Quotes About Inheritance

The evolutionary importance of the fact that genes control embryonic development is this: it means that genes are at least partly responsible for their own survival in the future, because their survival depends on the efficiency of the bodies in which they live and which they helped to build.

The gene's extended phenotypic effect, say an increase in the height of the dam, affects its chances of survival in precisely the same sense as in the case of a gene with a normal phenotypic effect, such as an increase in the length of the tail.

Within each species some individuals leave more surviving offspring than others, so that the inheritable traits (genes) of the reproductively successful become more numerous in the next generation. This is natural selection: the non-random differential reproduction of genes.

Finally, at the end of the chapter, we saw that genes 'sharing' a given extended phenotypic trait might come from different species, even different phyla and different kingdoms.

One is that phenotypes that extend outside the body do not have to be inanimate artefacts: they can themselves be built of living tissue.

What makes a gene good? As a first approximation I said that what makes a gene good is the ability to build efficient survival machines—bodies. We must now amend that statement. The gene pool will become an evolutionarily stable set of genes, defined as a gene pool that cannot be invaded by any new gene.

The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.

Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.

The sin of Adam and Eve is thought to be have passed down the male line - transmitted in the semen according to Augustine. What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor?

Each gene works in a world of phenotypic consequences of other genes. Some of those other genes will be members of the same genome. Others will be members of the same gene-pool operating through other bodies. Yet others may be members of different gene-pools, different species, different phyla.

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes.

because economic success in life depends in part on the talents measured by IQ tests, and because social standing depends in part on economic success, it follows that social standing is bound to be based to some extent on inherited differences.

You can't talk to people like that. Soldiers, corporate execs, politicians. All you can do is kill them, and even that rarely makes things any better. They just leave their shit behind, and someone else to carry on.

Tell me, do you get the ape in you from your mother's or your father's side of the family? - Cat

You only had to look at Noah and his wife, or at their three sons and their three wives, to realize what a genetically messy lot the human race would turn out to be.

Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.

So, you see, we're a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It's always like that in war. That's why it's up to your generation now.' But I don't feel part

So, you see, we're a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It's always like that in war. That's why it's up to your generation now.

Duty done, only child safely seen to the temporary harbour of marriage. Now all you have to do is not get Alzheimer's and remember to leave her such money as you have. And you could try to do better than your parents by dying when the money will actually be of use to her. That'd be a start.

Grace, as her mother had repeatedly told her, was very much second son material.

be honest, he sometimes felt a creeping impatience for his father to quit the scene, leaving John as his uncle's direct heir.

There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. — ECCLESIASTICUS 44:8–9 Barn

The sisters' acquaintance Madam Nell Kimball recalled the sage advice of her aunt Letty, a retired courtesan: "Every girl, if only she knew it, is sitting on her fortune.

The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The