A recognized fact which goes back to the earliest times is that every living organism is not the sum of a multitude of unitary processes, but is, by virtue of interrelationships and of higher and lower levels of control, an unbroken unity. When researched, in the efforts of bringing understanding, as a rule examines isolated processes and studies them, these must of necessity be removed from their context. In general, viewed biologically, this experimental separation involves a sacrifice. In fact, quantitative findings of any material and energy changes preserve their full context only through their being seen and understood as parts of a natural order.

— Walter Rudolf Hess

Are we biology or God or something higher? I know my heart beats and I listen to it. The beat is biology, but what is the song?

— James Frey

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

— Michael Shermer

As long as museums and universities send out expeditions to bring to light new forms of living and extinct animals and new data illustrating the interrelations of organisms and their environments, as long as anatomists desire a broad comparative basis human for anatomy, as long as even a few students feel a strong curiosity to learn about the course of evolution and relationships of animals, the old problems of taxonomy, phylogeny and evolution will gradually reassert themselves even in competition with brilliant and highly fruitful laboratory studies in cytology, genetics and physiological chemistry.

— William King Gregory

A sound Physics of the Earth should include all the primary considerations of the earth's atmosphere, of the characteristics and continual changes of the earth's external crust, and finally of the origin and development of living organisms. These considerations naturally divide the physics of the earth into three essential parts, the first being a theory of the atmosphere, or Meteorology, the second, a theory of the earth's external crust, or Hydrogeology, and the third, a theory of living organisms, or Biology.

— Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. Furthermore, it is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.

— Bill Bryson

As we delight in the strange and exotic beauty of orchid flowers, it is salutary to reflect that we are, in essence, looking at their genitalia.

— Unknown British Biologist

At the atomic level, matter does not even exist with certainty; it only exists as a tendency to exist.

— Bruce H. Lipton

Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had not struck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes.

— Frank Schätzing

...because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralized process...no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbors. We do not organize societies that way... Perhaps we should try.

— Matt Ridley