Quotes About Genes

Evolution of form is very much a matter of teaching very old genes new tricks!

For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.

The reason creativity and craziness go together is that if you're just plain crazy without being able to sing or dance or write good poems, no one is going to want to have babies with you. Your genes will fall by the wayside. Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?

Era înalt în pat È™i pot vedea argintul printre genele lui

By feeding back information on the lie of the land to the gene-complex, the cytoplasm thus co-determines which genes should be active and which should be temporarily or permanently switched off.

Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone.

Our evolved natures should be treated with respect, but not with deference. We did not evolve to be happy: rather we evolved to be happy, sad, miserable, angry, anxious, and depressed, as the mood takes us. We evolved to love and to hate, and to care and be callous. Our emotions are the carrots and sticks that our genes use to persuade us to achieve their ends. But their ends need not be our ends. Goodness and happiness may be goals attainable only by hoodwinking our genes.

I think that when we die we return to dust. But there's a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

For example, a computer virus is a program that will make copies of itself in the memory of a computer, and will transfer itself to other computers. Thus it fits the definition of a living system that I have given. Like a biological virus, it is a rather degenerate form, because it contains only instructions or genes, and doesn't have any metabolism of its own. Instead, it reprograms the metabolism of the host computer, or cell.

A living being like you or me usually has two elements: a set of instructions that tell the system how to keep going and how to reproduce itself, and a mechanism to carry out the instructions. In biology, these two parts are called genes and metabolism.

it was known that genes could be faithfully transmitted with mutation rates (errors) of less than one in one billion. This extraordinary high degree of fidelity convinced Schrödinger that the laws of heredity could not be founded on the "order from disorder" classical laws. Instead, he proposed that genes were more like individual atoms or molecules in being subject to the nonclassical but strangely orderly rules of the science he helped to found, quantum mechanics.

You inherit your environment just as much as your genes.

Genes do not make you, any more than brain chemistry makes you hungry, food makes you breathe, breathing makes you die.

Genes do not make an individual homosexual. They play their part, but so does the rest of the universe.

People don't adopt their ideologies at random, or by soaking up whatever ideas are around them. People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously being less sensitive to signs of threat, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals.

In fact, happiness is one of the most highly heritable aspects of personality. Twin studies generally show that from 50 percent to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences. 28 (Particular episodes of joy or depression, however, must usually be understood by looking at how life events interact with a person's emotional predisposition.)

Yes, genes explain far more about us than anyone had realized, but the genes themselves often turn out to be sensitive to environmental conditions. And yes, each person has a characteristic level of happiness, but it now looks as though it's not so much a set point as a potential range or probability distribution.

To replace wiring diagrams, Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter—be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality—consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words.

Groups that were able to put their by-product gods to some good use had an advantage over groups that failed to do so, and so their ideas (not their genes) spread.

Even though the effects of any single gene are tiny, these findings are important because they illustrate one sort of pathway from genes to politics: the genes (collectively) give some people brains that are more (or less) reactive to threats, and that produce less (or more) pleasure when exposed to novelty, change, and new experiences.19 These are two of the main personality factors that have consistently been found to distinguish liberals and conservatives.

make altruism pay, and two back-to-back breakthroughs in evolutionary thinking showed how to do that. In chapter 3 I presented kin altruism (be nice to those who share your genes) and reciprocal altruism (be nice to those who might reciprocate in the future) as two steps on the way to ultrasociality. Once these

Our brains, like rat brains, are wired so that food and sex give us little bursts of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that is the brains's way of making un enjoy the activities that are good for the survival of our genes.

Genes are selfish,3 selfish genes create people with various mental modules, and some of these mental modules make us strategically altruistic, not reliably or universally altruistic.

Life is a hierarchy of nested levels, like Russian dolls: genes within chromosomes within cells within individual organisms within hives, societies, and other groups.