Top 44 Biologist Quotes

We’re finding a third way for biologists to change the world. It’s very hard to change the world when the only directions available in biology are academia and the pharmaceutical industry.

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature’s only irreducible essence… I had to place myself amidst the variation.

I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.

I would be the worst biologist in the world!

What I was concerned with was life: what are the major features that are common to all living organisms that subtly define life. So I looked at the whole problem as a chemist, as a biochemist, and as a molecular biologist.

I think it’s tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

It was unthinkable not long ago that a biologist or paleontologist would be at the same conference as an astrophysicist. Now we have accumulated so much data in each of these branches of science as it relates to origins that we have learned that no one discipline can answer questions of origins alone.

As for memes, the word ‘meme’ is a cliche, which is to say it’s already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene.

Evolution is among the most well-established theories in the scientific community. To doubt it sounds to biologists as absurd as denying relativity does to physicists.

I’ve always had a natural affiliation with nature. If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be some sort of biologist working in the field in Africa or something.

I decided to pursue graduate study in molecular biology and was accepted by Professor Itaru Watanabe’s laboratory at the Institute for Virus Research at the University of Kyoto, one of a few laboratories in Japan where U.S.-trained molecular biologists were actively engaged in research.

I think that we scientists are seeking an understanding of the natural world. We come in various types – chemists and physicists and biologists and such – and we all have the same goal. We are making progress.

Without even knowing why, we believe that to learn how to be human – which we have many years to do, for human beings have longer childhoods than any other species, a feature that to biologists and philosophers alike is one of our race’s distinguishing characteristics – children must be surrounded by animal imagery.

So I think as a biologist I would like us to focus on this planet and finding solutions to sustaining humanity, to improving people’s lives globally, but doing our absolute utmost to preserve as much biodiversity as we can, knowing that we have already been responsible for the loss of thousands of species.

I was very much into science when I was young – I wanted to be a marine biologist, then I wanted to be a doctor, and then something else, I was always changing.

I wanted to be a meteorologist. I wanted to be a marine biologist.

It is, of course, quite natural that a biologist whose attention had been aroused by noticing in his own case the phenomena of precocious old age should turn to study the causes of it.

I was one of those kids who wanted to do everything, I wanted to be a marine biologist, an actress, a writer, an environmentalist, an activist.

Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist.

You may be guided by the unending effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to describe that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so essential to the human condition, but all the search engines in the universe cannot compete with the first kiss.

I understand emotions more than anyone else. I study emotions like a biologist studies various species.

Anything that makes us take more seriously scientists – or economists or chemists or physicists or biologists – I think is helpful in times when things get distorted because of people not paying attention to all the facts.

When I was little I had this notion of being a marine biologist. I grew up by the ocean so I was always in the water but realistically, I don’t think I would make the best marine biologist.

Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that.

There’s a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective ‘Darwinian’ used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that’s not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it’s whatever leads to reproductive success.

I didn’t become an actor because I wanted to act. Actually, I wanted to become a marine biologist. But most of all, I wanted to be accepted.

Deconstructing the concept of race not only conflicts with people’s tendency to classify and build family histories according to common descent but also ignores the work of biologists studying non-human species.

Cartoons are like fruit flies. Biologists use fruit flies because their large chromosomes and short life cycle make them ideal for studying hereditary changes.

I wanted to be a marine biologist my whole life until I graduated high school. And even now, I’m still like, ‘Maybe I’ll just quit the biz and go to Santa Cruz and study marine biology and have my own research center in the Bahamas.’ Yeah, I’m sure it would be just that smooth.

As a kid, I was going to be a marine biologist or an actor. When I became successful as an actor, I said, ‘Well, maybe I can lend a voice to this with an equal passion.’ You realize how lucky we are and how destructive we’ve been and what little regard we have for the natural world.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a marine biologist. As you go through the grind and the distraction of a career, it’s easy to lose sight of your dreams.

If commercial fishing were excluded from large areas of the sea, the total catch would be likely, paradoxically, to rise, due to what biologists call the spillover effect.

If I could have been a marine biologist I would have, but I didn’t have that kind of intelligence. Numbers were never my strong point.

Now I’m no biologist, but it seems to make a lot of sense that slow lives, as well as being enjoyable, are long lives. One only has to think of the example of the tortoise for proof of this theory from the animal world.

I view my job more almost as a field biologist or anthropologist, where I’m collecting practices. I’m collecting techniques.

I always felt that I had a childhood. I went to regular school whenever I wasn’t working. At one point, I wanted to be a marine biologist.

I weren’t an actor, I’d be a wildlife biologist or forest ranger.

This time at Birmingham turned me into a general biologist, and ever since then I have always tried to take a biological approach to any research project that I have undertaken.

Animal rights can be as extreme as not riding a horse, or not wearing leather, not having a pet at all. Animal welfare advocates are preventing the suffering of animals. And then there’s conservation and species conservation and what conservation biologists do.

Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.

To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size.

A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells… and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers.

Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology.

Biologists have determined brookies to be indicators of ecosystem health and have been recently campaigning to get the word out. If brookies inhabit a stream, the odds are good that the waterway is in excellent condition.