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John Stephen Jones
(24 Mar 1944 - )
British geneticist and science writer.
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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.
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.
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).
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.
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) -- 
