"...computers are the way of future and lab work is for suckers. But alas, in the realm of biology, the micropipetters and mice-killers win again." Doing biolo

"...computers are the way of future and lab work is for suckers. But alas, in the realm of biology, the micropipetters and mice-killers win again." Doing biology is the only way to develop biological intuition. Sometimes this means pipetting and killing mice. Ernst Mayr speaks to this: "About two years ago, three years ago, for maybe the 20th time I went over the whole business of the species concept. What is a species? I looked at the major figures in the evolutionary synthesis, and I looked at Robzhansky and myself, and Huxley and Stebbins, all of us had reasonable species concepts, and the only person that had a species concept that I thought was quite absurd was the paleontologist G.G. Simpson. And then I said to myself, "Well, he can't have been a naturalist in his youth if he had such a peculiar, unworkable species concept." So I went to Simpson's biography and what did I find? I found that in college he was an English major. He had never been a naturalist as a youngster. He never collected anything, and he discovered geology in his senior year in college, and from there he went to stratigraphy and finally to paleontology. Not surprisingly, not having been a naturalist, he has no idea what a species is and he never had. I argued with him about the species concept year after year, but lacking that background, he was unable to see it, and that is the thing. Being a naturalist -- having had that background of being a naturalist -- gives you a view of nature that cannot be acquired just learning from books." (Go to bottom of http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/may1int-5 http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/may1int-5 for a video of him saying it while sitting next to E. O. Wilson.)