Quotes About Heredity

In the spiritual world the subtle influences which form and transform the soul are Heredity and Environment. And here especially, where all is invisible, where much that we feel to be real is yet so ill-defined, it becomes of vital practical moment to clarify the atmosphere as far as possible with conceptions borrowed from the natural life.

Culture contradicts all genetic capital. It is the touch of magic, the special touch which contradicts biology, heredity, etc. and condenses a whole dynasty into one generation. What cannot be obtained in a single generation is ease and courage. Mutants are cowards.

Knowledge is not predetermined by heredity; it is not predetermined in the things around us - in knowing things around him the subject always adds to them.

only thing your DNA thinks about is reproducing itself.

Through some happy accident of heredity he had escaped his father's tediousness, while retaining a little of his mother's jolly high spirits and humor. This did not make him anything special, but at least he was good-natured.

Children in their youth blossomed and bloomed; then chance, inclination, heredity all played their part

Who can say how heredity and environment and disability come together?

Genes rule the world.

I know lots of women who have slim legs but refuse to wear skirts because of unsightly varicose or spider veins. Though heredity plays a role, your genes don't have to doom you to a life of long pants.

1. Strictly speaking, the general way of functioning is not hereditary because it is already operative at the level of the genes (Piaget, 1970/1972a, p. 57). Rather, it is a functional a priori that reflects the continuity of life.

We're Irish, Jake, which means heredity carries us halfway to madness smack out of the womb.

Men are not going to embrace eugenics. They are going to embrace the first likely, trim-figured girl with limpid eyes and flashing teeth who comes along, in spite of the fact that her germ plasm is probably reeking with hypertension, cancer, haemophilia, colour blindness, hay fever, epilepsy, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Among the herbicides are some that are classified as 'mutagens' or agents capable of modifying the genes, the materials of heredity. We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?

Through the lens of his socialism, Haldane saw—and was offended by—the sociopolitical presumptions, so many of them increasingly contrary to his own, hidden in mainline doctrine. Little was yet known about human heredity and, as Haldane put it, "many of the deeds done in America in the name of eugenics are about as much justified by science as were the proceedings of the inquisition by the gospels."54

However superficial prevailing views of heredity seem to be, it must be admitted that a person is indeed the bearer of inherited characteristics. This is the one aspect. He must often battle against these inherited traits and rid himself of them in order to bring to fulfillment the talents laid into him before he entered earthly existence.

We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.

Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement... Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.

Men are naturally unequal. They are unequal members of one family, in which one can be brilliant, another mediocre, and another an imbecile. Hereditary substance is a mystery.

A symbolic way of coming full circle in a world where representations of heredity express a substantial form of continuity between generations in other respects as well.

Heredity is a splendid phenomenon that relieves us of responsibility for our shortcomings.

My father was always getting excited about something. It's genetically inside me somewhere.

Don't let your heredity dictate your destiny. From where you are, take a leap of faith and pray. God has wonderful plans for you; He will make a way for you. With God, you can achieve all the desires of your heart.

Swann's illness was the same that had killed his mother, who had been attacked by it at precisely the age which he had now reached. Our existences are in truth, owing to heredity, as full of cabalistic ciphers, of horoscopic castings as if there really were sorcerers in the world. And just as there is a certain duration of life for humanity in general, so there is one for families in particular, that is to say, in any one family, for the members of it who resemble one another.

Humanity is a very old institution. Heredity, cross-breeding have given an irresistible force to bad habits, to vicious reflexes. One person sneezes and gasps because he is passing a rosebush, another breaks out in an eruption at the smell of wet paint, has frequent attacks of colic if he has to start on a journey, and grandchildren of thieves who are themselves millionaires and generous cannot resist the temptation to rob you of fifty francs.