Walter Gilbert Quotes

It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.

If you go far enough back, your genome connects you with bacteria, butterflies, and barracuda - the great chain of being linked together through DNA.

Every creature that lives climbs up its own genealogical tree before it reaches its mature condition. All animals living, or that ever have lived, are united together by blood relationship of varying nearness or remoteness, and every animal now in existence has a pedigree stretching back, not merely for ten or a hundred generations, but through all geologic time since life first commenced on the earth.

We are all 99.9 percent genetically equal. It is one one-hundredth of one percent of genetic material that makes the difference between any one of us.

All mammals undergo a certain degree of diversification. Darwin knew that. When he drew a family tree, it had many branches on it.

I am passionately devoted to the study of life, and particularly to the higher forms of life.

The chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.

Clearly, we are a species that is well connected to other species. Whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. A series of mutations could change us into all kinds of intermediate species. Whether or not those intermediate species are provably in the past, they could easily be in our future.

We are not humans because we've invented a different type of brain cell, a different type of brain chemical. We are the same basic building blocks as even a fruit fly.

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

I loved the idea that biology was logical.

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.

I think Darwinism as a theory explaining evolution within species is incredibly brilliant - just unbelievably, incredibly brilliant.

Perhaps arising from a fascination with animals, biology seemed the most interesting of sciences to me as a child.

Closely related species of birds are also chromosomally similar.

My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.

Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.

If we understand the worm, we understand life.

Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.

Living in your genome is the history of our species.

It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.

The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.

In an age of molecular genomics, it is ever more apparent that the fingerprints of evolution are pressed deeply into human DNA, just as they are into the genomes of every other organism. Biologists understand this, and so do students who study the science of life.

What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.