Quotes About Environment

People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice.

The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our environment can understand is that 'Quality is the response of an organism to its environment' [he

The defining feature of a major depression is loss of pleasure. If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a "genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.

genes and fetal environment are relevant. But most important, recall the logic of collapsing different types of trauma into a single category. What counts is the sheer number of times a child is bludgeoned by life and the number of protective factors.

Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.

Ask not what a gene does. Ask what it does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes

In other words, the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.

it can be enormously stressful to construct a world in which nothing stressful ever occurs.

Having the low-activity version of MAO-A tripled the likelihood … but only in people with a history of severe childhood abuse. And if there was no such history, the variant was not predictive of anything. This is the essence of gene/environment interaction. What does having a particular variant of the MAO-A gene have to do with antisocial behavior? It depends on the environment.

MAO-A variants show other important gene/environment interactions. For example, in one study the low-activity MAO-A variant predicts criminality, but only if coupled with high testosterone levels

This explains context-dependent craving in addiction.93 Suppose an alcoholic has been clean and sober for years. Return him to where the alcohol consumption used to occur (e.g., that rundown street corner, that fancy men's club), and those potentiated synapses, those cues that were learned to be associated with alcohol, come roaring back into action, dopamine surges with anticipation, and the craving inundates.

This was John Watson, a founder of behaviorism, writing around 1925. Behaviorism, with its notion that behavior is completely malleable, that it can be shaped into anything in the right environment, dominated American psychology in the midtwentieth century;

Watson was pathologically caught inside a bucket having to do with the environmental influences on development. "I'll guarantee . . . to train him to become any type." Yet we are not all born the same, with the same potential, regardless of how we are trained.*

In the 1970s Allan Wilson and Mary-Claire King at Berkeley correctly theorized that the evolution of genes is less important than the evolution of regulatory sequences upstream of genes (and thus how the environment regulates genes). Reflecting that, a disproportionate share of genetic differences between chimps and humans are in genes for TFs.

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.

It is virtually impossible to understand how biology works outside the context of environment.

This is huge. Saying that a gene "decides" when it is transcribed is like saying that a recipe decides when a cake is baked. Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.

This is the essence of gene/environment interaction. What does having a particular variant of the MAO-A gene have to do with antisocial behavior? It depends on the environment. "Warrior gene" my ass.

Dirt is just matter out of place.

Architecture is a social art that choreographs human interacti(-_-)n.

If I wasn't a human girl I think I'd like to be a bee and live among the flowers.

Have you ever noticed how many different silences there are, Gilbert? The silence of the woods...of the shore...of the meadows...of the night...of the summer afternoon. All different because all the undertones that thread are different. I'm sure if I were totally blind and insensitive to heat and cold I could easily tell just where I was by the quality of the silence about me.

Have you ever noticed how many different silences there are, Gilbert? The silence of the woods . . . of the shore . . . of the meadows . . . of the night . . . of the summer afternoon. All different because all the undertones that thread them are different. I'm sure if I were totally blind and insensitive to heat and cold I could easily tell just where I was by the quality of the silence about me.

Have you ever noticed how many different silences there are, Gilbert? The silence of the woods... of the shore... of the meadows... of the nigh... of the summer afternoon. All different because all the undertones that thread them are different. I'm sure if I were totally blind and insensitive to heat and cold I could easily tell you where I am by the quality of the silence about me.