"Faced with a new mutation in an organism,……" — George Wald
"Faced with a new mutation in an organism, or a fundamental change in its living conditions, the biologist is frequently in no position whatever to predict its future prospects. He has to wait and see. For instance, the hairy mammoth seems to have been an admirable animal, intelligent and well-accoutered. Now that it is extinct, we try to understand why it failed. I doubt that any biologist thinks he could have predicted that failure. Fitness and survival are by nature estimates of past performance."
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George Wald
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68 Quotes by George Wald
George Wald has 68 quotes on this site.
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Our challenge is to give what account we can of what becomes of life in the solar system, this corner…
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We are living in a world in which all wars are wars of defense.
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Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
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The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one. It can give us no…
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Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make…
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I tell my students, with a feeling of pride that I hope they will share, that the carbon, nitrogen, and…
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A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to…
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A scientist should be the happiest of men. Not that science isn't serious; but as everyone knows, being serious is…
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Science goes from question to question; big questions, and little, tentative answers. The questions as they age grow ever broader,…
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A scientist is in a sense a learned small boy. There is something of the scientist in every small boy.…
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About two million years ago, man appeared. He has become the dominant species on the earth. All other living things,…
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Every creature alive on the earth today represents an unbroken line of life that stretches back to the first primitive…
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More Accoutered Quotes
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