What was up with class today? It was watered-down porn. He practically had you and Patch on top of your lab table, horizontal, minus your clothes, doing the Big Deed.

— Becca Fitzpatrick

Whenever explaining an event, we must choose from three competing modes of explanation. These are regularity, chance, and design... To attribute an event to design is to say that it cannot reasonably be referred to either regularity or chance.

— William A. Dembski

When General Genius built the first mental [Artificial Intelligence] mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul. Or so the General genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus, there didn't seem to be a need for a mental body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mental mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer. And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals. As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls. This was intelligence the mentors never inherited from us.... The genius of the irrational...... We gave them only rational functions -- the ability to think and feel, but no irrational functions... Have you ever been in a tight situation where you relied on your 'gut instinct'? This is the body's intelligence, not the mind's. Every living cell possesses it. The mental substrate has no indomitable will to survive, but ours does. Likewise, mentors have no 'fire in the belly,' but we do. They don't experience pure avarice or greed or pride. They're not very curious, or playful, or proud. Furthermore, they lack a sense of wonder and spirit of adventure. Furthermore, they have little initiative. Granted, their cognition is miraculous, but their personalities are rather pedantic. But probably their chief shortcoming is the lack of intuition. Of all the irrational faculties, intuition in the most powerful. Some say intuition transcends space-time. Have you ever heard of a mental having a lucky hunch? They can bring incredible amounts of cognitive and computational power to bear on a seemingly intractable problem, only to see a dumb human with a lucky hunch walk away with the prize every time. Then there's luck itself. Some people have it, most don't, and no mental does. So this makes them want our bodies... Our bodies, ape bodies, dog bodies, jellyfish bodies. They've tried them all. Every cell knows some neat tricks or survival, but the problem with cellular knowledge is that it's not at all fungible; nor are our memories. We're pretty much trapped in our containers.

— David Marusek

When I am fully immersed in my work of nourishing humanity, it fills my head with all kinds of feel-good chemicals, such as endorphins, serotonin and dopamine. Problems occur during the brief intervals between the finishing of one work and the beginning of another. During these intervals, my biology starts to get filled with stress hormones cortisol and adrenalin, that worsens my OCD. That is why, I can’t sit still even a day after I finish writing a book. Because if I do, my OCD begins to suffocate me inside my head. Hence, as soon as I deliver a work, I have to start working on my next scientific literature.

— Abhijit Naskar

When in 1863 Thomas Huxley coined the phrase 'Man's Place in Nature,' it was to name a short collection of his essays applying to man Darwin's theory of evolution. The Origin of Species had been published only four years before, and the thesis that man was literally a part of nature, rather than an earthy vessel charged with some sublimer stuff, was so novel and so offensive to current metaphysics that it needed the most vigorous defense. Half the civilized world was rudely shocked, the other half skeptically amused. Nearly a century has passed since the Origin shattered the complacency of the Victorian world and initiated what may be called the Darwinian revolution, an upheaval of man's ideas comparable to and probably exceeding in significance the revolution that issued from Copernicus's demonstration that the earth moves around the sun. The theory of evolution was but one of many factors contributing to the destruction of the ancient beliefs; it only toppled over what had already been weakened by centuries of decay, rendered suspect by the assaults of many intellectual disciplines; but it marked the beginning of the end of the era of faith.

— Homer W. Smith

When I realized that my home was completely filled with a biologically toxic radio wave field, I decided that the best route forward was to milk the home for all the biological research that I could possibly produce from it!

— Steven Magee

When Mother Nature speaks, even the Gods hold silence.

— Abhijit Naskar

When one ponders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective teleonomies performances of living beings from bacteria to man, one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at random. [Nevertheless, ] a detailed review of the accumulated modern evidence [shows] that this conception alone is compatible with the facts.

— Jacques Monod

When these flies were put together in all-male groups they formed long, moving chains resembling conga lines, with each male attempting (unsuccessfully) to mate with the male in front of it.

— Simon LeVay

When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.

— Carl Sagan