Jonathan Weiner Quotes & Sayings

It's almost as if each instant is our last and first. We are always dying, and always reborn. And that is living. — Jonathan Weiner

To know your organism, you must eat it.' Not just the flies: the pupae. And not just to horrify people, but to know. — Jonathan Weiner

Cactus finches do more with cactus than Plains Indians did with buffalo. They nest in cactus; they sleep in cactus; they often copulate in cactus; they drink cactus nectar; they eat cactus flowers, cactus pollen, and cactus seeds. In return they pollinate the cactus, like bees. — Jonathan Weiner

The first man and woman knew it all; they had "pure and uncorrupted natural knowledge," before they tasted the forbidden fruit and were thrown out of Paradise. Adam and Eve enjoyed not only perfect knowledge but perfect power; and there was no death in the world. Once we recover what our First Parents knew, we will conquer death again. — Jonathan Weiner

Darwin argues, essentially, that all the sophistications we see in the eagle's or the human's eye could have arisen gradually, by stages, across geological spans of time, each stage conferring somewhat clearer vision than the one before. — Jonathan Weiner

Nature is perverse & will not do as I wish it. — Jonathan Weiner

Peter suspects that the caltrop is evolving in response to the finches. Where the struggle for existence is fierce, the caltrop that is likeliest to succeed is the plant that puts more energy into spines and less into seeds; but in the safer, more secluded spot, the fittest plants are the ones that put more energy into making seeds and less energy into protecting them. The finches may be driving the evolution of caltrop while caltrop is driving the evolution of the finches. — Jonathan Weiner

Some men by unalterable frame of their constitution are stout, others timorous, some confident, others modest and tractable. — Jonathan Weiner

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree, he writes. But if we look at the whole tree of life, Darwin says, we can find innumerable gradations from extremely simple eyes consisting of hardly more than a nerveless cluster of pigment cells, which are rudimentary light sensors, to the marvels of the human eye, which are more impressive pieces of work than the human telescope. — Jonathan Weiner

As an instrument of planetary home repair, it is hard to imagine anything as safe as a tree. — Jonathan Weiner