Jonathan Weiner Quotes

Taken together, these new studies suggest that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. He vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch.

Philosophers used to ask whether we are born with or invent our sense of time. Now we know that we have clocks woven into every one of our cells. Philosophers also used to ask how we know that the sun will rise tomorrow. In a sense we have that answer built into us, too. The clock is a kind of orrery in the heart of every one of our cells, revolving to help us keep time with our world, a model of the cosmos inside our heads that cycles whether we are in or out of sight of the sun. The revolution of the stars and the seasons is written in the turns of our DNA.

“Our only real competition for domination of the planet remains the viruses,” the microbiologist Joshua Lederberg once said. “The survival of humanity,” he added, “is not preordained.”

All three spoke in the kind of down-home, common-as-flies style that is the lingua franca of great scientists, conveying a contempt for pretension, a contempt for cant, a delight in common sense, combined with uncommon curiosity about what is really there.

Why are there so many kinds of animals? Adaptive radiations like Darwin’s finches are the essence of the answer.

The pamphlet teaches the skills that skills that Benzer’s former labmates would now need to learn, including propaganda, “that branch of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.”

“Ethicists are a mixed lot,” he says, “generally not worrying about their own problems, just somebody else’s problems.”

One test of a true clock is its ability to keep time through a wide range of temperatures. A clock that speeds up in hot weather and slows down in cold weather is not a clock, although it may make a good thermometer.

We are doing what the dinosaurs did before us, only faster. We bring strangers together to make strange bedfellows, and we remake the beds they lie in, all at once.

We do not lift a finger without three kinds of information: the information we are getting from our senses at that moment; the information we have gotten from our senses in the past; and the information our ancestors have acquired since life began on Earth—that is, the information that is represented by genes themselves. Evolution is learning. Species store learning in chromosomes the way individuals store learning in their brains and societies store learning in books.

“Molecular biology has no history for the young scientist,” one of the old guard declared not long ago.

All times seem special to those who live in them.

The rapid accumulation of change is not always progress, and forward motion is not always an advance.

Geneticists will tell you that. Evolution is always happening. What they mean is that the genes of this generation are not precisely what they were the preceding generation. Nor will they be precisely the same in the next. And evolution is that change.

For all species, including our own, the true figure of life is a perching bird, a passerine, alert and nervous in every part, ready to dart off in an instant. Life is always poised for flight. From a distance it looks still, silhouetted against the bright sky or the dark ground; but up close it is flitting this way and that, as if displaying to the world at every moment its perpetual readiness to take off in any of a thousand directions.