The incredible diversity oflife on this planet, most of which is microbial, can only beunderstood in an evolutionary framework
Carl WoeseRead
Our task now is to resynthesize biology; put the organism back into its environment; connect it again to its evolutionary past; and let us feel that complex flow that is organism, evolution, and environment united. The time has come for biology to enter the nonlinear world.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of understanding the interconnectedness between organisms, their environments, and evolutionary history.
Carl Woese argues that biology must evolve to recognize and integrate the complex relationships between organisms and their environments, as well as their evolutionary backgrounds. By acknowledging the nonlinear and intricate interactions that define life, he suggests a shift in perspective for the biological sciences, one that embraces complexity rather than oversimplification.
Themes
BiologyEnvironmentEvolutionInterconnectednessNonlinear
In practice
Example use cases
In a scientific conference discussing ecology, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of holistic approaches to understanding ecosystems.
More from Carl Woese
All quotes →Similar quotes
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Richard P. FeynmanRead
Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.
Richard DawkinsRead
It's a pity that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize.
Stephen HawkingRead
The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable - it was the birth of molecular biology.
Sydney BrennerRead
Deep non-REM sleep almost hits the save button on those recently acquired informational pieces so that when you wake up the next morning, you have remembering rather than forgetting.
Matthew WalkerRead
The goal of scientific physicians in their own science ... is to reduce the indeterminate. Statistics therefore apply only to cases in which the cause of the facts observed is still indeterminate.
Claude BernardRead