Carl Woese

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"Our task now is to resynthesize biology; put the organism back into its environment; connect it again to its evolutionary past; and let us feel that complex flow that is organism, evolution, and environment united. The time has come for biology to enter the nonlinear world."

— Carl Woese (1928-2012)

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“We cannot expect to explain cellular evolution if we stay locked into the classical Darwinian mode of thinking.”

— Carl Woese (1928-2012)

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"The incredible diversity of life on this planet, most of which is microbial, can only be understood in an evolutionary framework"

— Carl Woese (1928-2012)

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"Yes, I do not like people saying that atheism is based on science, because it's not. It's an alien invasion of science."

— Carl Woese (1928-2012)

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"Science is an endless search for truth. Any representation of reality we develop can be only partial. There is no finality, sometimes no single best representation. There is only deeper understanding, more revealing and enveloping representations. Scientific advance, then, is a succession of newer representations superseding older ones, either because an older one has run its course and is no longer a reliable guide for a field or because the newer one is more powerful, encompassing, and productive than its predecessor(s)."

— Carl Woese (1928-2012)

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"Science is impelled by two main factors, technological advance and a guiding vision (overview). A properly balanced relationship between the two is key to the successful development of a science: without the proper technological advances the road ahead is blocked. Without a guiding vision there is no road ahead; the science becomes an engineering discipline, concerned with temporal practical problems."

— Carl Woese (1928-2012)

sience truth guiding reality progress

"Science is an endless search for truth. Any representation of reality we develop can be only partial. There is no finality, sometimes no single best representation. There is only deeper understanding, more revealing and enveloping representations. Scientific advance, then, is a succession of newer representations superseding older ones, either because an older one has run its course and is no longer a reliable guide for a field or because the newer one is more powerful, encompassing, and productive than its predecessor(s)."

— Carl Woese (1928-2012)

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“It’s clear to me that if you wiped all multicellular life-forms off the face of the earth, microbial life might shift a tiny bit, If microbial life were to disappear, that would be it — instant death for the planet.”

— Carl Woese (1928-2012)

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"Science is impelled by two main factors, technological advance and a guiding vision (overview). A properly balanced relationship between the two is key to the successful development of a science: without the proper technological advances the road ahead is blocked. Without a guiding vision there is no road ahead; the science becomes an engineering discipline, concerned with temporal practical problems."

— Carl Woese (1928-2012)