Quotes About Biology

On peut démontrer ainsi ni la stérilité ni la fécondité ne fournissent aucune distinction certaines entre les espèces et les variétés.

Après douze générations, la proportion du sang, pour employer une expression vulgaire, n'est que de 1 sur 2 048; et pourtant, comme nous le voyons, on croit généralement que cette proportion infiniment petite de sang étranger suffit à déterminer une tendance au retour [ de ces caractères perdus. ]

Enfin, tous les naturalistes pourraient citer des cas innombrables d'espèces restant absolument les mêmes, c'est-à-dire qui ne varient en aucune façon, bien qu'elles vivent sous les climats les plus divers. Ces considérations me poussent à attribuer très peu de poids à l'action directe des conditions de vie.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection

Podemos creer que la selección natural llegue a producir, por una parte, un órgano de insignificante importancia, como la cola de la jirafa, que sirve de espantamoscas, y por otra parte, un órgano tan maravilloso como el ojo?

species of the same genus would occasionally exhibit reversions to lost ancestral characters.

The laws governing inheritance are for the most part unknown.

I believe in Natural Selection, not because I can prove in any single case that it has changed one species into another, but because it groups and explains well (as it seems to me) a host of facts in classification, embryology, morphology, rudimentary organs, geological succession and distribution.

I believe man . . . in the same predicament with other animals.

fewer and fewer of our progenitors were replicating themselves via the weird, squishy process to which they devoted their organs of entertainment.

This compares to a 202 base pair difference between us and Neanderthals

We are the only primates that can tap our foot or move our body in time with a specific rhythm. It's wired into us, but not into our chimp or gorilla cousins, which tells us that it is a trait that like language, big toes, and toolmaking evolved sometime over the past seven million years.

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. —Richard Dawkins

Biologists now believe that most cells in your body are designed to fall apart after relatively short life spans, partly to let you adapt to new circumstances and partly because older cells tend to get cancer, making immortal cells not such a great idea.

The fact that your liver can regenerate itself is incredible - it's a medical miracle.

Every single cell in each person's body tells us whether that person is a male or a female. There is no human being in history whose cells have some mixture of the two, nor anyone who has ever been able to change that cellular reality.

Much of modern molecular biology and microbiology has been based on the effort to decipher the basic code of life, which is made up of four nucleotides: adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine.

We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.

The more we understand what happens in living cells, the more incredibly powerful you realize things can be when they work from the bottom up, by interaction of one molecule and another.

We went from a world where almost nobody knew anything about computers to a world where almost all of us are computer geeks for a huge fraction of our day. And I'd like to see that happen with the digital world of biological molecules, too.

Cryptochrome harnesses the energy of incoming blue light, but other molecules are probably needed to absorb light of other colors.

No one likes doing primate experiments, but some research can only be done on monkeys.

The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month.

It's interesting: I think, genetically, there are people who need different things, like exercise. I need the exercise, others not so much, and I think more and more, we'll start to understand why people's bodies function in certain ways.