Quotes About Biology

How can you kill something that never existed? We're all winners in the ovarian derby, yet I never heard anyone crying about the—if you will excuse the biological term—the sperm who were the losers in the race.

Modern scientists attribute to such systems an "irre d u c i b l e complexity." In the same way that a motor will not work if one of its cogs is missing, in plants the absence of just one system, or a single functional failure in any one of the parts of the system, will lead to the death of the plant.

All of a plant's systems have this feature of irreducible complexity . The complex systems, which must all be present at the same time, and this unbelievable variety bring to mind the question: "How did these perfect systems in plants emerge?

The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life.

the female is most easily won by the male who most strongly excites her sexual instincts.

Steinach found that, when sexually mature white rats were castrated, though at first they remained as potent as ever, their potency gradually declined; sexual excitement, however, and sexual inclination always persisted.

That sexual feelings exist [it would be better to say 'may exist'] from earliest infancy is well known, and therefore this function does not depend upon puberty, though intensified by it.

Mixing up your genotype with someone else's, possibly breaking up some bad genetic combinations that had been riding around in you, perhaps discovering new good combinations, and giving your offspring a chance at being a better fit in a landscape that has not yet occurred—these are the benefits of sexual reproduction.

Asking if a particular trait is due to nature or nurture implies a false dichotomy between nature, genes, and evolution on the one side and between nurture and environment on the other. In fact, all of it is evolutionary.

Group membership never disappears, but an organism will try to pass as something it's not, if enough of its traits transform. We are nucleate, heterotrophic, vertebral, brainy, bony fish. We are fish.

Employing evolutionary logic is not exclusively about discovering our strengths; it is also about understanding our weaknesses and when to augment with modern solutions.

In alligators, the temperature of an egg as it develops determines the sex of its inhabitant: low temperatures create females, high temps make males. The same is true for tortoises, but

lots of fish switch genders?" Her parents had no idea. "They switch or they're both. Both at once, or first one then the other. Clown fish all start as boys, but some of them become girls later. Parrot fish are all girls, so then one of them has to become a boy—she changes color and everything—but then if another boy comes along, she might go back to being a girl again.

To comprehend the interactions between Homo sapiens and the vast and diverse microbial world, perspectives must be forged that meld such disparate fields as medicine, environmentalism, public health, basic ecology, primate biology, human behavior, economic development, cultural anthropology, human rights law, entomology, parasitology, virology, bacteriology, evolutionary biology, and epidemiology.

If there's a takeaway from working here, it's an understand that, as bioorganisms, we are a walking time bomb programed for cellular self-destruction. Not if, when.

As a chemist, I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology: What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution?

Nipples are a fact of life. We all have them.

Like all women she was tyrannized by her biology.

For the first time ever, women are scoring higher than men on IQ tests. Scientists say it has something to do with breast implants -- not that it makes the women smarter, it just makes the men dumber.

Women will soon be able to make their own sperm using their own bone marrow. Is that unbelievable? How unfair is that for us guys, huh? I mean, all these years, we've been in charge of manufacturing and distribution, you know what I'm saying? We provide free delivery and installation.

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?

Half an hour, the Gottmans found, is also about how long it takes for the chemicals released during "fight or flight" to exit the body.

enhances the orchid's reproductive success—but not his own! The best known of these cheats is the bee orchid—the flower looks and feels like a female bee and even has the same pheromones.

nature-versus-nurture controversy.