Science Quotations

The price of a metaphor is eternal vigilance.
–Alexander Rosenbluth and Norbert Wiener

[I]t is a rule of evolution that characters at first merely an asset will, if they are retained long enough, finally become, through correlative evolutionary changes, a necessity... –Hermann Muller Genetic aspects of sex. Am. Nat. 66: 118-138 (1932).

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
–Wernher von Braun

I see the question of biological organization taking two prominent directions today. The first is the evolution of (proteinaceous) cellular organization, which includes sub-questions such as the evolution of the translation apparatus and the genetic code, and the origin and nature of the hierarchies of control that fine-tune and precisely interrelate the panoply of cellular processes that constitute cells. It also includes the question of the number of different basic cell types that exist on earth today: did all modern cells come from a single ancestral cellular organization?

The second major direction involves the nature of the global ecosystem. . . . Bacteria are the major organisms on this planet—in numbers, in total mass, in importance to the global balances. Thus, it is microbial ecology that . . . is most in need of development, both in terms of facts needed to understand it, and in terms of the framework in which to interpret them. –Carl Woese, 2005

The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives. –Richard Dawkins, 1976