#organisms

Each organism, no matter how simple or complex, has around it a sacred bubble of space, a bit of mobile territoriality which only a few other organisms are allowed to penetrate and then only for short periods of time. ↗

— Edward Hall

#around #bit #bubble #complex #each

Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place. ↗

— Phillip E. Johnson

#aspire #beings #biologists #birds #broader

We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; those cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like [Martin J.] Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human. ↗

— Michael Specter

#fungi #microbes #microbiome #microorganisms #viruses

Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far. ↗

— Kevin Kelly

#design #far #made #organisms #their

We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us. ↗

— Walter Gilbert

#biological #embedded #organisms #related #us

People are not the only interesting organism on earth. From the point of view of scientific or commercial value, there are lots of interesting organisms. ↗

— Daniel Nathans

#earth #interesting #lots #only #organism

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

#changed #closely #conditions #even #exist

The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms. ↗

— Jeremy Rifkin

#consequences #environmental #examined #genetically #hadn

One of the deepest functions of a living organisms is to look ahead... to produce future. ↗

— Francois Jacob

#deepest #functions #future #living #living organisms

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence. ↗

— Phillip E. Johnson

#amount #certain #complex #darwinian #darwinian theory