Quotes About Biology

Ironically, although the Y-chromosome has become synonymous with male aggression, it is intrinsically unstable. Adam is as much cursed as cursing.

Human biochemistry works at its best at around 98 degrees F, and while adaptation to living in and visiting different environments is possible, from the Mojave to the moon, adaptation to altered body core temperatures is not possible.

bujold lois mcmaster ii

The genes for depression cause peoples' brains to overreact to stress.

Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish.

smoochers....Blob after blob after blob...squirming in the dark is a clever night's work....When they're all being shoved by body chemicals through a mindless mechanical process, like so many pairs of stuck-together frogs.

Eukaryotes topped that trick with yet another innovation—an elaborately orchestrated breakthrough in cell-division called meiosis.

Eukaryotes thus launched a great leap forward in data mix-and-matching, one which roils and churns within us to this day. We latter-age eukaryotes call the resulting DNA cut-and-shuffle sexuality.

True to Dr. Sauer's words, 1.4 billion years33 after the new eukaryotic refinements had begun, the first really exotic multicellular beings made their debut beneath the sun.34 One recently discovered fossil clam dates to over 720 million B.C.

As we've already seen, individual selectionists insist that a creature—be he man or woman or beast—will only sacrifice his comfort if the payback to his genes is greater than what he gives.

The latest findings suggest that before the new sphere's crust could even stabilize, the powers of chemical attraction yanked together the first detectable life.

The clam had shown up 200 million years before the action really began. Virtually all the phyla that have crawled, walked, flown, or swum during the modern era arose roughly 520 million years ago in a blink of geologic time so brief it's called the "Cambrian explosion.

A great anatomist used to close his opening lecture to beginning medical students with words that apply equally to our own undertaking. "In this course," he would say, "we shall be dealing with flesh and bones and cells and sinews, and there are going to be times when it's all going to seem terribly cold-blooded. But never forget. It's alive!" II.

It occurred to me then, as it has before, that that is what men are really for. Both sexes can do one thing specially well; women can give birth and men can kill.

the pelican symbolizes self-sacrificial parental devotion (from the belief that it pecks its own breast to feed its young on its blood)

Only two sexes. I was disappointed. If human bodies, minds, fates are so complex, if we are free like no other mammal, why limit the range?

children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.

Early in my conscious life one of my fingers, not then subject to my influence, brushed past a shrimp-like protuberance between my legs. And though shrimp and fingertip lay at differing distances from my brain, they felt each other simultaneously, a diverting issue in neuroscience known as the binding problem.

I've heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness. To avoid serious damage a simple

Biology is destiny, and destiny is digital, and in this case binary. It was bleakly simple. No one exclaims at the moment of one's dazzling coming-out, It's a person! Instead: It's a girl, It's a boy. Pink or blue.

What was in his day a vagina is now proudly a birth canal, my Panama, and I'm greater than he was, a stately ship of genes, dignified by unhurried progress, freighted with my cargo of ancient information.

The human body is an amazing organism. It can go from dead tired to completely alert in a terrified blink.

And what causes orgasm in a man?" Kate Daniels, the sex-ed specialist. Kill me, somebody.

We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.