Quotes About Genes

A lot of guys have better genes but if you work hard and consistently, you can outperform them.

Good Viking genes, being vegetarian and having rowdy dogs and kids definitely keep me in shape. Not eating meat gives me the energy I need to keep up with work, family and travel - I'm very active.

When the human body is put under exceptional strain, a range of dormant genes in the DNA are expressed and extraordinary physiological processes are activated.

Where we are going as a species is a big question. Human evolution certainly hasn't stopped. Every time individuals produce a new zygote, there's a reshuffling and recombination of genes. And we don't know where all of that is going to take us.

One of the most important aspects of what makes us who we are is neither straight genes or straight environment but actually what happens to us during development.

Genes don't mean necessarily that you have got a certain strand of gene that makes you particularly acceptable as a public official.

Such insights put to rest the century-old debate on nature versus nurture: do our genes or our experiences determine who we become? That debate turns out to be pointless, based on the fallacy that our genes and our environment are independent of each other; it's like arguing over which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, the length or the width.

Natural selection, this all-powerful driving force of biological evolution, has privileged in our genes traits that were immediately favorable to the survival and proliferation of our ancestors, under the conditions that prevailed there and then, with no regard for later consequences. This is intrinsic to the process of natural selection, which sees only the immediate present and does not foresee the future.

I once read that the flow of genes through time is like a great river, and individual lives are just eddies in the stream. When an eddy forms, the current is paused for a microsecond, and there we are–an assemblage of many different bits from many different sources–and then the stream pours on, and all those bits go forward in time, except that we no longer travel with them.

Or, as Razib Khan, a geneticist and science blogger, put it, culture is chunky, whereas genes are creamy.

While few researchers would claim that language and genes are not related, there has been little evidence that language is genetically encoded.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.

That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent. Besides

In short, we evolved, like other animals, to win the reproduction game. That contest has a single aim, to leave as many descendants as possible.

natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.

Thus, immigrants from Korea really did make a big contribution to the modern Japanese, though we cannot yet say whether that was because of massive immigration or else modest immigration amplified by a high rate of population increase. The Ainu are more nearly the descendants of Japan's ancient Jomon inhabitants, mixed with Korean genes of Yayoi colonists and of the modern Japanese.

In an epidemic those people with genes for resistance to that particular microbe are more likely to survive than are people lacking such genes. As a result, over the course of history, human populations repeatedly exposed to a particular pathogen have come to consist of a higher proportion of individuals with those genes for resistance—just because unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies.

As a result, over the course of history, human populations repeatedly exposed to a particular pathogen have come to consist of a higher proportion of individuals with those genes for resistance—just because unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies.

When God created man, He saw that he couldn't survive in that solitude and gave him a shadow. But since then man has never stopped selling it to the devil. I knew him in all conditions. Moist in sacrifice, hostile or welcoming, voracious or retractile, excited or indifferent, impulsive and without qualms, dreamy on his best day. That people who share the same genes should be separated by a moral chasm helps us to reassess the values in the name of which they are killing each other.

I definitely have my dad's competitive streak in me.

In any complex organism, brain formation and function must be controlled in part by genes.

Jumping genes are fundamental because they're agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn - called Indian corn - that you buy in the fall.

Most organisms have loads of junk DNA - less pejoratively, noncoding DNA - cluttering their cells.