Asa Gray Quotes

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.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

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

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

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, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion.

It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized.

Unless one is a religious fundamentalist and believes that man was created in the image and likeness of God, it is foolish to believe that human beings are exempt from biological classification and the laws of evolution that apply to all other life forms.

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

Species can be recognized by their morphological characteristics and songs.

It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

I'm saying that there were many great naturalists before Darwin's time who were very pious people and who knew more about nature than most of us. These were great naturalists; people I would admire for their knowledge of natural science given the time.

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

Islands are natural workshops of evolution.

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.

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.

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future.

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

Cuvier had preceded Lamarck in specifying the kinds and degrees of variation, which his own observations and critical judgment of the reports of others led him to admit.

If you really want to study evolution, you've got go outside sometime, because you'll see symbiosis everywhere!

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

A creationist can embarrass an evolutionist by asking for a definition of species.