Quotes About Biology

Menopause is your return to where you were before, when your hormone levels are the same as a pre-adolescent girl's.

Sex is biological, but gender is mental.

People tend to think that metabolism is genetically predetermined. That you're either cursed or you're blessed. And that's not true.

I have an enormous metabolism, so I'm lucky.

I think if I weren't so squeamish, I would have been some sort of forensic analyst. And I can't do anything with a microscope, because then I start thinking about the world of germs around us.

In science ... discovery can mean finding a guppy with an extra spine in its dorsal fin.

The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.

There can be no doubt that the existing Fauna and Flora is but the last term of a long series of equally numerous contemporary species, which have succeeded one another, by the slow and gradual substitution of species for species, in the vast interval of time which has elapsed between the deposition of the earliest fossiliferous strata and the present day.

vascular patterning

Human pigmentation is contained solely in the epidermis, the skin's outer layer. Lose the epidermis, we all look Scandinavian

Do blood clots get stuck in your teeth? What if someone's anemic; are you hungry again an hour later? Has anyone ever bitten you? If you run out of blood, do you shrivel up like a really old orange?

Kinds are like the dog sort (including dingoes, wolves, coyotes, domestic dogs, etc.), cat sort (including lions, tigers, cougars, bobcats, domestic cats, etc.), horse sort (ponies, Clydesdales, donkeys, zebras, etc.), and so on. There is variation within these kinds especially since the Flood, but not evolution where one kind changes into a totally different kind over long periods of time — which is not observed anyway (e.g., amoebas turning into dogs).

Falling in love indicated that your genes were complementary to those of the loved one. It told you nothing about whether your personalities and sexualities were compatible.

Our individual capacity for happiness is partly inherited. It is part of our biological makeup.

The first was that culture, not biology, was the principal force that shaped human affairs; the second, that humanity comprised a multitude of cultures that could not be ranked on an evolutionary scale, but each of which had to be understood in its own terms.

DNA was the first three-dimensional Xerox machine.

The word logos itself is a prime example, beginning its history as a word charged with religious power, and referring to the word of wisdom and truth. By the time of Aristotle, logos had lost its philosophical connotations and had come to mean the "study of" something: biology, the study of life; zoology, the study of animal forms; and theology, the study of God.

The successful mapping of the human genome was only a first big step, it turns out, one that would become the foundation for yet another quantum leap in biology. More advanced research, especially in the last decade, points to the advent of a new field called epigenetics, which studies the human epigenome.

Just as a biologist cannot find life by dissecting it, an artist cannot find beauty by analyzing it.

All the corpses in the world are chemically identical, but living individuals are not.

Biology, like any high-stakes academic field, is demanding. Because of this it has a reputation for turning young professors into curmudgeons who adopt a masochistic brand of workaholism, in which relaxation becomes a sign of failure and the accomplishments of peers become tragedies.

To use my terminology, this long period of training, starting with her undergraduate biology classes and continuing through her PhD and then postdoctoral work at the Broad Institute, was when she was building up her stores of career capital. When she took a professorship at Harvard, she was finally ready to cash in this capital to obtain the mission-driven career she enjoys today.

Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.

When emotions are expressed...all systems are united and made whole. When emotions are repressed, denied, not allowed to be whatever they may be, our network pathways get blocked, stopping the flow of the vital feel-good, unifying chemicals that run both our biology and our behavior.