Quotes About Reproduction

I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.

Your genes want you to get pregnant, and hormones are their magic wand.

The organism is driven toward nature's singular goal—conception, the passing on of one's genes—and anything that stands in the way is pushed into the background.

the little-known fact that the last portion of a man's ejaculate contains a natural spermicide- not intended to kill his own soldiers, obviously, but to annihilate the seed of any who come after him.

Free will was not created for fun; there was a reason that evolution handed our ancestors the ability to take initiatives (...) eventually to be in a better position to reproduce and rear children than human beings who do not reproduce.

Imagine you are a deer. You have essentially only four things to do during the day: sleep, eat, avoid being eaten and socialise (by which I mean mark a territory, pursue a member of the opposite sex, nurse a fawn, whatever).

If a monkey leaves the troop it is born into, it has no chance to inherit its mother's rank. Therefore, high-ranking females will have young of whatever gender stays at home in order to pass on the high rank to them. Low-ranking females will have young of whatever gender leaves the troop in order not to saddle the young with low rank.

Suppose, for instance, that a gene appeared on the X chromosome that specified the recipe for a lethal poison that killed only sperm carrying Y chromosomes. A man with such a gene would have no fewer children than another man. But he would have all daughters and no sons.

There are few clearings in an elm forest and few vacancies on an oyster bed. Each vacancy will attract many thousands of applicants in the form of new seeds or larvae. Therefore, it does not matter that your young are good enough to survive. What matters is whether they are the very best. Sex gives variety, so sex makes a few of your offspring exceptional and a few abysmal, whereas asex makes them all average.

In other words, long-lived, late-maturing mammals do more genetic mixing regardless of their size or fecundity than short-lived, early maturing mammals. By Burt's measure, man has thirty crossovers, rabbits ten, and mice three. Tangled-bank theories would predict the opposite.17

Sexual relations are driven not by what is good, in evolutionary terms, for men or for women, but for their chromosomes. The ability to seduce a woman was good for Y chromosomes in the past; the ability to resist seduction by a man was good for X chromosomes in the past.

Indeed, their bodies are designed with planned obsolescence called ageing that causes them to decay after they reach breeding age – or, in the case of squid or Pacific salmon, to die at once. None of this makes any sense unless you view the body as a vehicle for the genes, as a tool used by genes in their competition to perpetuate themselves. The body's survival is secondary to the goal of

Male gorillas monopolise their mates, so their sperm meets no competitors; male chimpanzees share their mates, so each needs to produce large quantities of sperm and mate frequently to increase his chances of being the father. It also explains why male birds sing so hard when already 'married'. They are looking for 'affairs'.

The sex that invests most in rearing the young—by carrying a fetus for nine months in its belly, for example—is the sex that makes the least profit from an extra mating. The sex that invests the least has time to spare to seek other mates. Therefore, broadly speaking, males invest less and seek quantity of mates, while females invest more and seek quality of mates.

more wealth is desired even though above a certain level it has ceased to translate into greater reproduction; with effective contraception much the same applies to sexual success; power, status, honor, and fame -connected to the above- are still hotly pursued even though their reproductive significance has become ambivalent. It is the evolution-shaped proximate mechanisms -the web of desire- that dominate human behavior, even where much of their original adaptive rationale has weakened.

If communities of believers obtained copies of various Christian books in circulation, how did they acquire those copies? Who was doing the copying? And most important for the ultimate subject of our investigation, how can we (or how could they) know that the copies they obtained were accurate, that they hadn't been modified in the process of reproduction?

It said that the mission's copying costs were too high, so would she please type two hundred fifty copies of the attached letter in addition to her other duties.

You can't really protect women or men from their choices, so let them have their own lives and trust the process. Given the history of society's efforts to control women's sexuality and reproduction, this remained a revolutionary idea. No wonder it disturbed and frightened some people so deeply.

Government agents sardonically known as the Menstrual Police regularly rounded up women in their workplaces to administer pregnancy tests. If a woman repeatedly failed to conceive, she was forced to pay a steep "celibacy tax.

La distinción entre una mujer que elige controlar su fertilidad y el gobierno que elige limitar su fertilidad es fundamental y la gente con frecuencia parece perder de vista esta diferencia.

Clones, in fact, are just identical twins born at different times.

Evolution left us with another burden: our cognitive, emotional, and moral faculties are adapted to individual survival and reproduction in an archaic environment, not to universal thriving in a modern one.

Natural selection consists of competition among genes to be represented in the next generation, and the organisms we see today are descendants of those that edged out their rivals in contests for mates, food, and dominance.

If a gene could build a brain that could tell when copies of itself were sitting in another animal's gonads, it would make the brain enjoy the other animal's well-being, and make it act in ways that increased that other animal's well-being.