Quotes About Biology

Males are relatively more interested in fertility and sexual loyalty.

Why has the medical profession not taken advantage of the help available from evolutionary biology, a well-developed branch of science with great potential for providing medical insights? One reason is surely the pervasive neglect of this branch of science at all educational levels. Religious and other sorts of opposition have minimized the impact in general education of Darwin's contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.

Chlamydia, today´s most common cause of venereal disease, does the equivalent of hiding in the police station. Schistosomes of the mansoni type go a step further and essentially steal police uniforms. These parasites, a serious cause of liver disease in Asia, pick up blood-group antigens so that they may look to the immune system like our own normal blood cells.

Astronomy is not the science of all objects with mass and weight and velocity. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Biology is not the science of all objects that consume and excrete and have inherited characteristics. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Linguistics is not the study of all possible symbols or symbol systems. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies.

in human males, testosterone appears to promote behavior intended to dominate other people. This behavior can be expressed aggressively, even violently, as well as nonaggressively. Testosterone levels, even a single baseline measurement, correlate well with dominance behavior, that is, testosterone not only affects dominance behavior but also responds to it.

mosquitoes have primitive eyes that don't recognize the color yellow.

As soon as we pass through the birth canal we begin to become 90 percent microbe.

Stress imbalances microbiome, disrupts gut, promotes brain dysfunction Imbalanced microbiome disrupts gut, promotes brain dysfunction, induces exaggerated response to stress Dysfunctional gut imbalances microbiome, promotes brain dysfunction, induces exaggerated response to stress

This lesser world is all about reproduction, as you might well know. Those who cease to duplicate simply die.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.

However, we have the benefits of the billions of years of evolution that have already taken place, which are responsible for the greatly increased order of complexity in the natural world. We can now benefit from it by using our evolved tools to reverse engineer the products of biological evolution (most importantly, the human brain).

Once you're on the road to slowing down aging and dramatically reducing your risk of disease, you'll find that you will discover new ideas on a regular basis as our knowledge of how biology works continues to grow exponentially.

A key aspect of a probabilistic fractal is that it enables the generation of a great deal of apparent complexity, including extensive varying detail, from a relatively small amount of design information. Biology uses this same principle. Genes supply the design information, but the detail in an organism is vastly greater than the genetic design information.

Tal y como dice el neurocientífico del MIT Sebastian Seung, "la identidad no depende de nuestros genes, sino de las conexiones entre nuestras células cerebrales" (

To compare the rate of progress of the biological evolution of intelligence to that of technological evolution, consider that the most advanced mammals have added about one cubic inch of brain matter every hundred thousand years, whereas we are roughly doubling the computational capacity of computers every year

I can understand why many observers do not readily embrace the obvious implications of what I have called the law of accelerating returns (the inherent acceleration of the rate of evolution, with technological evolution as a continuation of biological evolution).

The advent of strong AI is the most important transformation this century will see. Indeed, it's comparable in importance to the advent of biology itself. It will mean that a creation of biology has finally mastered its own intelligence and discovered means to overcome its limitations. Once

It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.

The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis";

From a biological perspective, making mistakes is critical to new learning

Orgasm coincides with a general hardening of the arteries.

Ironically, it was the completion of the Human Genome Project a decade ago that showed how little the genetic code told us about living organisms (and even less about complex ones such as us).

William Osler's ironical definition of man as 'the medicine-taking animal' is therefore justified inasmuch as it captures something distinctive about humans.

Meme theory is an example of the kind of prestidigitation needed to present an image of us as biologically programmed in the face of the overwhelming evidence that everyday human life is utterly different from the reflex-, tropism-, instinct-driven life of animals (although of course we rely on reflexes to perform our voluntary actions, may be in part guided by tropisms and have a general direction influenced remotely by instincts).