# Jonathan Weiner - Quotes: 22 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner ## Books - [The Beak of the Finch](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/the-beak-of-the-finch.md) — 11 quotes - [Time, Love, Memory](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/time-love-memory.md) — 11 quotes ## Recently added quotes > Philosophers used to ask whether we are born with or invent our sense of time. Now we know that we have clocks woven into every one of our cells. Philosophers also used to ask how we know that the sun will rise tomorrow. In a sense we have that answer built into us, too. The clock is a kind of orrery in the heart of every one of our cells, revolving to help us keep time with our world, a model of the cosmos inside our heads that cycles whether we are in or out of sight of the sun. The revolution of the stars and the seasons is written in the turns of our DNA. p. 193 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/time-love-memory/philosophers-used-to-ask.md) > People who don’t believe in relativity don’t understand relativity. People who don’t believe in evolution don’t understand evolution. And it’s the same with genetics. And I think some people are just reluctant to let their imaginations run. > > My feeling is that molecular biologists are going to move into psychology and take over the field. I think that’s the way psychology is going to be rejuvenated. p. 243 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/time-love-memory/people-who-dont.md) > “Ethicists are a mixed lot,” he says, “generally not worrying about their own problems, just somebody else’s problems.” p. 169 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/time-love-memory/ethicists-are-a-mixed.md) > Watson sighs. “So in that sense you don’t have a free will. Your reactions are programmed. You know, you start asking the difference,” he says with a nod toward the Fly Room next door. “What free will is there in Drosophila? You put the question of the free will of a fly. And what’s really different about the fly’s brain from ours—which gives us free will? > > “I’m sure once we know how the brain works, we’ll no longer talk about free will in the Jesuit sense. It will cease to be, you know—” Freedom will cease to be a mystery requiring Jesuitical debate; it will cease to be a theological or philosophical question. “It will just be how the brain works. You will describe how the brain works. You won’t use the words ‘free will’; you know, you’ll understand…. Because you’re asking, how does the brain work?” He says in a softer voice. “That’s what you’re really asking.” The bell in the double-helical bell tower outside his office window begins to toll. “And that’s really the ultimate question to ask,” he says. p. 251 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/time-love-memory/watson-sighs-so-in-that.md) > “Molecular biology has no history for the young scientist,” one of the old guard declared not long ago. > > Sydney Brenner qualified that: “I hold the somewhat weaker view that history does exist for the young, but is divided into two epochs: the past two years, and everything that went before.” p. 241 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/time-love-memory/molecular-biology-has.md) > All three spoke in the kind of down-home, common-as-flies style that is the lingua franca of great scientists, conveying a contempt for pretension, a contempt for cant, a delight in common sense, combined with uncommon curiosity about what is really there. p. 24 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/time-love-memory/all-three-spoke.md) > Evolution discloses a meaning in death, although the meaning is like some of the berries that Darwin tasted in the Galapagos, “acid & Austere.” There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Even Drought bears fruit. Even death is a seed. p. 82 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/the-beak-of-the-finch/evolution-discloses-a-meaning.md) > Geneticists will tell you that. Evolution is always happening. What they mean is that the genes of this generation are not precisely what they were the preceding generation. Nor will they be precisely the same in the next. And evolution is that change. p. 126 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/the-beak-of-the-finch/geneticists-will-tell.md) > We do not lift a finger without three kinds of information: the information we are getting from our senses at that moment; the information we have gotten from our senses in the past; and the information our ancestors have acquired since life began on Earth—that is, the information that is represented by genes themselves. Evolution is learning. Species store learning in chromosomes the way individuals store learning in their brains and societies store learning in books. p. 132 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/time-love-memory/we-do-not.md) > One test of a true clock is its ability to keep time through a wide range of temperatures. A clock that speeds up in hot weather and slows down in cold weather is not a clock, although it may make a good thermometer. p. 105 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/time-love-memory/one-test-of-a-true.md) > With the discovery of the clock gene, the sense of time, mysterious for so many centuries, was no longer a mystery that could be observed only from the outside. Now it could be explored as a mechanism from the inside. The discovery implied that behavior itself could now be charted and mapped as precisely as any other aspect of inheritance. Qualities that people had always thought of as somehow floating above the body, apart from the body, as if they belonged to the realm of the spirit and not of the flesh, as if they were supernatural, might be mapped right alongside qualities as mundane as eye pigment. p. 110 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/time-love-memory/with-the-discovery.md) > For all species, including our own, the true figure of life is a perching bird, a passerine, alert and nervous in every part, ready to dart off in an instant. Life is always poised for flight. From a distance it looks still, silhouetted against the bright sky or the dark ground; but up close it is flitting this way and that, as if displaying to the world at every moment its perpetual readiness to take off in any of a thousand directions. p. 112 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jonathan-weiner/the-beak-of-the-finch/for-all-species.md)