Quotes About Biology

Nature is full of drama. I know nothing about biology, about birds, about insects, about the details of politics. I just make movies about human interest stories.

One of the most important aspects of what makes us who we are is neither straight genes or straight environment but actually what happens to us during development.

My approach is to start from the straightforward principle that our body is a machine. A very complicated machine, but none the less a machine, and it can be subjected to maintenance and repair in the same way as a simple machine, like a car.

Our long, flexible lumbar spines are great in many ways - they help us to run efficiently, for instance. But they have their drawbacks. The lumbar vertebrae are under great strain, and as we age, the ligaments that hold the pulpy centres of the intervertebral discs in place dry out.

I've said it before - and I'll say it again: it always seems to me that we come to know our same-sex parents through the bodily and the involuntary; through a kind of fossicking of our own physical strata. As we come to resemble our fathers, so we re-encounter the individual who reared us.

Those colors of hers really begin their attack on me now, ripping through my skin, electrifying my bloodstream, sending sparks zapping around in my stomach. I take a long pull on my whisky but I can't keep a hard-on from starting. I only mention this because I have a theory that the hard-on is the number one reason for sexism down through history. I mean, it is seriously impossible to really soak in a girl's ideas, no matter how deep or true, when you have a stiffy coming on.

The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease by Marc Lewis. Addiction is short-term desire. Purpose is long-term desire.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett. How consciousness arises, and how much it depends on a sense of past, present, and future (plus a lot of other interesting insights).

The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease by Marc Lewis.

Rhonda Perciavalle Patrick Tótem: Coywolf

There are actually 10 times more bacterial cells in your body than human cells: 100 trillion of them to 10 trillion of you.

you don't need to understand any of the biology, just as you don't need to understand radiation to use a microwave oven.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene,

Everyone who's born has come from the sea. Your mother's womb is just a sea in small. And birds come of seas on eggs. Horses lie in the sea before they're born. The placenta is the sea. Your blood is the sea continued in your veins. We are the ocean — walking on the land.

For a woman the worst thing about a sperm bank is that sperm is no longer free. Just go into a bar, and a sperm container will try to pick you up.

Now an embryo may seem like some scientific or laboratory term, but in fact the embryo contains the unique information that defines a person. All you add is food and climate control, and some time, and the embryo becomes you or me.

The work of both Piaget and Kinsey suggests that while biology is always a dominant influence on behavior, environment is critical to its expression. Even

What psychology failed to appreciate, Frankl believed, is the multidimensional nature of human beings. He did not deny that biology or conditioning shapes us, but he also insisted that there is room for free will—to choose to develop certain values or a particular course in life, or to retain our dignity in difficult situations.

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred - that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

It is clear that if we are going to understand ocean ecosystems, we need to understand the part that bioluminescence plays in those ecosystems.

When they first told me, 'Oh yeah, you developed asthma,' I was like, 'What? There's no way. How do you develop asthma? You're supposed to be born with that.'

Right now, oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in shipping, trucking and otherwise transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion.

I have a biology degree, okay?

In a way, cancer is so simple and so natural. The older you get, this is just one of the things that happens as the clock ticks.