The Naturalist Quotes

“There’s a clarity that arrives when life forces you into a binary situation.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Killing is a solution to a problem. Murder is something you do because you want to. You divorce your wife because you don’t love her. You murder her because you hate her.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“It’s one thing to kill someone and not leave evidence or hide the body so it’s never found, but to be able to murder someone and have everyone think it was an accident of nature? That’s some kind of genius.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, a mere heart of stone. —Charles Darwin”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“A mistake we make too often in science is thinking that having a name for something is the same as understanding it. A skeleton in a museum or a drop of blood”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Besides the emotional difficulty of literally defacing another human being, I become aware of the practical problem.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Sharks have millions of years of preprogrammed strategies. Dolphins have cheat codes.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“You have a judgmental face.” “I’m a scientist. I look at everything this way.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“In biology you become accustomed to different ways data can represent itself. Salmon returning upstream and herd animals have very linear patterns. Birds follow loops. I’m looking at another pattern. One that’s very familiar to me. It’s a predator’s circuit. I furiously type away, searching for the pattern imprinted on my memory. I find it. It’s not the same shape, but it has similar symmetry. I could write a formula for a fractal that would generate patterns just like these. But it’s not just a pattern, it’s a behavior. The behavior generating the pattern on my wall,”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“When you’re a kid, you just assume your parents were always grown-up. It’s weird—I’m older now than she was when she died. Yet she still feels like my mom.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Everything drains from my body. There’s no thrill of being right. It’s just an overwhelming sense of dread.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“She wanted to be like you.” Be like me? A socially ignorant bystander to the world?”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“You only see what you’re paying attention to. You’re likely to trail bear tracks all the way back to the bear.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“A scientist is someone trying to see order in chaos. Sometimes it simply can’t be done, as science tells us via quantum mechanics and chaos theory. A thing can”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“A scientist is someone trying to see order in chaos.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Put a wildlife camera in your campsite overnight and you’ll be surprised and possibly frightened by the amount of nature that comes strolling and slithering through.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Guilty like a chastised dog sitting in the corner, not because he knows taking food from the table is bad, but because he’s done something inappropriate he doesn’t understand.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Vital organs and arteries matter, but so does the will to live.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Deep down we’re all animals.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“I’m not really an epidemiologist, if that’s what you mean. It’s outside my area. I build mathematical models based on biological systems.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Yes. You can see this in the womb, where one fetus takes nutrients from another, causing varying birth weights. In vanishing twin syndrome, probably one in ten pregnancies results in a twin, but one is absorbed by the other. Did the mother cause this? Did the evil twin? If so, the evil twin always wins.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“or in the same time frame. The trouble is we expect the emote part of emotion. Humans are social primates, and our experiences have to be externalized to be acknowledged by others.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“People who share last names tend to be related and get together more often for meals and are less guarded about eating off one another’s plates and exchanging germs. This creates pockets of infection over weekends that soon extend to schools and work. The presence of convention centers added to the calculation.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“People tend to think that scientists are experts in all things, when in fact we can be so specialized we know less”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“When Dad was alive, the world was filled with color. Afterward, color only existed as a number on a list of hues. Everything felt muted.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Nature controls us more than we want to admit.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“I’ve heard it argued that we’re just space suits for mitochondrial DNA,” I reply. “Another thought is that we’re just moving cities of gut bacteria.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“When you’re a kid, you just assume your parents were always grown-up.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“The trouble is we expect the emote part of emotion. Humans are social primates, and our experiences have to be externalized to be acknowledged by others.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist

“Would you invest in landscaping if you knew your property values were going to keep declining? Maybe it’s better to spend your money on an escape pod with leather seats and a Bluetooth system.”
― Andrew Mayne, The Naturalist