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“The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data...which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire living biosphere, that's the assemblage of 20 million species or so that constitute all the living creatures on the planet, and you have a genome for every species the total is still about one petabyte, that's a million gigabytes - that's still very small compared with Google or the Wikipedia and it's a database that you can easily put in a small room, easily transmit from one place to another. And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data.”
― Freeman Dyson

“My simple explanation of why we human beings, the most advanced species on earth, cannot find happiness, is this: as we evolve up the ladder of being, we find three things: the first, that the tension between the range of opposites in our lives and society widens dramatically and often painfully as we evolve; the second, that the better informed and more intelligent we are, the more humble we have to become about our ability to live meaningful lives and to change anything, even ourselves; and consequently, thirdly, that the cost of gaining the simplicity the other side of complexity can rise very steeply if we do not align ourselves and our lives well.”
― Dr Robin Lincoln Wood

“It necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, and of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among many other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition - or the hope - that on this score our position is ever likely to be revised. There is no scientific concept, in any of the sciences, more destructive of anthropocentrism than this one.”
― Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology

“[Religious belief is] outmoded and ridiculous. [Belief in gods was a] worn out but once useful crutch in mankind's journey towards truth. We consider the time has come for that crutch to be abandoned.

It is a vacuous answer... To say that 'God made the world' is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don't understand how the universe originated. A god, in so far as it is anything, is an admission of ignorance.

Religion utterly failed to provide an explanation of the biosphere other than that 'God made it all'. Then Darwin thundered over the horizon and in a few decades of observation and thought . . . arrived at an answer.

I regard teaching religion as purveying lies. I came here today to de-corrupt you all.”
― P.W. Atkins

“in the heat of unprecedented technological breakthroughs it is easy to think that we are invincible, like gods who would rule the world. But none of us need be reminded that the future of our planet is being held hostage by our own cleverness, with nuclear physics, chemistry, agribusiness, mineral exploration, and bioengineering threatening our biosphere in ways we could never have imagined even twenty years ago.”
― Hal Zina Bennett, Spirit Animals and the Wheel of Life: Earth-Centered Practices for Daily Living

“Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection alone and unaided could have drawn all the music of the biosphere. In effect natural selection operates upon the products of chance and can feed nowhere else; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions, and from this domain chance is barred. It is not to chance but to these conditions that evolution owes its generally progressive course, its successive conquests, and the impression it gives of a smooth and steady unfolding.”
― Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology

“The late Alan Gregg pointed out that human population growth within the ecosystem was closely analogous to the growth of malignant tumor cells within an organism: that man was acting like a cancer on the biosphere. The multiplication of human numbers certainly seems wild and uncontrolledâ€� Four million a month—the equivalent of the population of Chicagoâ€� We seem to be doing all right at the moment; but if you could ask cancer cells, I suspect they would think they were doing fine. But when the organism dies, so do they; and for our own, selfish, practical... reasons, I think we should be careful about how we influence the rest of the ecosystem.”
― Marston Bates

“Nothing is more important to human beings than an ecologically functioning, life sustaining biosphere on the earth. It is the only habitable place we know of in a forbidding universe. We all depend on it to live and we are compelled to share it; it is our only home... the earth's biosphere seems almost magically suited to human beings and indeed it is, for we evolved through eons of intimate immersion within it. We cannot live long or well without a functioning biosphere, and so it is worth everything we have.”
― Joseph Guth

“NASA astronauts have only managed to live continuously on the International Space Station (ISS) for a year and Biosphere 2 on Earth failed at two years of uninterrupted human habitation. Both cases required extracting the sickened people from the toxic environments. At this point it is ludicrous to talk about a permanent manned base on Mars.”
― Steven Magee

“I need not to show you the incapacity to predict in deterministic chaotic systems is emphatically not the same as the failure to prestate or predict Darwinian preadaptations. in the deterministic chaotic case, we know beforehand the state space of the system, in the simplest case, three continuous variables and their ranges. But in sharp contrast, we do not know beforehand the state space, or sample space, of the evolving biosphere and the emergence in the nonergodic universe of swim bladders.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

“The biosphere only survives, today, by virtue of what prosthetic assistance we can afford it. The assemblers might keep that going, were the klept to founder. But I don’t trust that some last convulsive urge to short-term profit, some terminal short-sightedness, mightn’t bring an end to everything.”
― William Gibson, Agency

“The alarming issue of global warming ought to be addressed by the collaboration of individuals and the government. There must be strict sanction against release of pollutants by industries along with awareness events at all levels.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“The biosphere explodes in diversity, creating more and more cracks in the floor of Darwin’s nature until the cracks, ever expanding, become the very floor of nature, and nature herself.”
― Stuart A. Kauffman, A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life

“Information in evolution is usually associated with processes of adaptive change, because that is how we recognize that variation is possible ex ante but restricted ex post. The information in a unique and universal metabolism would be of a different kind, because it would preclude variation in the processes that permit structure to form at all. We will argue that this is the information carried in paths of least resistance. It is essential to the organization of the biosphere because only along these paths are the residual problems of robustness in a hierarchical system simple enough to have evolutionary solutions.”
― Eric Smith, The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere