Philosophy Of Biology Quotes & Sayings

I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences. — David Pearce

The truth is that anxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture. — Scott Stossel

Everything we learn - economics, philosophy, biology, mathematics - has to be understood in light of the overarching reality of the character of God. That is why, in the Middle Ages, theology was called "the queen of the sciences" and philosophy "her handmaiden." Today the queen has been deposed from her throne and, in many cases, driven into exile, and a supplanter now reigns. We have replaced theology with religion. — R.C. Sproul

Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading and walking as almost his only pursuits. He voluntarily attended graduate lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them with a rather pathetically intent look in his eyes, as if waiting for something the lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a point. He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of becoming a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand miles away, Amory almost choked with the romantic joy of watching him. Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable to get a foothold. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Black magic, the magic of the primeval chaos, blots out or transmogrifies the true form of things. At the stroke of twelve the princess must flee the banquet or risk discovery in the rags of a kitchen wench; coach reverts to pumpkin. Instability lies at the heart of the world. With uncanny foresight folklore has long toyed symbolically with what the nineteenth century was to proclaim a reality - namely, that form is an illusion of the time dimension, that the magic flight of the pursued hero or heroine through frogskin and wolf coat has been, and will continue to be, the flight of all men. — Loren Eiseley

What we're starting to see is a quantum biology, it being applied in biology and cosmology and a host of other sciences, because it does really pertain to how we know. It really helps bring epistemology, which is how do we know what we know, out of the realm of philosophy and brings it into the realm of science. — Edgar Mitchell

Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy? — Auguste Comte

It is not at all coincidental that Darwinian psychology has the same difficulty explaining the unity and integration of human reasoning as Darwinian biology has explaining the unity and integration of irreducibly complex functions. Practical and theoretical reasoning is often irreducibly complex. A given argument has several well-matched, interacting reasons, and the removal of any one of them makes the argument break down. — Angus J.L. Menuge

Astronomy is not the science of all objects with mass and weight and velocity. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Biology is not the science of all objects that consume and excrete and have inherited characteristics. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Linguistics is not the study of all possible symbols or symbol systems. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. — Randy Allen Harris

I don't believe any scientific field to be superior to another. — Abhijit Naskar

If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more? — Carl Sagan

Apologetics is both a science and an art. It is a science because it deals with the truth found within the various disciplines of knowledge - philosophy, biology, physics, math, and history. It is also an art because each person has the flexibility to craft their arguments however they wish." (Life Hacks, p.85) — Jon Morrison

Is the conclusion that the universe was designed - and that the design extends deeply into life - science, philosophy, religion, or what? In a sense it hardly matters. By far the most important question is not what category we place it in, but whether a conclusion is true. A true philosophical or religious conclusion is no less true than a true scientific one. Although universities might divide their faculty and courses into academic categories, reality is not obliged to respect such boundaries. — Michael J. Behe

Natural Sciences are all about fascinating causality. — Abhijit Naskar

On the other hand, the conditions of human existence - life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth - can never "explain" what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely. This has always been the opinion of philosophy, in distinction from the sciences - anthropology, psychology, biology, etc. - which also concern themselves with man. But today we may almost say that we have demonstrated even scientifically that, though we live now, and probably always will, under the earth's conditions, we are not mere earth-bound creatures. Modern natural science owes its great triumphs to having looked upon and treated earth-bound nature from a truly universal viewpoint, that is, from an Archimedean standpoint taken, wilfully and explicitly, outside the earth. 2 — Hannah Arendt

I'm not the one going for a biology degree. I'm just a philosophy major who eats people. — Scott Westerfeld

Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our understanding of the life sciences, which scaffold our understanding of the human sciences, which scaffold the humanities, which scaffold the arts: and here we stand. What then is the totality? What do we call it? Can there be a study of the totality? Do history, philosophy, cosmology, science, and literature each claim to constitute the totality, an unexpandable horizon beyond which we cannot think? Could a strong discipline be defined as one that has a vision of totality and claims to encompass all the rest? And are they all wrong to do so? — Kim Stanley Robinson

You can't find God through astronomy; you can't find immortality through biology. The Kingdom of Heaven can't be attained through philosophy. There is only one way that leads to these things and that way is through the spirit. — Michelle Carbotte

It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects. — Colin McGinn

Throughout history we humans have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of our human condition. Neither philosophy, nor psychology nor biology has, until now, been able to provide the truthful explanation. — Jeremy Griffith

It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious. — Jean Piaget

Discussion is to Christian philosophy what lab work is to the practice of biology. — Kevin J. Corcoran

Good biology without good philosophy will be a calamity. — George Will

The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. — Rachel Carson

The contrast between genetic and environmental, between nature and nurture, is not a contrast between fixed and changeable. It is a fallacy of biological determinism to say that if differences are in the genes, no change can occur. — Richard C. Lewontin

Things to know from books to read — Kip Koehler

A man woke up at midnight and wanted to smoke. Therefore he looked for some fire, for which he went to a neighbor's house and knocked at the door. The neighbor opened the door and asked him what he wanted. The man said, I wish to smoke. Can you give me a little fire? The neighbor replied, O.M.G.! What the heck is wrong with you? You have taken so much trouble to come and wake us up at the middle of the night, while in your own hand you have a lantern! The God that human beings so keenly seek, lives within the human biology, yet they wander hitherto searching for it. — Abhijit Naskar

Even though it is common knowledge in our field of Neuroscience, I take immense pleasure every time I realize that our perception of the whole universe emerges from the activity of the little specks of jelly inside our skull. — Abhijit Naskar

There are no mineral monsters. — Canguilhem

The purpose of Neurotheology shall be to ease human sufferings with a deeper understanding of the neurobiological substrates of spirituality and divinity. — Abhijit Naskar

Where did biology, morality, literature, and philosophy intersect? — Paul Kalanithi

The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field's real problems. — Vladimir L. Voeikov

In short, bioethics investigates ethical issues arising in the life sciences (medicine, health care, genetics, biology, research, etc) by applying the principles and methods of moral philosophy to these problems. — Adele Langlois

In the ensuing chapters, we will look in some detail at particular manifestations of the modern scientific ideology and the false paths down which it has led us. We will consider how biological determinism has been used to explain and justify inequalities within and between societies and to claim that those inequalities can never be changed. We will see how a theory of human nature has been developed using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to claim that social organization is also unchangeable because it is natural. We will see how problems of health and disease have been located within the individual so that the individual becomes a problem for society to cope with rather than society becoming a problem for the individual. And we will see how simple economic relationships masquerading as facts of nature can drive the entire direction of biological research and technology. — Richard C. Lewontin

The more you learn the biology behind your every action, emotion and behavior, the better you become at accepting others the way they are. — Abhijit Naskar