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Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index J > John Stephen Jones Quotes

John Stephen Jones
(24 Mar 1944 - )

British geneticist and science writer.

Science Quotes by John Stephen Jones (4 quotes)

Evolution triumphs because it turns to natural selection, the plodding accumulation of error.
— John Stephen Jones
Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated (1999), 9.
Science quotes on:  |  Accumulation (51)  |  Error (339)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Natural (810)  |  Natural Selection (98)  |  Selection (130)  |  Triumph (76)  |  Turn (454)

Genetics is to biology what atomic theory is to physics. Its principle is clear: that inheritance is based on particles and not on fluids. Instead of the essence of each parent mixing, with each child the blend of those who made him, information is passed on as a series of units. The bodies of successive generations transport them through time, so that a long-lost character may emerge in a distant descendant. The genes themselves may be older than the species that bear them.
— John Stephen Jones
Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated (1999), 115.
Science quotes on:  |  Atomic Theory (16)  |  Bear (162)  |  Biology (232)  |  Character (259)  |  Child (333)  |  Descendant (18)  |  Essence (85)  |  Fluid (54)  |  Gene (105)  |  Generation (256)  |  Genetic (110)  |  Genetics (105)  |  Information (173)  |  Inheritance (35)  |  Long (778)  |  Parent (80)  |  Particle (200)  |  Pass (241)  |  Physic (515)  |  Physics (564)  |  Principle (530)  |  Series (153)  |  Species (435)  |  Successive (73)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Theory (1015)  |  Through (846)  |  Time (1911)  |  Transport (31)

Philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex: it is cheaper, easier and some people prefer it.
— John Stephen Jones
Review of Simon Pinker, How the Mind Works (1997). In New York Review of Books (6 Nov 1997).
Science quotes on:  |  Easier (53)  |  People (1031)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Pornography (2)  |  Preference (28)  |  Sex (68)

The language of the genes has a simple alphabet, not with twenty-six letters, but just four. These are the four different DNA bases—adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine (A, G, C and T for short). The bases are arranged in words of three letters such as CGA or TGG. Most of the words code for different amino acids, which themselves are joined together to make proteins, the building blocks of the body.
— John Stephen Jones
The Language of the Genes: Biology, History and the Evolutionary Future (1993), 3.
Science quotes on:  |  Acid (83)  |  Adenine (6)  |  Amino Acid (12)  |  Base (120)  |  Body (557)  |  Building (158)  |  Building Block (9)  |  Code (31)  |  Cytosine (6)  |  Different (595)  |  DNA (81)  |  Gene (105)  |  Guanine (5)  |  Language (308)  |  Letter (117)  |  Most (1728)  |  Protein (56)  |  Short (200)  |  Simple (426)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Thymine (6)  |  Together (392)  |  Word (650)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
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Sophie Germain
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Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
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Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
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- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
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- 60 -
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Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
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