Quotes About Biology

we are all now descended from a single mitochondrial ancestor – a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. You may have heard her referred to as Mitochondrial Eve. She is, in a sense, mother of us all.

if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.

The liver was long thought to be the seat of courage, which is why a cowardly person was deemed "lily-livered.

The stomach holds about one and a half quarts, which is not very much compared with other animals. The stomach of a big dog will hold up to twice as much food as yours does.

Almost no one ever notices it, but our thumbs are on sideways. The thumbnail faces away from the rest of the fingers.

bodies are a universe of 37.2 trillion cells operating in more or less perfect concert more or less all the time.

Altogether, according to RSC calculations, fifty-nine elements are needed to construct a human being. Six of these—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus—account for 99.1 percent of what makes us, but much of the rest is a bit unexpected.

Remarkably, Darwin hadn't finished with barnacles yet. Three years later he produced a 684-page study of sessile cirripedes and a more modest companion work on the barnacle fossils not mentioned in the first work. "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before," he declared upon the conclusion of the work, and it is hard not to sympathize.

the palms don't sweat in response to physical exertion or heat, but only from stress.

It is an extraordinary fact that having good and loving relationships physically alters your DNA.

Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies.

Among the genetic gifts the Neanderthals passed on to us, it seems, is red hair, bless them.

Cadmium, for instance, is the twenty-third most common element in the body, constituting 0.1 percent of your bulk, but it is seriously toxic.

Just as our ambitions have been driven by an appreciation for climate science, any practical plan for reducing emissions has to be driven by other disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, economics, finance, and more.

I have all these great genes, but they're recessive. That's the problem here.

Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor?

Abduction A movement away from the midline (or to return from adduction).

Hyenas 'appear to violate the rules of mammalian biology,' Holekamp tells me. 'Studying the oddballs can teach you about the basics,' she explains. 'They allow us to gain insight into what the rules actually are.' And by showing us an alternative way to sociality and intelligence, they help us better understand our own beloved pets, and perhaps even ourselves.

Together the pigeons and doves make up the family Columbidae, with three hundred species, from doves smaller than sparrows to the Victoria crowned pigeon, the size of a turkey.)

typical bird's feathers outweigh its skeleton. Feathers define a bird. By trapping and moving air, feathers protect the bird from cold and wet, and they enable it to fly.

voles make up 85 percent of the diet. (One feature of vole biology that inadvertently helps out hawks is that these rodents mark their territories with urine, which Scandinavian researchers recently discovered reflects ultraviolet light. Hawks can see UV light—and may well use the voles' territorial markings as signposts to the nearest restaurant.)

a one hump camel makes a one hump poop, and a two hump camel makes a two hump poop

People who are attached to each other develop a social dependence on each other that's based in a physical dependence on brain opiates.

The body and the brain aren't two different things, controlled by two completely different sets of genes. Many of the same chemicals that work in your heart and organs also work in your brain, and many genes do one thing