Quotes About Biology

Art Levinson, who was on Apple's board, was chairing the board meeting of his own company, Genentech, when his cell phone rang and Jobs's name appeared on the screen. As soon as there was a break, Levinson called him back and heard the news of the tumor. He had a background in cancer biology, and his firm made cancer treatment drugs, so he became an advisor. So did Andy Grove of Intel, who had fought and beaten prostate cancer. Jobs called him that Sunday, and he drove

The evolutionary process cares little about what happens to us after we have children and get them to a safe age, so there are a whole bunch of middle-aged maladies, including Huntington's and most forms of cancer, that we humans would want to eliminate, even though nature sees no need to.

What drives people to kill and maim each other so savagely?" Einstein asked. "I think it is the sexual character of the male that leads to such wild explosions.

four bases in DNA: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, now commonly known by the letters A, T, G, and C.

DNA doesn't do much work. It mainly stays at home in the nucleus of our cells, not venturing forth. Its primary activity is protecting the information it encodes and occasionally replicating itself.

RNA, on the other hand, actually goes out and does real work. Instead of just sitting at home curating information, it makes real products, such as proteins.

But she became more interested in DNA's less-celebrated sibling, RNA. It's the molecule that actually does the work in a cell by copying some of the instructions coded by the DNA and using them to build proteins.

These proteins come in many types. Fibrous proteins, for example, form structures such as bones, tissues, muscles, hair, fingernails, tendons, and skin cells. Membrane proteins relay signals within cells. Above all is the most fascinating type of proteins: enzymes. They serve as catalysts. They spark and accelerate and modulate the chemical reactions in all living things. Almost every action that takes place in a cell needs to be catalyzed by an enzyme. Pay attention to enzymes

is an amazing revelation for those who are interested in uncovering the fundamental secrets of life. It is the way that chemistry—the study of how atoms bond to create molecules—becomes biology.

In explaining the amazing mechanisms of life, little things matter. And very little things matter a lot.

it folded and twisted, which would reveal how it interacted with other molecules.5

Almost from the beginning of life on this planet, there's been an intense arms race between bacteria, which developed elaborate methods of defending against viruses, and the ever-evolving viruses, which sought ways to thwart those defenses.

I mention "mosaic," a term often used in biology. "That's a better description than grayscale," she says. "And frankly that's true for all of us. All of us, if we're honest with ourselves, know that we have things that we're great at and things that we're not so great at.

Berg to discuss the advances that were being made in gene splicing and recombinant DNA. Berg described how difficult it was to do experiments in a biology lab, where it could take weeks

Happy thoughts create happy molecules, and healthy thoughts create healthy molecules.

In decoupling gender from biology and denying any given or "natural" meaning to male and female sexuality, gender ideology directly repudiates reality. People don't need to be "religious" to notice that men and women are different. The evidence is obvious. And the only way to ignore it is through a kind of intellectual self-hypnosis.

The sciences form a hierarchy. "Physics rests on mathematics, chemistry on physics, biology on chemistry, and, in principle, the social sciences on biology," wrote evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers.

Biology is not going to put us out of business. The new knowledge that geneticists and neuroscientists are providing, conjoined with the kinds of analyses we do best, will enable us to take giant strides in understanding how societies, polities, and economies really function. We are like physicists at the outset of the nineteenth century, who were poised at a moment in history that would produce Ampères and Faradays.

biology, with devastating effects."2 Why the resistance? Because the social sciences have been in the grip of an orthodoxy that is scared stiff of biology.

The explicit rejection of a role for biology in the social sciences occurred from the end of the nineteenth through the beginning of the twentieth centuries, with the leading roles played by Émile Durkheim in sociology, Franz Boas in anthropology, and John Watson in psychology.3

natural selection has almost become irrelevant in human evolution. There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we've built with the same body and brain."6

The Simiadae then branched off into two great stems, the New World and Old World monkeys; and from the latter at a remote period, Man, the wonder and the glory of the universe, proceeded.

A hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits.

Man with all his noble qualities… with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.