biology

• Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.

  — Ronald Fisher

• In the process of natural selection, then. any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• We may consequently state the fundamental theorem of Natural Selection in the form : The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.

  — Ronald Fisher

• Any living cell carries with it the experiences of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors. You cannot expect to explain so wise an old bird in a few simple words.

  — Max Delbrück

• Where natural selection slackens, new forms may arise which would not survive under more rigid competition

  — J.B.S. Haldane

• The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

  — Francis Crick

• At the molecular level, we are all virtually identical.

  — Carl Sagan

• Note that in all this interaction between mutation and natural selection, no moth is making a conscious effort to adapt to a changed environment. The process is random and statistical.

  — Carl Sagan

• Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?

  — Max Perutz

• Natural Selection is not evolution.

  — Ronald Fisher

• The stability of the internal medium is a primary condition for the freedom and independence of certain living bodies in relation to the environment surrounding them.

  — Claude Bernard

• Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and very fast, whereas biological evolution is Darwinian and usually very slow.

  — Edward O. Wilson

• No practical biologist interested in sexual reproduction would be led to work out the detailed consequences experienced by organisms having three or more sexes; yet what else should he do if he wishes to understand why the sexes are, in fact, always two?

  — Ronald Fisher

• Life, we now know, is nothing but a vast array of coordinated chemical reactions. The “secret” to that coordination is the breathtakingly complex set of instructions inscribed—again, chemically—in our DNA.

  — James Watson

• It is these chromosomes … that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual's future development and of its functioning in the mature state. Every complete set of chromosomes contains the full code...

  — Erwin Schrödinger

• The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.

  — James Watson

• Genetically speaking, a human is a pretty big mouse, with a few bits changed

  — Joscha Bach

• ..every cell is a triumph of natural selection. And we're made of trillions of cells. We are, each of us, a multitude. Within us is a little universe.

  — Carl Sagan

• Comparative parasitology supports the evolutionary hypothesis. If two animals have a common ancestor, their parasites are likely to be descended from those of the ancestor. This principle has been applied with considerable effect to the classification of frogs and other groups.

  — J.B.S. Haldane

• [A] living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine.

  — Claude Bernard