Quotes About Biology

Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering. Indeed

Carleton Coon of the University of Pennsylvania suggested that some modern races have different sources of origin, implying that some of us come from superior stock to others.

Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If

To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce.

For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today.

The biggest component in any human, filling 61 percent of available space, is oxygen. It may seem a touch counterintuitive that we are almost two-thirds composed of an odorless gas.

ocean vents harbour some of the most extraordinary life on the planet.

Put another way, the amount of electricity going on within your cells is a thousand times greater than the electricity within your house. You are, in a very small way, exceedingly energetic.

They are, reluctantly or enthusiastically, accepting the idea that humans are as much an accident of nature as a product of orderly development." But

DNA is, as it were, especially unalive. It is "among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world

How fast a man's beard grows, for instance, is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge).

The genome, as Eric Lander of MIT has put it, is like a parts list for the human body: it tells us what we are made of, but says nothing about how we work.

To function, a protein must not only have the necessary chemical components, properly assembled, but then must also be folded into an extremely specific shape. "Folding" is the term that's used

One reason life took so long to grow complex was that the world had to wait until the simpler organisms had oxygenated the atmosphere sufficiently

Even thinking, it turns out, affects the ways genes work. How fast a man's beard grows, for instance, is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge).

They maintain their own DNA. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do.

One reason chimps can't talk is that they appear to lack the ability to make subtle shapes with tongue and lips to form complex sounds.

we now know that most viruses infect only bacterial cells and have no effect on us at all. Of the hundreds of thousands of viruses reasonably supposed to exist, just 586 species are known to infect mammals, and of these only 263 affect humans.

Similarly, no one has ever come close to explaining why our fingers wrinkle when we have long baths. The explanation most often given is that wrinkling helps them to drain water better and improves grip. But that doesn't really make a great deal of sense. Surely the people who most urgently need a good grip are those who have just fallen in water, not those who have been in it for some time.

the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech.

Above all, the adoption of a narrower pelvis to accommodate our new gait brought a huge amount of pain and danger to women in childbirth. Until recent times, no other animal on Earth was more likely to die in childbirth than a human, and perhaps none even now suffers as much. —

You are the product of three billion years of evolutionary tweaks.

Nuestro cerebro es nosotros. Todo lo demás son solo tuberías y andamios.

However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves.