Quotes About Biology

One mitochondrion contains tens of thousands of copies of each respiratory complex. A single cell contains hundreds or thousands of mitochondria. Your 40 trillion cells contain at least a quadrillion mitochondria, with a combined convoluted surface area of about 14,000 square metres; about four football fields. Their job is to pump protons, and together they pump more than 1021 of them – nearly as many as there are stars in the known universe – every second.

The first true eyes appeared somewhat abruptly in the fossil record around 540 million

Onions, wheat and amoebae have more genes and more DNA than we do. Amphibians such as frogs and salamanders have genome sizes that range over two orders of magnitude, with some salamander genomes being 40 times larger than our own, and some frogs being less than a third of our size. If

A cell can also look static under a microscope, yet its state is the product of more than a billion metabolic reactions every second.11 You are composed of at least thirty trillion cells, so in the last second your tranquil demeanour was sustained by an incomprehensible one hundred billion trillion reactions (1023, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). I'm now in my mid-fifties, so my wrinkles and aches and pains are the product of about 1032 reactions to date, roughly a billion times

Geochemistry gives rise seamlessly to biochemistry.

So it seems to me there are two big unknowns at the very heart of biology today: why life evolved in the perplexing way it did, and why cells are powered in such a peculiar fashion. This

the igneo-aerial food." In other words, despite

We now know that free-radical signals are central to cell physiology, so we can begin to see why antioxidants (which mop up free radicals) do as much harm as good.

If free-radical leak is fast, degenerative diseases set in quickly; if it's slow, they're postponed or even abrogated altogether.

this chapter is different from the other chapters in this book, in that not only does science not (yet) know the answer, but at present we can barely conceive of how that answer might look in terms of the known laws of physics or biology or information.

While a few men seek to justify their existence by assuming the burden of childcare, or material provisioning, the same is not true of many lower creatures, human or otherwise, where the males quite literally just fuck off.

multicellular life. All animals, all plants, all of them depend on

of oxygen, whether we think of it as 'good' or 'bad', is the formation of free radicals. As conventionally stated, the idea that breathing oxygen causes ageing is disarmingly simple. We produce free

If we are biological organisms, not angels, then our cognitive faculties are similar to those called "physical capacities" and should be studied much as other systems of the body are.

In brief, if we are biological organisms, not angels, much of what we seek to understand might lie beyond our cognitive limits – maybe a true understanding of anything, as Galileo concluded, and Newton in a certain way demonstrated. That cognitive reach has limits is not only a truism but also a fortunate one; if there were no limits to human intelligence, it would lack internal structure and would therefore have no scope: we could achieve nothing by inquiry.

You can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholesterol (like lobster and avocado and eggs) and they have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME?

The grouper isn't one of your prettier fish, but it's versatile. They're all born female and produce eggs before they change sex and become functioning males.

Even the atheistic, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins admitted that life appears to have been designed and that an origin one–celled animal has a thousand sets of Encyclopedias full of genetic information in it!

Darwinian biologists must keep repeating that reminder to themselves because otherwise they might become conscious of the reality that is staring them in the face and trying to get their attention."7

Skin, bones, blood and organs transplant from person to person. Even what's inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you'd die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited. Whatever you're thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they're doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.

There isn't any real you in you, she says, Even your physical body, all your cells will be replaced within eight years.

She said when a boy and a girl dog copulate, the head of the boy's penis swells and the vaginal muscles of the girl constrict. Even after sex, both dogs remain locked together, helpless and miserable for a brief period of time. The Mommy said this same scenario described most marriages.

Too much estrogen, and you get bitch tits.

it's why men marry women and why women have children.