Quotes About Biology

That the role of size has been to some degree neglected in biology may lie in its simplicity. Size may be a property that affects all of life, but it seems pallid compared to the matter which makes up life. Yet size is an aspect of the living that plays a remarkable, overreaching role that affects life's matter in all its aspects.

A fly with a brain the size of a salt grain has the behavioral repertoire nearly as complex as a much larger animal such as a mouse. That's a super-interesting problem from an engineering perspective.

The general framework of the body is built up mainly of a series of bones, supplemented, however, in certain regions by pieces of cartilage; the bony part of the framework constitutes the skeleton.

Like funny men, skilled diners are apparently perceived to have an evolutionary advantage.

I was performing skin grafts and became interested in why skin wouldn't graft permanently.

although science could pinpoint the exact spot in the brain that ignites rage, they had yet to identify the location that produces love.

A zygote is a gamete's way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe.

The symptom of love is when some of the chemicals inside you go bad. So there must be something in love because your chemicals do tell you something.

One day scientists will more fully understand the chemistry and neuro-circuitry that differentiates love from lust. I couldn't begin to explain the mechanics, but I know that they feel differently.

Love is just chemicals.

How do people stay in love, anyway? Is it a choice? Or is it like those plants we studied in biology that mutate into something new and totally different but are still part of the same plant family?

We were once fish! We spent millions of years under the water in silence! That's why now we love talking continuously!

Brain cells last as long as you do. You are issued with a hundred billion or so at birth and that is all you are ever going to get. It has been estimated that you lose five hundred of them an hour, so if you have any serious thinking to do there really isn't a moment to waste.

Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don't need us at all. We'd be dead in a day without them.

One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,' he says, 'is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.

You have three chromosomes, Bryson. X, Y, and Fuckhead. -- Katz

Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them.

Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria's point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them.

If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can't we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows.

An increase of only a degree or so in body temperature has been shown to slow the replication rate of viruses by a factor of two hundred—an astonishing increase in self-defense from only a very modest rise in warmth.

Salamanders are interesting, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.

We have body clocks not just in the brain but all over—in our pancreas, liver, heart, kidneys, fatty tissue, muscle, virtually everywhere—and these operate to their own timetables, dictating when hormones are released or organs are busiest or most relaxed. Your reflexes, for instance, are at their sharpest in mid-afternoon, while blood pressure peaks toward evening. Men tend to pump more testosterone early in the morning than later in the day.

There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us.