Quotes About Biology

What was love anyway, except a biological trick? It was larger doses of hormones like oxytocin and dopamine, which delivered a euphoric rush. It was lower levels of serotonin, which induced anxiety and made you focus obsessively on the object of your "love." It was elevated levels of adrenaline and norepinephrine making your heart flutter and your palms sweat. She liked Joe and he liked her. The rest was a temporary chemical imbalance.

When certain parts of our bodies are touched, certain enzymes and chemicals that trigger sexual desire are released into our system. The more our bodies are stimulated, the more chemicals are released and the greater our sexual desire grows until it becomes a virtually unstoppable flood.

The brain is shaped by the experiences of the body, and the body is shaped by the brain. Changing one part results in lethal confusion for the other.

Now rabbits eat their children - somebody ought to explain to them how it's only a complex.

have chemicals in my body?! Why? What are they doing in there?

Dopamine can be read as the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain.

Among the many incredible things about your incredible pelvic nerve and its lovely multiple branches is that, as we saw, it is completely unique for every individual woman on earth—no two women are alike.

They found that the fetal cells from their sons reached their brains, sprouted branches, and pumped out neurotransmitters. Their sons helped shape their thoughts.

tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.

defective genes.

Based on their research, the Sanger scientists estimated that an embryo gains two or three new mutations every time its cells double.

A virus does not reproduce by copying its own genes and dividing in two. Instead, it invades a host cell.

We humans have 23 pairs, but pea plants have only 7. Yeast have 16. Some butterflies have 134.

Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties," Galton predicted.

Chromosomes were chemical mixtures, including proteins as well as a mysterious molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA for short.

Each gene is a stretch of DNA, made up of thousands of bases.

single base may change from A to C. A stretch of a hundred bases may be accidentally copied out twice. A thousand bases may be cut out altogether. These are the mutations that scientists like Hugo de Vries and Thomas Hunt Morgan spent years trying to figure out. Mutations can produce new versions of genes—alleles, as they came to be known.

If a cat lost her tail and then gave birth to tailless cats, the scientific thing to do would be to track down the father and see if he had a tail or not. There was no need to invoke acquired characters to explain why musk ox have thick fur. Natural selection favored individuals that, for whatever reason, had warmer coats that made them less likely to freeze to death.

influenza viruses manage to wreak their harm with very little genetic information—just thirteen genes.

Since hominin skin doesn't fossilize, we can't say for sure what skin color our ancestors had four million years ago. But if our closest living primate relatives—gorillas and chimpanzees—are any guide, they likely had light skin.

For comparison, tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.

There is thus more Neanderthal DNA on Earth today than when Neanderthals existed.

All told, a cell may need three weeks to finish meiosis.

If heredity is a kind of memory, methylation suffers radical amnesia in every generation.