Quotes about morphology

A collection of quotes on the topic of morphology, form, other, difference.

Quotes about morphology

Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Leszek Kolakowski photo
Robert Charles Wilson photo
Aron Ra photo

“It is no hoax that mammalian embryos temporarily have pharyngeal pouches, which are morphologically indistinguishable from the gill slits in modern fish embryos, and that the divergence of development from there matches what is indicated in the fossil record. This is fact, not fraud. And none of these facts should be true unless evolution were true also.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"13th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myfifz3C0mI Youtube (September 3, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Aron Ra photo
Joseph Kosuth photo
John Cage photo
Manuel Castells photo
Aron Ra photo

“We don’t believe this because we want to! And why would we want to? We believe it because we can prove it really is true, and that applies to everyone whether you want to believe it or not. We’re not just saying you’ve descended from primates either; we’re saying you are a primate! Humans have been classified as primates since the 1700s when a Christian creationist scientist figured out what a primate was –and prompted other scientists to figure out why that applied to us. It wouldn’t be this way if different “kinds” of life had been magically-created unrelated to anything else; not unless God wanted to trick us into believing everything had evolved. Because the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life forms. But it can be just as objectively confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically. This is why it is referred to as a “twin-nested hierarchy”. But there’s still more than that because the evident development of physiology and morphology can be confirmed biochemically as well as chronologically in geology and developmentally in embryology. Why should that be? And how do creationists explain why it is that every living thing fits into all of these daughter sets within parent groups, each being derived according to apparently inherited traits? They don’t even try to explain any of that, or anything else. They won’t because they can’t, because evolution is the only explanation that accounts for any of this, and it explains it all.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"10th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MXTBGcyNuc, Youtube (June 5, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Teresa de Lauretis photo

“Life cycles that incorporate discrete, morphologically distnct phases predominate among animals.”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

[Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Adaptation and Constraint in the Complex Life Cycles of Animals, 25, 573–600, November 1994, 10.1146/annurev.es.25.110194.003041]

Benoît Mandelbrot photo

“What we call growth of even a simple organism is a tremendously complex phenomenon from the biochemical, physiological, cytological, and morphological viewpoints.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Von Bertalanffy (1957) "Quantitative laws in metabolism and growth" in: Quarterly Review of Biology 32(1957), p. 217
1950s

Richard Dawkins photo
Ferdinand de Saussure photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo

“A person’s things can be a kind of exterior morphology of their mind.”

Aftermaths (p. 247). Note: Aftermaths was originally published as a standalone short story in 1986, but since then has usually been reprinted as a sort of appendix to Shards of Honor, which it follows naturally in the series arc.
Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)