Quotes About Biology

Hace unos 300 millones de años, los cerebros y los sistemas nerviosos eran comparativamente simples. No obstante, ya poseían la estructura y la neuroquímica necesarias para procesar información sobre el estatus y la sociedad.

dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted.

It is a truism of biology that evolution is conservative.

the interesting thing about the slime mold is that it makes pretty good decisions.

It's all just hormones, my friend. You might as well just say you're in testosterone with somebody. And if you're really lucky, she might be in estrogen with you.

biologists have been arguing for decades about the definition of "life" (the zombie-rights activists are a powerful lobby group),

The female of species is deadlier than the male.

But one group did. By 3.5 billion years ago, bacteria had emerged, and continue to this day as the most populous kind of organism on Earth.

When altruistic behavior benefits individuals belonging to another species, it is impossible for the gene to be benefiting some other copy of itself.

You are your synapses

Every human being has billions of neurons that together make trillions of synaptic connections among one another. Chemicals are oozing and sparks flying constantly, during wakefulness and during sleep, during thoughtfulness and during boredom. At any one moment, billions of synapses are active.

If you are standing still and decide to take a step, the movement of your leg on the basis of your decision involves axons that originate in cell bodies located in the movement control regions in the frontal cortex (just behind your forehead) and that travel uninterrupted to the base of the spinal column (in the region of your lower back).

Once a genetic component has been established, the search for the genes involved can begin. This is a time-consuming and complex process that has recently been greatly facilitated by the information obtained by the Human Genome Project.51

It should be noted that psychological processes and learning experiences are, in the end, also biological in nature, because they are products of the brain and as such are also subject to genetic influences and the influence of gene-environment interactions, or what is called epigenetics.

An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primaeval animals really existed as the direct ancestors of Man, is furnished according to the fundamental law of biogeny by the fact that the human egg is nothing more than a simple cell.

Every politician, clergyman, educator, or physician, in short, anyone dealing with human individuals, is bound to make grave mistakes if he ignores these two great truths of population zoology: (1) no two individuals are alike, and (2) both environment and genetic endowment make a contribution to nearly every trait.

According to the concept of transformational evolution, first clearly articulated by Lamarck , evolution consists of the gradual transformation of organisms from one condition of existence to another.

And it is this randomness of variation that is responsible for the enormous, often quite bizarre diversity of the living world.

The final proof as to whether a certain habitat form has a genetic basis or is entirely phenotypical can be found only through experiments.

To use the molecular clock in such a way requires the calibration of its "ticking rate.

The principle of adaptationism has been adopted so widely by Darwinians because it is such a heuristic methodology.

Furthermore, it is observed in general that the smaller the population size of a species is, the more vulnerable it will be to extinction.

LIVING MATTER EVADES THE DECAY TO EQUILIBRIUM

To give the statement life and colour, let me anticipate what will be explained in much more detail later, namely, that the most essential part of a living cell – the chromosome fibre – may suitably be called an aperiodic crystal.