Biological Analogy Quotes

I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word 'stimulus,' my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

I think computer viruses should count as life.

In general, the human race is still a young organism.

The complexity of social media is akin to biology. It is not a coincidence that we speak of things going viral. Figuring out what is going on with these new platforms, what is harmful, what is beneficial, is as challenging as determining what is best for our health.

Man may be considered as a superior species of animal that produces philosophies and poems in about the same way a silkworm produces their cocoons and bees their hives.

Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory...by spitting.

Plasma seems to have the kinds of properties one would like for life. It's somewhat like liquid water--unpredictable and thus able to behave in an enormously complex fashion. It could probably carry as much information as DNA does. It has at least the potential for organizing itself in interesting ways.

In reality, a cell is a biological mini-me compared to the human body. A cell has every biological system that you have.

We're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. So we're the amoebas.

Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.

The Ferrari is exactly the same in the human context as the peacock's tail is on the peacock.

For us, we are all very different, our languages are very different, and our societies are very different. But if we could extract ourselves from our point of view and sort of look down at human life the way a biologist looks at other organisms, I think we could see it a different way.

To call the State an organism shows a diseased tendency to make a fetish of words.

It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.

Our examination of computer viruses leads us to the conclusion that they are very close to what we might define as "artificial life." Rather than representing a scientific achievement, this probably represents a flaw in our definition.

Analogue. A part or organ in one animal which has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

Perhaps there are somewhere in the infinite universe beings whose minds outrank our minds to the same extent as our minds surpass those of the insects. Perhaps there will once somewhere live beings who will look upon us with the same condescension as we look upon amoebae.

All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.

Savages have often been likened to children, and the comparison is not only correct but also highly instructive. Many naturalists consider that the early condition of the individual indicates that of the race,-that the best test of the affinities of a species are the stages through which it passes. So also it is in the case of man; the life of each individual is an epitome of the history of the race, and the gradual development of the child illustrates that of the species.

Blockchains are digital organisms. As organisms evolve through changes in their DNA, blockchain protocols evolve through changes in their code. And like biological organisms, the most adaptive blockchains will be the ones that survive and thrive.

A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.

I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an enormous brain on millions of legs; the individual termite is a mobile neurone.