Quotes About Biology

Just like the bones and muscles, the heart is designed to work in one gravity here on Earth, so when you put the heart in space, it operates differently and changes shape.

Most mutations involve typos: Something bumps a cell's elbow as it's copying DNA, and the wrong letter appears in a triplet - CAG becomes CCG.

You would think that UV just causes mutations, but it doesn't; you need a gene to be active for it.

First of all, many human diseases are influenced by, if not caused by mutations in genes.

To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them.

People used to think that biological clocks were not only mysterious, they were seen almost as miracles. This is no longer the case.

Perhaps the most mysterious of all mammals is the male Homo sapiens. Indeed, many anthropologists classify the group as a subspecies.

There are still so many questions to answer about the workings of the human body and, most mysterious of all, it is influenced by our state of mind.

The amount of sleep - the total amount of sleep that you get - starts to decrease the older that we get. I think one of the myths out there is that we simply need less sleep as we age, and that's not true, in fact.

I could take you for a walk on the beach and I could point out just about any creature and give you their Latin names.

Genes are natural resources.

Natural selection is not evolution.

Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

We think there are lifestyle factors that boost telomerase naturally.

Your beliefs and thoughts are wired into your biology. They become your cells, tissues, and organs. There's no supplement, no diet, no medicine, and no exercise regimen that can compare with the power of your thoughts and beliefs. That's the very first place you need to look when anything goes wrong with your body.

On this scale, the human brain is 7.5 times bigger than the brain of a typical mammal weighing as much as we do, with all other mammals having smaller encephalization quotients. Why the size of say, the prefrontal cortex, should relate to the size

When we sleep, consciousness fades. We spend one-quarter to one-third of our life asleep, more when we're young and less as we age. Sleep is defined by behavioral immobility (which is not absolute, as we continue to breathe, move our eyes, and occasionally twitch a limb) and reduced responsiveness to external stimuli. We share this need for daily sleep with all animals.

Didn't he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?

Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.

Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.

Either one attributes one's presence here to the laws of biology and physics, or one attributes it to a divine design.

The stamp of the lowly origin is to be found in our appendix, in the now needless coat of hair that we still grow (and then shed) after five months in the womb, in our easily worn-out knees, our vestigial tails, and the many caprices of our urinogenital arrangements. Why do people keep saying, "God is in the details"? He isn't in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure, and incompetence.

There is an intriguing paradox here: evolution does not have eyes but it can create them.