Humans As Organisms Quotes & Sayings

a still water that ran deep." I still don't know what she meant by that, except quiet people did exude some illusion of mystery that kept you wondering just what they really were beneath the surface. — V.C. Andrews

There are more organisms living on the skin of a single human than there are humans living on earth * * * There are more living organisms in a teaspoonful of soil than there are people alive on Earth * * * — Tasnim Essack

The naturalist E. O. Wilson gave a name to this warm, fuzzy feeling I'm experiencing: biophilia. He defined it as "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms." Wilson argued that our connection to nature is deeply ingrained in our evolutionary past. That connection isn't always positive. Take snakes, for instance. The chances of encountering a snake, let alone dying from a snakebite, are extraordinarily remote. Yet modern humans continue to fear snakes even more, studies have found, than car accidents or homicide or any of the dozens of other more plausible ways we might meet our demise. The fear of snakes resides deep in our primitive brain. The fear of the Long Island Expressway, while not insignificant, was added much more recently. — Eric Weiner

Humans, particularly those influenced by the Judeo-Christian ethic, see themselves as rulers of the earth, an attitude stemming not from divine doctrines, but rather from human interpretation of them. Those governed by such erroneous tenets look upon animals as chattels, organisms that have been divinely created for human use and convenience. But domestic animals are the work of man. The wolf and all other wild beings are the work of nature; they are PURE WILD, gloriously so. This is why a wolf can never be owned; it cannot be mastered. — R.D. Lawrence

Simple organisms like bacteria tend more to the Airfix way of life. Their genes are fairly set, coding for just one protein. The more complex an organism becomes, the more the genome begins to resemble LEGO, with a much greater degree of flexibility in how the components are used. And when we think how extraordinary we humans are, it seems reasonable to say, in a nod to certain movie, that at the genetic level 'everything is awesome'. — Nessa Carey

We think of ourselves as individuals, but all that we have accomplished, and all that we will accomplish, is the result of groups of humans cooperating. Those groups are organisms in their own rights. — Ramez Naam

Love as if you are born to love; live as if life is for love. — Debasish Mridha

Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases. — Paul Kalanithi

are biased toward studying individual organisms. It is often difficult for scientists to grasp the idea that individual brains do not exist in nature. As much as one may adhere to the notion of the isolated self, humans have evolved as social creatures and are constantly regulating one another's biology. Without mutually stimulating interactions, people (and neurons for that matter) wither and die. In neurons this process is called apoptosis (programmed cell death); in humans it is called failure to thrive, depression, or dying of a broken heart. — Louis Cozolino

What I mean is that we all exists as parts of groups and collectives larger than ourselves. Tribes. Communities. Organizations. Institutions. Families. Nations. We think of ourselves as individuals, but all that we have accomplished, and all that we will accomplish, is the result of groups of humans cooperating. Those groups are organisms in their own rights. We are their components. — Ramez Naam

Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better? — Peter Cheeke

In their "deep" objectives - in what they evolved to do - humans are not qualitatively different from other living organisms. Like other living things, they evolved to get and use resources to survive and enhance the spread of their genes. — Bobbi S. Low

Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth - 4600 million years old - was a 46 year old woman- as old as Aleyamma teaacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of earth woman's life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The earth woman was 11 yrs old when the first single celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty five - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it, began only 2 hrs ago in the earth woman's life ... — Arundhati Roy

If the aging process is controlled in a similar way in worms and humans, then we can use what we learn about worms to speed our study of higher organisms. — Cynthia Kenyon

Dig: I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish. B'nai B'rith is goyish; Hadassah, Jewish.
If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't matter even if you're Catholic; if you live in New York, you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you're going to be goyish even if you're Jewish. — Lenny Bruce

What truth do these people possess? What proof, damn it! A book of ancient fables? Promises of miracles to come? — Dan Brown

If derision failed, there was always the police, who were authorized to arrest a non-noble person for wearing a sword. — Thomas J. Craughwell

A great library contains the diary of the human race. — George Mercer Dawson

In the Gaia theory air, water, and soil are major components of one central organism, planet Earth. What we typically think of as life - the plants and animals that inhabit the earth - has evolved merely to regulate the chemistry of the biosphere. Humans are insignificant participants, far less important to the life cycle than termites. Even the imbalance that we have created by adding massive quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere may be brought back to acceptable levels by other organisms functioning in their capacity to correct excesses. — David Easton

