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Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology.
ANIMALS AND HUMAN
OBLIGATIONS
"The record of human aggression as it
affects other species is a dismal one that records the extinction
of roughly three hundred species in the last three hundred years,
among them . . . the Tasmanian wolf. The Tasmanian people, too,
have been exterminated (the last native Tasman died in 1876)."1a
BIOENGINEERING
"Nothing in biological principle stands
in the way of our applying the most powerful known technique of
genetic engineering, artificial selection, to treat people, in
effect, like dogs; for this is how we have treated dogs."1b
BIOGENESIS
" . . . [T]he
Law of Biogenesis states that all living organisms are the progeny
of living organisms that went before them. . . the progeny of mice
are mice and of men, men -- "homogenesis," or
like begetting like."1c
CHROMOSOMES
"The reproduction of chromosomes is the
primordial act of replication in biology: a chromosome is not
synthesized de novo but is assembled as a copy of a preexisting
chromosome; in other words, a chromosome forms only when there was
one before."1d
SCHRODINGER
GENE
" . . . [G]enes
are messages . . .
"1e
SCHRODINGER
DAWKINS
HYPOTHESIS AND
THEORY
"A hypothesis is an imaginative
preconception of what the truth might be. . .
A theory is a hypothesis together with . . . the deductive
inferences we draw from it. It follows, then, that a theory cannot
be logically proved to be true . . .
"1f
INSTINCT
"Biology has no greater triumph to look
forward to than a solution of the problem of
how a program of
instinctual behavior is genetically stored and epigenetically
retrieved."1g
ORDER IN BIOLOGY
"Order permeates biology through and
through.
. . . No generalization in physical science is more firmly
established than that which declares that
the direction of flow of
events in the universe is always from less probable to more
probable . . .
"1h
PLANCK
BOHM
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