Arthur Guiterman Quotes

Reproduction is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organisms that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected with sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction.

It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.

For my part, I would say that the male sperm and seeds of plants have been penetrated so far that there is nothing further to discover in this great secret, but I could err in my opinion.

Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through "asexuality" ("without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs"). Each of them split in half.

I think you can say that life is a system in which proteins and nucleic acids interact in ways that allow the structure to grow and reproduce. It's that growth and reproduction, the ability to make more of yourself, that's important.

The reason for natural selection's great success is that it provides a satisfying explanation of how evolution might have occurred: individual organisms vary, and if those variations are inherited, the successful ones will survive and propagate and pass down their desirable traits to succeeding generations.

Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.

It's so hard to figure out what's going on in biological systems. You just can't see them.

Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

Sex is not only the basis of life, it is the reason for life.

The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.

Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about.

Life needs a membrane to contain itself so it can replicate and mutate.

Humans are mutants, everything's a mutant - things that evolve.

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.

Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex - and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.

Mr. Darwin refers to the multitude of the individual of every species, which, from one cause or another, perish either before, or soon after attaining maturity.

The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is - a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.

Think about multicellularity on this Earth. Every living thing originally came from bacteria. So, who do you think made up the rules for how to perform collective behaviors? It had to be the bacteria.

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.

The elementary particles which form the embryo are each drawn from the corresponding structure in the parent, and conserve a sort of remembrance of their previous form, so that in the offspring they will reflect and reproduce a resemblance to the parents ... We can thus readily explain how new species are formed... by supposing that the elementary particles may not always retain the order which they present in the parents, but may fortuitously produce differences, which, multiplying and accumulating, have resulted in the infinite variety of species which we see at the present time.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

Throughout the kingdom of life, plant as well as animal, the overproduction of individuals and their reduction by death to a fractional part of the original number is one of the basic conditions of progress, if Darwinism is a sound explanation of organic evolution. For this death will be in the nature of things selective, and hence will make for the modification of the species toward a condition of better adaptation to conditions of life. Indeed, the upholders of war have used precisely the argument of war's high mortality as a proof of war's real beneficence to the race.

Cloning isn’t all that unusual. For thousands of years we have been cloning plants.