Quotes About Genes

Although he has perhaps breathed in hundreds of billions—even trillions—of programmed archaea that are carrying longevity-fostering genes from many species, perhaps it is a mistake to regard the breach of the organism-isolation labs as an existential crisis.

did you know that way back in the 1980s some scientists proposed an ambitious effort called the Human Protein Project to map all human proteins? It never happened. Instead, the NIH backed the Human Genome Project for one big reason: Proteins were tough to study, while genes were far easier to sequence. The tools dictate the science.

Secular progressive thought also denies free will, viewing all our behavior as ultimately attributable to genes and environment. Between blaming society and denying free will, progressives are more interested in understanding violent criminals than in punishing them. That explains why in Norway, for example, the maximum sentence for murder is 21 years in prison, and few Norwegian murderers spend more than 14 years behind bars.

Prigogine and Stengers caution against leaping to genetic or sociobiological explanations for puzzling social behavior. Many things that are attributed to biological pre-wiring are not produced by selfish, determinist genes, but rather by social interactions under nonequilibrium conditions.

This is not to say that being born late into a big family automatically makes someone fast, any more than having a parent die early in life automatically makes one prime minister of England. But it does say that being fast, like any talent, involves a confluence of factors that go beyond genes and that are directly related to the intense, subconscious reaction to motivational signals that provide the energy to practice deeply and thus grow myelin.

the recent discovery that your habits and emotions can impact your biology so deeply that it causes changes in the genes that are transmitted to the next several generations.

The rate of brain maturation is largely influenced by the genes we inherit.

The interaction of the variation in our genes is what's responsible for lots of our attributes and vigor.

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas.

We know virtually all of the genes known to mammals. We do not know all of the combinations.

After I arrived in Basel, I initially attempted to continue the project of my days in Dulbecco's laboratory, namely, the transcriptional control of the simian virus 40 genes.

We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.

Bruce conducted some groundbreaking experiments showing that our genes do not control biology. The idea that genes control biology is a faulty scientific assumption that was debunked by the Human Genome Project around the year 2003, a

Joe Schwarcz

I put it to you that no rule consciously invented by mankind since we acquired speech has force equivalent to those inherited from perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred thousand generations of evolution in the wild state. I further suggest that the chief reason why modern society is in turmoil is that for too long we claimed that our special human talents could exempt us from the heritage written in our genes.

It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.

Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection.

If organs as elemental as brain and heart can be persuaded to regenerate, and others, like ears and corneas, can be fashioned from living ink, how will that change us as a species? Will the printing of organs affect our evolution? Could it alter our genes?

As for those among you who do have the genes, who do have the instincts, and who could be highly successful, well, I still hope you won't follow my advice. Because that would just make it a much tougher world for me.

Like father like son, like mother like daughter!

If there's any interaction between genes and languages, it is often languages that influence genes, since linguistic differences between populations lessen the chance of genetic exchange between them.

And when he finally plotted it all up, there it was: the number of cell types in an organism did indeed scale roughly as the square root of the number of genes it had.

In most life forms, genes are stretched out along the length of a filament-like molecule of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid. But many viruses—including influenza, HIV, and the coronavirus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome)—encode their genes in RNA, ribonucleic acid, an even simpler but less stable molecule.