They shall stand there to be judged, but not to be acquitted. Fear shall lay hold upon them there; they shall not stand their ground; they shall flee away; they shall not stand in their own defence; for they shall blush and be covered with eternal contempt. Well may the saints long for heaven, for no evil men shall dwell there, "nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous." All our congregations upon earth are mixed. Every Church hath one devil in it. The tares grow in the same furrows as the wheat. There is no floor which is as yet thoroughly purged from chaff. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

When viewed at the next quantum level of perspective, from which the Earth is seen as an organism and humans are seen as microorganisms, the human species looks like a menace to the planet. In fact, the human race is looking a lot like a disease
comprised of organisms excessively multiplying, mindlessly consuming, and generating waste with little regard for the health and well-being of its host
planet Earth. — Joseph Jenkins

From his companions, and set forth to walk, Perhaps grown wearied of their Corinth talk: Over the solitary hills he fared, Thoughtless at first, but ere eve's star appeared His phantasy was lost, where reason fades, In the calm'd twilight of Platonic shades. Lamia beheld him coming, near, more near - Close to her passing, in indifference drear, His silent sandals swept the mossy green; So neighbour'd to him, and yet so unseen — John Keats

The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life. — Antonio Damasio

Winning the Origins Lottery Nontheistic models adhere to a central premise that humans arose by strictly natural unguided steps from a bacterial life-form that sprang into being 3.8 billion years ago. Famed evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, an advocate for the hypothesis that natural selection and mutations can efficiently generate distinctly different species, nevertheless calculated the probability that humans (or a similarly intelligent species) arose from single-celled organisms as a possibility so small (10-1,000,000) that it might as well be zero (roughly equivalent to the likelihood of winning the California lottery 150,000 consecutive times with the purchase of just one ticket each time).2 He and other evolutionary biologists agree that natural selection and mutations could have yielded any of a virtually infinite number of other outcomes. Astrophysicists Brandon Carter, John Barrow, and Frank Tipler produced an even smaller probability. — Hugh Ross

Early ecologists soon realised that, since humans are organisms, ecology should include the study of the relationship between humans and the rest of the biosphere ... We don't often tend to think about the social sciences (history, economics and politics) as subcategories of ecology. But since people are organisms, it is apparent that we must first understand the principles of ecology if we are to make sense of the events in the human world. — Richard Heinberg

In humans, smell is often viewed as an aesthetic sense, as a sense capable of eliciting enduring thoughts and memories. Smell, however, is the primal sense. It is the sense that affords most organisms the ability to detect food, predators, and mates. — Richard Axel

If any value is deeply evolutionarily familiar, it is reproductive success. If any value is truly unnatural, if there is one thing that humans (and all other species in nature) are decisively not designed for, it is voluntary childlessness. All living organisms in nature, including humans, are evolutionarily designed to reproduce. Reproductive success is the ultimate end of all biological existence. — Satoshi Kanazawa

Hebrews is a delight for the person who enjoys puzzles...It invites engagement in the task of defining the undefined. — William L. Lane

Homo industrialis. We are so industrial (but not so wise) that we are creating a world more like the late Precambrian than the late 1800s - a world where jellyfish ruled the seas and organisms with shells didn't exist. We are creating a world where we humans may soon be unable to survive, or want to. — Lisa-Ann Gershwin

I made a mock newscast with my friend Amy. We'd set up the camera, an old VHS camcorder, and I did the sports section and interviewed my brother who pretended to be Jay Buhner ... against his will, of course. — Charissa Thompson

The plant and animal kingdoms (excluding humans) offered some pleasant surprises. Organisms from these realms are much simpler to figure out. Their behaviours are not muddied by personality factors or flawed belief systems. If an insect smells like a fart, you can be sure that the stench has a genetic basis. It is neither trying to make a lofty point, nor is it suffering from an inferiority complex. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

Sound trumpets! Let our bloody colours wave! And either victory, or else a grave. — William Shakespeare

Ageing is very rare. We only see it in humans and laboratory animals and in zoo animals and in our pets. Basically, organisms that are protected from the external world. Once you create that protection, you live long enough to see ageing. — S. Jay Olshansky

Sentience is not an end in itself. It is a means to the end of staying alive. Sentient beings use sensations of pain and suffering to escape situations that threaten their lives and sensations of pleasure to pursue situations that enhance their lives. Just as humans will often endure excruciating pain in order to remain alive, animals will often not only endure but inflict on themselves excruciating pain - as when gnawing off a paw caught in a trap - in order to live. Sentience is what evolution has produced in order to ensure the survival of certain complex organisms. To claim that a being who has evolved to develop a consciousness of pain and pleasure has no interest in remaining alive is to say that conscious beings have no interest in remaining conscious, a most peculiar position to take. — Gary L. Francione

Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse. — Donna J. Haraway