Quotes About Biology

Biologically a woman has fewer functional sweat glands than a man and she also has a slightly higher sweating threshold except when pregnant. So women as a rule do perspire less than men, but this minor difference has not been deemed large enough to distinguish the sexes. A lady is not supposed to sweat at all.

One little known fact: The water that spouts out of a whale's blowhole in such a picturesque way reeks like the most toxic fart imaginable.

Certainly, dolphins have a laundry list of capabilities that qualify as magical. They can see with their hearing, deploying biological sonar to effectively produce X-ray vision: dolphins can literally see through objects.

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.

To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size.

I don't pretend there aren't biological differences, but I don't believe the desire for leadership is hardwired biology, not the desire to win or excel. I believe that it's socialization, that we're socializing our daughters to nurture and our boys to lead.

I was in an interdisciplinary major - which was a new thing then - which was psychology, sociology, anthropology, and biology, which is really sort of the study of the human being.

By being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware.

A century ago, scientists believed there was only one obvious stomping ground for alien biology in our solar system: Mars. Because it was reminiscent of Earth, Mars was assumed to be chock-a-block with animate beings, and its putative inhabitants got a lot of column inches and screen time.

Proponents of intelligent design don't accept that some of the very complex nanomachines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection.

We're finally moving out of the realm of solely discussing biology in regards to a drug-based world.

The common ancient ancestor of mulluses and chordates could not possibly have possessed a camera eye, so quite clearly they have evolved independently. The solution has been arrived at by completely different routes.

I wanted to rewrite the code of life, to make new molecular machines that would solve human problems.

My whole interest is, how do you use evolution as an innovation engine? How does evolution solve new problems that life faces? And to have a system that can create a whole new chemical bond that biology hasn't done before, to me, demonstrates the power of nature to innovate.

Becoming a bird ecologist was just luck! I had the chance to be a field assistant for a scientist working in the Galapagos Islands, and while I was there, I saw a particular problem in behavioral biology that I wanted to solve and, in the process, made myself into a bird ecologist.

I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology.

It's important to remember that we evolved. Now, I know that's a dirty word for some people, but we evolved from common ancestors with the gorillas, the chimpanzee and also the bonobos. We have a common past, and we have a common future.

There are some people who're all doctors. Is it genetic?

Evolutionary biologists have long pondered the phenomenon of the changing colours of autumn leaves. It's possible that the red pigments are manufactured in the leaf as a side-effect of something else that's happening at this time.

Love is poetry plus biology.

...... I hate biochemistry because there is no chapter on roses.

It's amazing what the gene pool will do to perpetuate itself.