In the present epoch of struggle between two worlds the two opposing and antagonistic trends penetrating the foundations of nearly all branches of biology are particularly sharply defined.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology.
Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.
Biology sometimes reveals its fundamental principles through what may seem at first to be arcane and bizarre.
In the past, biology has been a backwater type of activity - a bunch of nerds in a lab. Now the sheer potential of biology to re-program our physical world is a new reality for everyone.
The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.
The theist and the scientist are rival interpreters of nature, the one retreats as the other advances.
Our world is built on biology and once we begin to understand it, it then becomes a technology.
Biology has tended to be an observational science, and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past, but I hate to predict the future on that.
As in all of biology, comparative studies showing differences among species are often helpful for a better understanding of the basic mechanisms; with all its advantages, there is a danger of clinging exclusively to one model organism.
The realms of life are many. For each one, special sciences develop. But life itself is a unity, and the more deeply the sciences try to penetrate into their separate realms, the more they withdraw themselves from the vision of the world as a living whole.
No opposing quotes found.