Quotes About Biology

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

Both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—the mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.

When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a "Newtonian" or of a biologist when asked if he is a "Pasteurian.

When you're single and in your twenties, having sex with whoever comes along is practically your job. It's biological. It's emotional. It's psychological. It's egomaniacal.

The human mechanism is marvelous. But why not — it is the result of three-and-a-half billion years of tinkering.

For what we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.

Our biochemistry bolts and revolts at our modern life.

No normal man ever fell in love after thirty when the kidneys begin to disintegrate.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebums and smaller adrenal glands.

The earth is not flat. The universe does not revolve around the earth. The physical world is not the only reality. Genes do not control our biology. Evolution is not random. There are many cosmic forces at work, and all of them are intelligently directed. We are not a cosmic accident. Consciousness did not evolve. Consciousness is reality. Conscious energy creates physical reality.

Newborns can be up to 20 percent of their mother's mass in the smaller cetacean species. This is extreme. Few, if any, large terrestrial mammals give birth to young that are more than 15 percent of their own weight.26 The minimum size for a newborn marine mammal seems to be about 0.6 meters long and five kilograms.

Their myoglobin, which holds oxygen in the muscles, evolved to become more electrically charged and therefore better at holding onto oxygen, so their muscles became huge oxygen stores.

The sound-producing organs of their terrestrial ancestors, their larynxes, evolved to make louder and more complex sounds. For instance, dolphins have two nasal passages and two sets of sound-producing organs and can simultaneously produce two different sounds. The

then social learning is, down the line, affecting the genetic structure of the species.

We pay large costs, particularly in energy costs and birthing difficulties, for our cognitive apparatus. Is this another cultural consequence?47

Genes do not code for behavior—they code for proteins and control the production of those proteins. How

Morality, by promoting cooperative behavior, can change the whole population biology of a species, and it seems to be an important product of gene-culture coevolution in human societies.

renowned biologist and thinker E. O. Wilson calls the study of gene-culture coevolution "one of the great unexplored domains of science.

3.2. Evolution of the marine mammals, showing aquatic, semiaquatic, and largely terrestrial groups of species. Copyright Emese Kazár.

If it's green or wriggles, it's biology. If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's physics.

Oxytocin is an ancient neurotransmitter chemical. Animal lineages much older than the mammals—amphibians, reptiles, worms, even the egg-dumping fish—all sport some version of it. For hundreds of millions of years animals have been practicing sexual reproduction. And for that long they've also needed a chemical pry-bar to push them into proximity. Why

Not to use bacteria as model organisms for more complex animals, but the reverse: to literally make complex animals more like their model organisms, by making living matter conform to the shape, time, and technical forms of simpler experimental models.

It is with the [head louse and body louse] that we are chiefly concerned, and they are so closely related that, even now, by an occasional mésalliance resulting from the meetings of young people about the neck band, a body louse may go native and interbreed with a head louse. The crab louse we may neglect. He is probably of distinct generic origin and a creature that merits neither respect nor sympathy; not even terror.

The experience of birth is vast. It is a diverse tapestry woven by cultural customs, shaped in personal choices, affected by biological factors, marked by political circumstances. Yet the nature of birth itself prevails in elegant design of simple complexity.