Quotes & Sayings About Organisms

there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. — Alan W. Watts

Plants began the process of land colonization about 450 million years ago, accompanied of necessity by tiny mites and other organisms which they needed to break down and recycle dead organic matter on their behalf. Larger animals took a little longer to emerge, but by about 400 million years ago they were venturing out of the water, too. Popular illustrations have encouraged us to envision the first venturesome land dwellers as a kind of ambitious fish - something like the modern mudskipper, which can hop from puddle to puddle during droughts - or even as a fully formed amphibian. In fact, the first visible mobile residents on dry land were probably much more like modern woodlice, sometimes also known as pillbugs or sow bugs. These are the little bugs (crustaceans, in fact) that are commonly thrown into confusion when you upturn a rock or log. — Bill Bryson

Self-fertilization is a risky strategy, which is why sex is so popular among large and complex organisms. — Randall Munroe

Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms. — Kevin Kelly

Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning" and Turing's equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other. These twin ideas have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but they still provoke dismay and disbelief in some quarters, which I have tried to dispel in this chapter. Creationists are not going to find commented code in the inner workings of organisms, and Cartesians are not going to find an immaterial res cogitans "where all the understanding happens". — Daniel C. Dennett

Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel - just as fire does. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place. — Phillip E. Johnson

with rare exceptions (chiefly the social insects), mammals and birds are the only organisms to devote substantial attention to the care of their young; an evolutionary development that, through the long period of plasticity which it permits, takes advantage of the large information-processing capability of the mammalian and primate brains. Love seems to be an invention of the mammals. — Carl Sagan

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. — Neal Stephenson

Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast. Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol. — Kurt Vonnegut

A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not. Genes, language, history: what it all meant in actual practice was that fear passed down through the years, altering organisms for generation after generation, thus altering the species. Fear, an evolutionary force. — Kim Stanley Robinson

In a sense, evolution adheres to the classic twelve-step program: it takes things one day at a time. It does not strive for perfection; it does not strive at all. There is no progress, no plans, no scala natura, or scale of nature, that ranks organisms from lowly to superior, primitive to advanced. — Natalie Angier

For their size, crows are among the brainiest organisms on Earth, outclassing not only other birds (with the possible exception of parrots), but also most mammals. — Candace Savage

Many of the earth's habitats, animals, plants, insects and even micro-organisms that we know to be rare may not be known at all by future generations. We have the capability and the responsibility to act; we must do so before it is too late. — Dalai Lama

In nature's cyclical rhythms, there are no grounds for the discriminatory view that underlies Darwin's view of superiority and inferiority that deems single-celled organisms as lower, and more complicated life forms as higher. It would be more appropriate to say we are all one continuous life-form. — Masanobu Fukuoka

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances. — George C. Williams

Cancer is not something confined to human beings. It's found in all multi cellular organisms where the adult cells proliferate, so it's widespread in the biosphere. It's a phenomenon that is deeply related to the history of life itself, so by studying cancer I think we can illuminate the history of life itself and vice versa. — Paul Davies

Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms — Lewis Thomas

The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance). — Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today. — Carl Sagan

Giant group events are distorting organisms: You can like and hate them in rapid succession. — Jerry Saltz

The morphological characteristics of plant and animal species form the chief subject of the descriptive natural sciences and are the criteria for their classification. But not until recently has it been recognized that in living organisms, as in the realm of crystals, chemical differences parallel the variation in structure. — Karl Landsteiner

Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady. — Sylvia Earle

Sean was stung. "I do not fuck everything that has a pulse," he said haughtily. "I have my standards. I limit myself to endoskeletal organisms. I always go for vertebrates. And I dont't do reptiles. Ever. — Shannon McKenna

If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria. — Andrew H. Knoll

We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity. — Cornel West

The living environment is the biosphere, the thin layer around the world of living organisms. We're part of that. Our existence is dependent on it in ways that people haven't even begun to appreciate. Our existence depends not just on its existence, but its stability and its richness. — E. O. Wilson

A natural hierarchy is simply an order of increasing wholeness, such as: particles to atoms to cells to organisms, or letters to words to sentences to paragraphs. The whole of one level becomes part of the whole of the next. In other words, natural hierarchies are composed of holons. — Ken Wilber

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. — Hans Adolf Krebs

background extinction." In ordinary times - times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs - extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation, and it occurs at what's known as the background extinction rate. This rate varies from one group of organisms to another; often it's expressed in terms of extinctions per million species-years. — Elizabeth Kolbert

