“Our knowledge of the nature and properties of living things is far too meagre to justify any such attempts.”

— William Bateson

Preface
Problems In Genetics (1913)
Context: Few who are familiar with the facts that genetic research has revealed are now inclined to speculate as to the manner by which the process [species come into existence] has been accomplished. Our knowledge of the nature and properties of living things is far too meagre to justify any such attempts. Suggestions of course can be made: though, however, these ideas may have a stimulating value in the lecture room, they look weak and thin when set out in print.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Our knowledge of the nature and properties of living things is far too meagre to justify any such attempts." by William Bateson?

William Bateson 16

British geneticist and biologist 1861–1926

Related quotes

“Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s32.html James Madison (28 October 1785)
1780s

“The attempt to live by the reality of our own nature, which means our limits as well as our potentials, is a profoundly moral regimen.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), p. 50

“What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

“There was no way possible [the queen] could have done all of the things the pamphleteers claimed. The crimes were too gross, too immoral and far too physically challenging. Magnus himself had never attempted half of them.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Runaway Queen

“Our nature as sensitive beings is far too complex to break apart, re-examine and reshape in a poem.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

On why she will not critique her fans' poetical work http://www.masielalusha.com/message_center.php

“Such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country... The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”

Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) Italian physicist

On the Hydrogen bomb in a minority annex http://web.archive.org/web/20080725010150/honors.umd.edu/HONR269J/archive/GACReport491030.html (co-authored with I. I. Rabi) to an official General Advisory Committee report for the Atomic Energy Commission (30 October 1949)

“Most good things have been said far too many times and just need to be lived.”

Shane Claiborne (1975) American activist

Variant: Most good things have already been said far too many times and just need to be lived.

“The book, as far as I am aware, is the first attempt to connect the natural sciences into a history of creation.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 388

“Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

On the Mindless Menace of Violence (1968)
Context: Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution. But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

“The image a society evolves of the relationship between the living and the dead is, in the final analysis, an attempt, on the level of religious thought, to conceal, embellish or justify the actual relationships which prevail among the living.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss book Tristes Tropiques

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 23 : The Living and the Dead, p. 246

“Our knowledge of the nature and properties of living things is far too meagre to justify any such attempts.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

William Bateson 16

Related quotes

Related topics