Quotes About Biology

The foundational problem with that view is that all living organisms, it turns out, are self-organized and all of them show emergent behaviors.

R. imbricata is highly protective in mice against whole-body lethal radiation.

The number of sperm cells released in a single ejaculation of one man is 175 thousand times more than the number of eggs a woman produces in her entire lifetime. It can be more than the number of people in North America; hundreds of millions.

Darwin had two genuinely deep insights that are paradigm altering: 1) that the root of the plant is in fact its brain; and 2) that the plant is using sensitive, and intelligent, analysis of it surroundings to navigate through the soil.

Curiously enough, many of the strongest antibacterial and antiviral plants are invasives.

When testosterone levels are low, vitamin D potentiates abnormal prostate tissue growth.

Measured with magnetic field meters, the electromagnetic field that the heart produces is some 5,000 times more powerful than that created by the brain.

Symbiosis entails the unfathomably messy entanglements that constitute temporal assemblages that sometimes emerge as symbiogenetic singularities. 14

Over the past sixty years a rather impressive assembly of respectable taxonomists and evolutionary biologists have tried to unseat the biological species concept for a wide variety of reasons. Most of them failed, probably because Ernst Mayr is alive, adroit, and articulate at ninety-six years young as I write these words, and most critics are no match for him.

and their ability to ventilate their lungs, amphibians developed a

sparing only those species that could adapt to

Gills would evolve into

from cosmology to biology, it is becoming increasingly clear that science's failure to explain matters at the most fundamental level is at least in part due to an institutional prohibition on intelligent design as one of the explanatory options.

Freud's antique notion of women as diminished men is quite wrong. Biology instead reveals every man's battle to escape the woman within.

Biologists have an adolescent fascination with sex. Like teenagers they are embarrassed by the subject because of their ignorance.

We've accounted for 95 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way. The other 5 percent are big, bright stars - the kind that dominate the night sky, but are lamentably both rare and short-lived. If biology's your thing, you can forget those guys.

All human beings are, in fact, born with dozens of mutations their parents lacked, and a few of those mutations could well be lethal if we didn't have two copies of every gene, so one can pick up the slack if the other malfunctions.

If sleep does not provide a remarkable set of benefits, then it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.

Child psychology and animal psychology are of relatively slight importance, as compared with the sciences which deal with the corresponding physiological problems of ontogeny and phylogeny.

The gross demonstration of caffeine is that it prevents you from falling asleep. The slightly more nefarious aspect of caffeine is that maybe you can fall asleep, but we know that the depth of deep sleep you're getting if caffeine is still in your system is severely less.

We know in the field of aging that some people tend to senesce, or grow older, more rapidly than others, and some more slowly.

In humans, the thing is that as we mature, our telomeres slowly wear down. So the question has always been: 'Did that matter?' Well, more and more, it seems like it matters.

Many dinosaurs were smaller than chickens.

As far as I'm concerned, attraction, in its most rudimentary form, comes from the way a person naturally smells. I'd say that within the first five seconds of 'inhaling' someone, I know if there's an attraction or not. This may sound animalistic - and it is.