Living Organisms Quotes

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things-from subatomic particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole.

It's common to say that trees come from seeds. But how can a tiny seed create a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the resources need to grow a tree. These must come from the medium or environment within which the tree grows. But the seed does provide something that is crucial : a place where the whole of the tree starts to form. As resources such as water and nutrients are drawn in, the seed organizes the process that generates growth. In a sense, the seed is a gateway through which the future possibility of the living tree emerges.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.

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.

Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as hewill, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod.

There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together.

Stones grow, plants grow, and live, animals grow live and feel.

If I had to define life in a single phrase, I should clearly express my thought of throwing into relief one characteristic which, in my opinion, sharply differentiates biological science. I should say: life is creation.

Physiology is concerned with all those phenomena of life that present them selves to us in sense perception as bodily processes, and accordingly form part of that total environment which we name the external world.

By 'life,' we mean a thing that can nourish itself and grow and decay.

One of the deepest functions of a living organisms is to look ahead... to produce future.

At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.

Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.

Natural bodies are divided into three kingdomes of nature: viz. the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. Minerals grow, Plants grow and live, Animals grow, live, and have feeling.

Physiology and psychology cover, between them, the field of vital phenomena; they deal with the facts of life at large, and in particular with the facts of human life.

Generation by male and female is a law common to animals and plants.

Animals that not only move by their own free will and share feelings with people but also possess sight and hearing qualify as deserving of names.

The ensouled is distinguished from the unsouled by its being alive. Now since being alive is spoken of in many ways, even if only one of these is present, we say that the thing is alive, if, for instance, there is intellect or perception or spatial movement and rest or indeed movement connected with nourishment and growth and decay. It is for this reason that all the plants are also held to be alive . . .

From all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics. And that not on the ground that there is any 'new force' or what not, directing the behaviour of the single atoms within a living organism, but because the construction is different from anything we have yet tested in the physical laboratory.

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.

The investigation into the possible effects of cosmic rays on living organisms will also offer great interest.

The concept of evolution postulates that living organisms have common roots, and in turn, the existence of common features is powerful support for the concept of evolution.

Biochemistry is the science of life. All our life processes - walking, talking, moving, feeding - are essentially chemical reactions. So biochemistry is actually the chemistry of life, and it's supremely interesting.