Quotes About Biology

X-rays revealed that some people were born without a corpus callosum, and they seemed just fine.

The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially.

Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals.

I became fascinated by the then-blossoming science of molecular biology when, in my senior year, I happened to read the papers by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod on the operon theory.

Despite the fact that human beings think that they have escaped the evolutionary paradigm, they've done nothing of the kind, and so we should expect the belief systems that people hold to mirror the evolutionary interests that people have.

I love parasites! I can't get enough of them.

Remember that the pharynx is at a crossroads from which leads off, at the top, the passage to the mouth cavity and the passage to the nasal cavity, and below, the passage to the larynx.

The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.

The total number of different specific antibodies that can be made by an individual is known as the antibody repertoire and it might be as high as 10^16. In practice, the number of B cells limits the actual repertoire to closer to 10^9.

When fish experience something that would cause other animals physical pain, they behave in ways suggestive of pain, and the change in behaviour may last several hours.

four Fs" of evolutionary survival: Fleeing, Fighting, Feeding and Fucking. If any one of these instincts malfunctions in a species, the species will eventually become extinct.

I don't understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.

ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH. —PETE RICHERSON AND ROBERT BOYD

You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe.

Nothing's immortal on a road trip of a billion years. The universe runs down in stop-motion around you, your backups' backups' backups need backups. Not even the error-correcting replication strategies cadged from biology can keep the mutations at bay forever. It was true for us meatsicles cycling through mayfly moments every thousand years; it was just as true for the hardware.

Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Spaceship? Of course. Were they built by naturally evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?

Electrophoresis.

Don't lecture me in my own field! We've got language and speech centers hardwired into our brains. That gives us a common starting point. Gels don't have anything like that. Speech might just be one giant conditioned reflex to them.

Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on the Denver sewer system.

So there's a membrane of—of living tissue around that star," I say, trying to wrap my head around the concept. "A, a meat balloon. Around the whole damn star.

protocadherin

fibrodysplasia

conspecifics

You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.