Quotes About Genes

When deontologism and consequentialism contemplate trolleys, the former is about moral intuitions rooted in the vmPFC, amygdala, and insula, while the latter is the domain of the dlPFC and moral reasoning. Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, "Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.

women with variants of genes that produce higher levels of oxytocin or oxytocin receptors average higher levels of touching their infants and more synchronized gazing with them.

it's human behavior, human social behavior, and in many cases abnormal human social behavior. And it is indeed a mess, a subject involving brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things.

evolution is about reproduction, passing on copies of genes.

These are crucially different. For example, how much do genes have to do with people's scores averaging 100 on this thing called an IQ test? Then how much do genes have to do with one person scoring higher than another?

If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited. If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritability.

Hormonal responses to various fetal and childhood experiences have epigenetic effects on genes related to the growth factor BDNF, to the vasopressin and oxytocin system, and to estrogen sensitivity. These effects are pertinent to adult cognition, personality, emotionality, and psychiatric health. Childhood abuse, for example, causes epigenetic changes in hundreds of genes in the human hippocampus.

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.

Oxytocin and vasopressin are chemically similar hormones; the DNA sequences that constitute their genes are similar, and the two genes occur close to each other on the same chromosome. There was a single ancestral gene that, a few hundred million years ago, was accidentally "duplicated" in the genome, and the DNA sequences in the two copies of the gene drifted independently, evolving into two closely related genes

Just like a single cell, the character of our lives is determined not by our genes but by our responses to the environmental signals that propel life.

Life is not found in atoms or molecules or genes as such, but in organization; not in symbiosis but in synthesis.

According to materialistic science, any memory requires a material substrate, such as the neuronal network in the brain or the DNA molecules of the genes.

The self is the resultant of the interest of the genes.

My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen. — Aimee Bender (Willful Creatures: Stories)

Once we know the rules that human vision uses to decode messages about fitness, we can use those rules to send the messages we want. Consider jeans.

This broader notion of fitness is called "inclusive fitness" to distinguish it from the notion of "personal fitness," which we have discussed until now.50 The two notions are not at odds. Inclusive fitness simply recognizes a broader spectrum of strategies by which genes muscle into the next generation.

The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you're a farmer and you're growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm.

There are even genes that correlate with charisma. Some of them overcompensate for a lack of internal empathy. They make you feel like they care more than anyone else while you're nothing to them.

I'm wary of too-convenient explanations or mental boogeymen that exonerate us from being lazy and making bad choices, but I can't deny that the evidence is growing that a number of behaviors and diseases may not be due to defects in our genes, but to the survival mechanisms of the biome within us.

Once the principle is there, that cells have the same genes, my own personal belief is that we will, in the end, understand everything about how cells actually work.

I'm a happy and productive person. I'm very fortunate; I was born with happy genes. I've got a lot of energy.

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?

Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.

Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, "Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.