Biologists Quotes

“John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's.”
― David Craig

“A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Scouting for the Reaper

“I have sometimes thought that the reason the trees are so quiet in the summer is that they are in a sort of ecstasy; it is in winter, when the biologists tell us they sleep, that they are most awake, because the sun is gone and they are addicts without their drug, sleeping restlessly and often waking, walking the dark corridors of forests searching for the sun.”
― Gene Wolfe, Peace

“Biologists have an adolescent fascination with sex. Like teenagers they are embarrassed by the subject because of their ignorance.”
― Steve Jones, The Language of Genes: Solving the Mysteries of Our Genetic Past, Present and Future

“We biologists often use the phrase “Mother Nature” to refer to the entire system of Nature that we see around us, but it is not really an entity, and it does not have any real concern for any of its living creatures – it lives on with or without us; it is in our human psychology to impose a human-like identity upon any grand system that we encounter around us – it gives us a sense of closeness to that system and makes us feel an essential part of it. When I say, Mother Nature designed us, or programmed us, I am simply referring to the process of natural selection.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Wise Mating: A Treatise on Monogamy

“That many biologists were bound to get themselves into trouble sooner or later. If you've ever been to an Ichs and Herps meeting, you know it was going to be the herpetologists who got there first.”
― Joe Roman, Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act

“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

“Once a small planet is discovered, astronomers try to determine which category it belongs to. This is like biologists trying to classify a new animal as either being a mammal or reptile.”
― Michio Kaku, The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny Beyond Earth

“But I am not those people. I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Mary and Thatcher had lived in enviable times, when biologists were discovering new species right and left, not watching them go extinct.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered

“Many biologists are like migratory birds---they nest and reproduce in the temperate zone, but regularly migrate to warmer climes in search of spiritual fodder.”
― Vojtech Novotny, Notebooks from New Guinea: Field Notes of a Tropical Biologist