An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy. — John B. S. Haldane

I see the mycelium as the Earth's natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape. — Paul Stamets

I scoured myself with lye soap from head to toe to get the evil funk of demon snot off me. I have flossed things the gods never meant to be flossed and used things that would be toxic to most living organisms. All to sanitize my body for your chewing pleasure. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

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

We need to have a paradigm shift in our consciousness. If we don't get our act together and come in commonality and understanding with the organisms that sustain us today, not only will we destroy those organisms, but we will destroy ourselves. — Paul Stamets

We are obsessed with sex, because those organisms who have this obsession leave behind many more copies of organisms with this obsession. — Hugh Howey

The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species — Yuval Noah Harari

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

Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality). — Stephen Jay Gould

You put three facts together - that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there's variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited - and the syllogistic inference is natural selection. — Stephen Jay Gould

Without programmed cell death, the bonds that bind cells in complex multicellular organisms might never have evolved. — Nick Lane

Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one. — Karl Popper

The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials, these for organisms are air water & soil, all abundantly available, nor for energy which exists in plenty in the sun and any hot body in the form of heat, but rather a struggle for entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth. — Ludwig Boltzmann

Consciousness is the chronic pain of life, and all higher organisms suffer it every waking moment. — David Marusek

Most organisms have loads of junk DNA - less pejoratively, noncoding DNA - cluttering their cells. — Sam Kean

No practical biologist interested in sexual reproduction would be led to work out the detailed consequences experienced by organisms having three or more sexes; yet what else should he do if he wishes to understand why the sexes are, in fact, always two? — Ronald Fisher

Monod proposed an analogy: Just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an "abstract kingdom" rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas. Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. Ideas have "spreading power," he noted - "infectivity, as it were" - and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are "just as real" as the neurons they inhabit. Ideas have power, he said. — James Gleick

An organism exists for no other reason than that it is able to ... The wonderful, almost transcendent thing about life on earth is that in order to so exist, organisms must relate to each other and to the earth itself. — Richard Mabey

These coupling certainly do not fit with the mainstream idea that genes, or at least organisms, are hell-bent on reproducing themselves. They do fit, however, with the idea of a social role for sex, and they fit with the idea that sexual reproduction is a spandrel, a by-product of some other phenomenon. If Roughgarden is on to something, she believes it could have cultural as well as scientific implications. The orthodoxy of biology has corroded our culture like battery acid, she says, In general, we play out the roles prescribed for us by that culture - aggressive male and coy female - because deviation from its "norm" results in emotional and physical violence, bigotry, personal guilt, and criminalized behaviors. If biology has been getting it wrong though, the new orthodoxy could trigger an infusion of tolerance; perhaps the anomalous prevalence of sexual reproduction will end up having deeper repercussions outside of science than within it. — Michael Brooks

I am suggesting here that organisms have a built-I capability of adapting to their environment. I am suggesting that to the extent that evolution occurs, it occurs at the level of the organism. This suggestion differs sharply from the thesis of the NDT, which holds that evolution occurs only at the level of the population. Organisms contain within themselves the information that enables them to develop a phenotype adaptive to a variety of environments. The adaptation can occur by a change in the genome through a genetic change triggered by the environment, or it can occur without any genetic change. — Lee Spetner

By providing safe nesting sites, woodpeckers are thus keystone organisms for a vast assemblage of birds the world over, including many owls, parrots, parids, flycatchers. — Bernd Heinrich

The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability. — Ernst Mayr

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms — Fyodor Dostoevsky

As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating. — Gary Hamel

There's this anomaly that happens sometimes with twins. It occurs in the womb when the fetuses are growing too closely to each other. The stronger twin develops normally, while the weaker twin crumples and is encased by the body of the stronger twin, where it becomes a parasite. The result is a single child, plagued by a twin-shaped fossil inside. Like a tumor.
In death Rose became Linden's parasitic twin. They were two separate organisms once, growing steadily beside each other. Two pulses. Two brains. But she has crumpled and died, and still he carries her inside himself. She goes where he goes, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, a shadow behind his ribs. — Lauren DeStefano

Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't, the love and the pleasure will have been enough. — E. O. Wilson

The incredible new medical technology has made it possible for highly disciplined teams of surgeons ... to keep stricken organisms alive even if the brain is irretrievably damaged or lung and heart incapable of functioning without mechanical help. Now it is not dust to dust, but human to vegetable. — Marya Mannes

