Quotes from Carl Zimmer

Trudno wyobrazi? sobie, ?e rak ma cokolwiek wspólnego z ró?owym grapefruitem. A jednak oba sÄ… produktami mozaicyzmu: ?ywych linii komórkowych ró?niÄ…cych siÄ™ od reszty ciaÅ'a mutacjami, które odziedziczyÅ'y po komórkach macierzystych.

And they certainly would not have guessed that the human genome is partly composed from thousands of viruses that infected our distant ancestors, or that life as we know it may have gotten its start four billion years ago from viruses.

Writing to Lucretius, on Epicurus' belief that the soul was no different from the rest of the cosmos; made of atoms] Death is therefore nothing to us, and does not concern us at all, since it appears that the substance of the soul is perishable. When the separation of body and soul, whose union is the essence of our being, is consummated, it is clear that absolutely nothing will be able to reach us and awaken our sensibility, not even if earth mixes with sea, and sea with heaven.

Goddard's staff kept careful records of the tests, which he analyzed back in Vineland. The results stunned him: A huge proportion of the immigrants tested as feebleminded. Goddard broke down the results by ethnic group: 79 percent of Italians were feebleminded, 83 percent of Jews, 87 percent of Russians.

Traveling across Australia, Asia, and Africa, he searched for people with little contact with the West who he could examine. Porteus found that the so-called Bushmen of the Kalahari scored a mental age of seven. Yet his subjects were navigating their way through Porteus's printed mazes in the middle of a vast desert that they could navigate without a map, finding all the food and shelter they required.

Po naszej Å›mierci – pisaÅ' Dawkins – pozostajÄ… po nas dwie rzeczy: geny i memy

It was final sour proof of something Harvey had suspected for years: Man, he declared, is but a great mischievous baboon.

We have the technology right now to effectively eradicate Huntington's disease from the planet, along with many other genetic disorders. But the messy realities of human existence--of economics, emotions, politics, and the rest--override the technological possibilities.

In the early 1900s, a Florida farmer found a notable bud sport while inspecting his grove of Walters grapefruit trees. Tree after tree bore white fruit, except one. On that tree, the farmer spotted a branch weighed down with pink fruits. From that single bud sport, all pink grapefruits descend.

In 2011, a seventeen-year-old Israeli girl named Chen Aida Ayash was killed in a car accident. After her death, her parents asked for doctors to collect some eggs from her cadaver. They had to go to court to get permission, explaining to a judge that they wanted to fertilize Chen's eggs, after which Chen's aunt would bear them to term. After her own death, Chen would give her parents grandchildren.

Those immune cells then make us feel awful. They create inflammation that triggers a scratchy feeling in the throat and leads to the production of a lot of mucus around the site of the infection. In order to recover from a cold, we have to wait not only for the immune system to wipe out the virus but also to calm itself down.

I never knew any man who had once tasted the sweetness of experimental knowledge, that ever afterward fasted after ye Vapour garlick and onions of phantasmatical seeming philosophy. [William Petty]

After a few years of breeding a type of lily, Burbank found a single specimen that met his standards. A rabbit ate it.

In 1814 the breeders founded an organization, the title of which was—deep breath—"The Association of Friends, Experts and Supporters of Sheep Breeding for the achievement of a more rapid and more thoroughgoing advancement of this branch of the economy and the manufacturing and commercial aspects of the wool industry that is based upon it." Those who didn't want to lose too much oxygen uttering the full name simply called it the Sheep Breeders' Society.

When a cell divides, it needs another army of molecules to make a second copy of its DNA.

Everybody's genome is like a book with 23 chapters," he told them. "You have two copies of each chapter, one from your dad and one from your mom. Whole genome sequencing looks for everything. It looks for missing chapters, missing paragraphs, every misspelled word.

The very word virus began as a contradiction. We inherited the word from the Roman Empire, where it meant, at once, the venom of a snake or the semen of a man. Creation and destruction in one word.

Evolution has taught them that pointless harm will ultimately harm themselves.

Two hallmarks of Homo Sapiens are decoration and self-identification.

The extra clutter adds no important insight; instead, it offers more clutter in which erros can lurk.

The problem is not that dolphins are dumber than we thought, but that our anthropomorphism inevitably makes it hard to understand an intelligence other than our own.

Dolphins may even be able to name each other with signature whistles. But their society may nevertheless be one of an overlapping network of minds, wandering linked through a transparent ocean.

The stubborn inequalities in the Unites States are not the result of some people living in a physical environment. Their environment is built by social forces, and those forces last for centuries because they are regenerated across the generations.

parasites make up the majority of species on Earth. According to one estimate, parasites may outnumber free-living species four to one. In other words, the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology. The book in your