#humour #sarcasm #today

Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#fictions #life #lived #memories #life

Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores. — Teller: A Novel ↗

— Frederick Weisel

#escape #frederick-weisel #teller #weisel #life

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#evolution #radical-science #science

And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#science #science

Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance. ↗

— William A. Dembski

#chance #coincidence #darwinism #evolution #god-of-the-gaps

No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific. ↗

— Henry Gee

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

YOU AND YOU ALONE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN HAPPINESS, NOT ANYONE ELSE ↗

— Sondra A. Torres

#autobiography #family #fetal-alcohol-syndrome #inspirational #family