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Thomas Hunt Morgan Quotes

Some things are better done than described.

Some things are better done than described.

Thomas Hunt Morgan
Done, Tasks, Action

The media has enormous power. The media is undergoing huge changes now. It seemed like it's time to step back and look at how the media shapes our lives and our perceptions of reality.

Thomas Hunt Morgan
Reality, Media, Perception

Two years work wasted, I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I've got nothing out of it.

Thomas Hunt Morgan
Years, Two, Breeding

That the fundamental aspects of heredity should have turned out to be so extraordinarily simple supports us in the hope that nature may, after all, be entirely approachable. Her much-advertised inscrutability has once more been found to be an illusion due to our ignorance. This is encouraging, for, if the world in which we live were as complicated as some of our friends would have us believe we might well despair that biology could ever become an exact science.

Thomas Hunt Morgan
Believe, Ignorance, Simple
Thomas Hunt Morgan (1919). “The Physical basis of heredity”

Within the period of human history we do not know of a single instance of the transformation of one species into another one. It may be claimed that the theory of descent is lacking, therefore, in the most essential feature that it needs to place the theory on a scientific basis, this must be admitted.

Thomas Hunt Morgan
May, Essentials, Needs
Thomas Hunt Morgan (1903). “Evolution and adaptation”

Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cooacters can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes. In a word the cytoplasm may be ignored genetically.

Thomas Hunt Morgan
Science, Inheritance, May

Realizing how often ingenious speculation in the complex biological world has led nowhere and how often the real advances in biology as well as in chemistry, physics and astronomy have kept within the bounds of mechanistic interpretation, we geneticists should rejoice, even with our noses on the grindstone (which means both eyes on the objectives), that we have at command an additional means of testing whatever original ideas pop into our heads.

Thomas Hunt Morgan
Real, Mean, Eye

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