Quotes About Biology

What is love when it's not for dopamine?

Since plants pull minerals from the soils—micronutrients essential for human health—they serve as a conduit, taking the soil—the environment—putting it into a digestible form, and passing it on to us. Each time we take a bite of food, part of the environment literally becomes part of our biological fabric, our bodies. At the risk of sounding like a hippy, the Earth is part of us.

Life could leave the ocean when it learned to grow a skin, a bag in which to take the water with it.

To date, laboratory attempts to recreate these processes are intriguing but inconclusive. We have yet to create life from scratch. I have little doubt that one day, perhaps not far off, we will.

The sheer number of ways that twenty distinct amino acids can be linked in a long chain makes this evident: for a chain with one hundred and fifty amino acids (a small protein), there are about 10195 different arrangements, far larger than the number of particles in the observable universe.

Biology isn't just genes playing out some unalterable script. It is sensitive to the world around it

Just like a single cell, the character of our lives is determined not by our genes but by our responses to the environmental signals that

Biological behavior can be controlled by invisible forces, including thought, as well as it can be controlled by physical molecules like penicillin, a fact that provides the scientific underpinning for pharmaceutical-free energy medicine.

Charles Regis Perrone was a biologist by default. Medical school had been his first goal--specifically, a leisurely career in radiology. The promise of wealth had attracted him to health care, but as a devoted hypochondriac he was repelled by the idea of interacting with actual sick people.

Bottlenose dolphins engage in more same-sexual behavior than any other known creature.) As Denise Herzing concluded, "Dolphins love to have sex and they have sex a lot.

Your body is run by a competent staff that's been on the job since before the company acquired consciousness. Too bad you can't personally meet your team.

We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical.

There are as many atoms in one molecule of DNA as there are stars in a typical galaxy.

Those are some of the things that molecules do, given four billion years of evolution

almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception.

When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.

A healthy young man can produce in a week or two enough spermatozoa to double the human population of the Earth. So is masturbation mass murder? How about nocturnal emissions or just plain sex? When the unfertilized egg is expelled each month, has someone died? Should we mourn all those spontaneous miscarriages?

So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume... Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent.

If there is as a continuum from self-reproducing molecules, such as DNA, to microbes, and an evolutionary sequence continuum from microbes to humans, why should we imagine that continuum to stop at humans?

Thus, 99 percent of the Earth's atmosphere is of biological origin. The sky is made by life.

The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.

The family tree of each of us is graced by all those great inventors: the beings who first tried out self-replication, the manufacture of protein machine tools, the cell, cooperation, predation, symbiosis, photosynthesis, breathing oxygen, sex, hormones, brains, and all the rest-inventions we use, some of them, minute-by-minute without ever wondering who devised them and how much we owe to these unknown benefactors, in a chain 100 billion links long.

There are so many examples of human misuse of the Earth that even phrasing this question chills me. If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes. The existence of an independent biology on a nearby planet is a treasure beyond assessing, and the preservation of that life must, I think, supersede any other possible use of Mars.

But if humans can make new varieties of plants and animals, must not nature do so also? This related process is called natural selection. That life has changed fundamentally over the aeons is entirely clear from the alterations we have made in the beasts and vegetables during the short tenure of humans on Earth, and from the fossil evidence.