Quotes About Biology

Everything is sex. Trust me. It always comes down to sex.

Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical. Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own.

Esa idea de mantener interconectado al mundo entero equivaldrá a la muerte en masa. Todo biólogo sabe que los pequeños grupos aislados evolucionan más rápidamente.

autophagy is sort of a recycling of your body.11 It helps your body clean up and repair itself by churning up damaged cells and getting rid of (eating) the unwanted cell parts while keeping the cells intact (the word "autophagy" means "self-eating").

Snake hearts don't stay put, like human hearts, but travel up and down the snake's body.

genomic sequencing

Inside him a quality and a chemical—intelligence and testosterone—wrestled for hegemony. At the moment the chemical was winning on points.

You are what you eat eats.

Scientists recently discovered a handful of species that produce caffeine in their nectar, which is the last place you would expect a plant to serve up a poisonous beverage. These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.

The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom—a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.)

Plants are so unlike people that it's very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have

Evolution doesn't depend on will or intention to work; it is, almost by definition, an unconscious, unwilled process.

Our brains constitute only 2.5 percent of our weight yet consumer 20 percent of our energy when we're resting.

A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn't do very well.

Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. At either end of any food chain you find a biological system- a patch of soil, a human body- and the health of one is connected- literally- to the health of the other.

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the eighteenth-century gastronomist, drew a useful distinction between the alimentary activity of animals, which "feed," and humans, who eat, or dine, a practice, he suggested, that owes as much to culture as it does to biology.

Many ribosomes act simultaneously along the mRNA, forming superstructures called polysomes.

Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day.

I first heard about 'genes' when I was six years old. At dinner one night, I heard my mom tell my sister, 'It's in your genes.'

Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.

The site of hearing was now known to be in the cochlea.

In the jungle, size is king. Women like big men. That's just evolution.

When you buy a jacket, you pick the size to ensure it fits. Similarly, we live in a universe in which the amount of dark energy fits our biological make-up. If the amount of dark energy were substantially different from what we've measured, the environmental conditions would be inhospitable to our form of life.