Here at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, we have genetically rearranged various viruses and bacteria as part of our medical research. In fact, we have been able to create entirely new types of DNA molecules by splicing together the genetic information from different organisms - recombinant DNA. — James D. Watson

Life on the planet is being homogenized by the expanding human population and the frequent and rapid movement of people and goods, which carry invasive organisms with them. These invasives often flourish in their new ecosystems because, like the woolly adelgid, they have escaped their predators. — Richard Preston

Reproduction is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organisms that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected with sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction. — Havelock Ellis

In this way a process of evolution was started that led to the development of more and more complicated, self-reproducing organisms. The first primitive forms of life consumed various materials, including hydrogen sulfide, and released oxygen. This gradually changed the atmosphere to the composition that it has today, and allowed the development of higher forms of life such as fish, reptiles, mammals, and ultimately the human race. — Stephen Hawking

We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms. — Antonin Artaud

We found evolution will punish you if you're selfish and mean. For a short time and against a specific set of opponents, some selfish organisms may come out ahead. But selfishness isn't evolutionarily sustainable. — Chris Adami

Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make up the "organic" molecules that constitute living organisms on a planet, and the nuclei of these same elements interact to generate the light of its star. Then the organisms on the planet come to depend wholly on that starlight, as they must if life is to persist. So it is that all life on the Earth runs on sunlight. [Referring to photosynthesis] — George Wald

When the Europeans first arrived in North America, the average depth of the topsoil was 53.34 cm (1¾ ft) and it was rich in the types of symbiotic organisms necessary for plant roots to absorb minerals from the soil. Today North America averages around 15.24 cm (6 in) of topsoil and most if it is exhausted of nutrients and much is devoid of life. — Thom Hartmann

There is part of a structure in which every species is related to every other species. And they're built up on species, like a pyramid. The simpler cell organisms, and then the more complicated ones, all the way up to the mammals and birds and so forth. We call it 'developing upward' ... The whole thing depends on every part of it. And we're taking out the stones from the pyramid. — W.S. Merwin

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

Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations. — Joseph Brodsky

Let us ask ... how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc ... we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects. — Michel Foucault

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

Molecular machines display a key signature or hallmark of design, namely, irreducible complexity. In all irreducibly complex systems in which the cause of the system is known by experience or observation, intelligent design or engineering played a role in the origin of the system ... We find such systems within living organisms. — Scott A. Minnich

The miracle of yeast is awesome enough to strain credulity. It's a fungus, a naturally occurring nanotechnological machine that converts sugar to the alcohol we drink. It breeds pretty much everywhere and is one of the organisms on which scientists have built much of our knowledge of how life works . . . and, postscript, it also makes possible the baking of bread. — Adam Rogers

What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes. — Richard Dawkins

The world of organisms, of animals and plants, is built up of individuals. I like to think, then, of natural history as the study of life at the level of the individual-of what plants and animals do, how they react to each other and their environment, how they are organized into larger groupings like populations and communities. — Marston Bates

Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, 'How do new structures arise in evolution?' 'Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them. — Lynn Margulis

Injecting CO2 into an underground reservoir would certainly change the local environment and thus affect the organisms that live there. Some will thrive, and others will suffer. While we should minimize such impacts, they cannot be avoided completely. The same happens when one plows a field, builds a house or a road, or waters a lawn. — Klaus Lackner

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. — David Christian

The underlying reason for convergence seems to be that all organisms are under constant scrutiny of natural selection and are also subject to the constraints of the physical and chemical factors that severely limit the action of all inhabitants of the biosphere. Put simply, convergence shows that in a real world not all things are possible. — Simon Conway Morris

In terms of the short-term objective [halving world hunger by 2015], the position I have always taken is that we don't need genetically modified organisms. — Jacques Diouf

Even now, the world's metamorphosis continues. It's at a rate that's practically impossible to detect with our own eyes, but it's happening. The scale of a human life - measured by the speed of Internet updates or the crawl of a working day - is ill suited to fit the dynamic nature of our planet and the fantastic organisms that continue to evolve here. — Brian Switek

it's natural that we associate language with such verbal intercourse. Unfortunately, this association has led many to assume that language is an exclusive attribute of our species - we, after all, are the only creatures that use words - and to conclude that all other organisms are entirely bereft of meaningful speech. It is an exceedingly self-serving assumption. Other animals, commonly possessed of senses far more acute than ours, may have much less need for a purely conventional set of signs to communicate with others of their species, or even to glean precise information from members of other species. — David Abram

Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoebae. The first animal with a head did not appear until October. The first human appears on December 31. We, like all the animals and plants that have ever lived, are recent crashers at the party of life on earth. — Neil Shubin

A self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is going on in our organisms. — Antonio Damasio

It has occurred to me that possibly the white corpuscles may have the office of picking up and digesting bacterial organisms when by any means they find their way into the blood. The propensity exhibited by the leukocytes for picking up inorganic granules is well known, and that they may be able not only to pick up but to assimilate, and so dispose of, the bacteria which come in their way does not seem to me very improbable in view of the fact that amoebae, which resemble them so closely, feed upon bacteria and similar organisms. — George Miller Sternberg

If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case, get it out of the science classroom and send it back to church, where it belongs. — Richard Dawkins

Anyone familiar with the numerous accounts of the Buddha's extraordinary compassion and reverence for living beings - for example his insistence that his monks strain the water they drink lest they inadvertently cause the death of any micro-organisms - could never believe that he would be indifferent to the sufferings of domestic animals caused by their slaughter of food — Philip Kapleau

The nucleic acids, as constituents of living organisms, are comparable In importance to proteins. There is evidence that they are Involved In the processes of cell division and growth, that they participate In the transmission of hereditary characters, and that they are important constituents of viruses. An understanding of the molecular structure of the nucleic acids should be of value In the effort to understand the fundamental phenomena of life. — Linus Pauling

Beverly once read a science magazine article about bioluminescence, the natural glow emitted by organisms like fireflies and jellyfish, but she knows the dead also give off a strange illumination, a phosphor that can permanently damage the eyes of the living. Necroluminescence - the light of the vanished. A hindsight produced by the departed body. Your failings backlit by the death of your loved ones. — Karen Russell

The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. — Theodore Kaczynski

Single cells analyze thousands of stimuli from the microenvironment they inhabit. The more awareness an organism has of its environment, the better its chances for survival. When cells band together they increase their awareness exponentially. Division of labor among the cells in the community offers an additional survival advantage. The efficiency it enables more cells to live on less. Evolution is based on an instructive, cooperative interaction among organisms and their environment enables life forms to survive and evolve in a dynamic world. — Bruce H. Lipton

Think of it : zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another : 'My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death'. And you are one of those organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity. — Robert Wright

The ethics of reverence for life makes no distinction between higher and lower, more precious and less precious lives. It has good reasons for this omission. For what are we doing, when we establish hard and fast gradations in value between living organisms, but judging them in relation to ourselves, by whether they seem to stand closer to us or farther from us. This is a wholly subjective standard. How can we know what importance other living organisms have in themselves and in terms of the universe? — Albert Schweitzer

As soon as we touch the complex processes that go on in a living thing, be it plant or animal, we are at once forced to use the methods of this science [chemistry]. No longer will the microscope, the kymograph, the scalpel avail for the complete solution of the problem. For the further analysis of these phenomena which are in flux and flow, the investigator must associate himself with those who have labored in fields where molecules and atoms, rather than multicellular tissues or even unicellular organisms, are the units of study. — John Jacob Abel

The river moves from land to water to land, in and out of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have never forgotten: that you cannot separate the land from the water, or the people from the land. — Lynn Culbreath Noel

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. — Robin Marantz Henig

Most organisms either adapt and become part of the system, or get wiped out. The only thing we have to adapt to the system with is our brain. If we don't use it, and we don't adapt fast enough, we won't survive. — George Lucas

The field is a halfway house, halfway between the detail of those intimately known places and the ignorance of a landscape view ... The essence of a field is that the cultural accommodates the natural there. The human being makes room for and makes use of those organisms that are not him. In that way the field is a poem to symbiosis, and a human contract with the natural. — Adam Nicolson

For modern science, at least from a philosophical point of view, the critical divide seems to be between inanimate matter and the origin of living organisms, while for Buddhism the critical divide is between non-sentient matter and the emergence of sentient beings. — Dalai Lama XIV

Animals are not property or "things" but rather living organisms, subjects of a life, who are worthy of our compassion, respect, friendship, and support. — Marc Bekoff

This is the mitochondrial DNA." Bowers nodded back to the cryo-case. "It's the genetic material that actually makes the energy that powers our cells. Think of it like this. Each of our cells has the usual 23 pairs of chromosomes that make us human and determine our physical appearance, how we fight off disease, and other physical characteristics. Now think of the mitochondria as little organisms within our cells. Like cells within a cell. It's those little organisms that make energy for our cells. And they have their own DNA." "I — Jonathan Brookes