Embryology Quotes

“If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.”
― Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, Vol 1

“The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to be explained on the principle of survival of the fittest) to attain her needs by the easiest means.”
― Francis Maitland Balfour

“I check every can of Barbasol I buy for dinosaur embryos. I haven't found any yet, as evidenced by the lack of T-Rex screams in my apartment.”
― Ryan Lilly

“It is undignified to inject yourself with hormones designed to slow or enhance ovarian production. It is undignified to have your ovaries monitored by transvaginal ultrasound; to be sedated so that your eggs can be aspirated into a needle; to have your husband emerge sheepishly from a locked room with the “sample” that will be combined with your eggs under supervision of an embryologist. The grainy photo they hand you on transfer day, of your eight-celled embryo (which does not look remotely like a baby), is undignified, and so is all the waiting and despairing that follows.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on the multiplication of blood cells by division in bird and mammalian embryos and on the division of muscle bundles in frog larvae. Since then I have continued these observations in frog larvae, where it is possible to follow the history of tissues back to segmentation.”
― Robert Remak

“cell is not a name for a thing but for a type of organization”
― Joseph Woodger

“Evo Devo has not just provided a critical missing piece of the Modern Synthesis - embryology - and integrated it with molecular genetics and traditional elements such as paleontology. The wholly unexpected nature of some of its key discoveries and the unprecedented quality and depth of evidence it has provided toward settling previously unresolved questions bestow it with a revolutionary character.”
― Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo