Quotes About Biology

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For every 10 atoms in your body, 6 are hydrogen, 3 oxygen, 1 carbon. All the other elements are much less common.

Man with Brain the Size of Tic Tac Mates with Amoeba Couple gives birth to giant adjusto; names him Dale

If you feel depressed for an hour, you've produced approximately eighteen billion new cells that have more receptors calling out for depressed-type peptides and fewer calling out for feel-good peptides.

On average, human brains have shrunk some 10 percent in size over the last 20,000 years,

We must start by recognizing that the human mind was not designed for happiness. It was designed by natural selection to facilitate the survival and reproduction of human beings in an environment that existed tens of thousands of years ago. We know this because we know how natural selection works.

of all that has been learned is clear and indisputable: all known living organisms are descendants from a single common ancestral form.

Because Y DNA and mtDNA don't get reshuffled with other DNA, they can be used to learn something about an individual in your family tree who lived 10,000, 50,000, or 100,000 years ago. That person is still there, in a sense, in you in a completely disproportionate way to the rest of your grandparents.

It is extremely unlikely that anyone in the twenty-first century does not have some consanguinity in his or her family within the last three hundred years. Yet according to Feldman, more than half of all human populations today still engage in consanguineous marriage, and up to 10 percent of all humans are in first- or second-cousin marriages.

As of 2014 a small handful of well-known companies—Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, and AncestryDNA.com, as well as National Geographic's Genographic Project—and services offer a selection of DNA tests and genealogical connections to the general public.

Here is where it becomes clear that this kind of fine-grained genetic history is the flip side of the family-history coin. Although genealogy is not widely valued in academia, it meshes perfectly with, and helps explain, social history. These small stories about individual lives reveal the way that individual choices shape the biology and the history of whole populations.

While all living things affect the evolution of other living things simply by virtue of trying to stay alive, humans interact with the biological evolution of other species in a much more complex and powerful fashion because of one ability: language. Nothing occurs on the human scale without language. No language means no agriculture, no animal farming, no science.

Vonnegut exposes the assumption that if we do change biologically, we typically think we will end up smarter in the terms in which we consider ourselves smart today. But to survive means only that we'll be smart in the context of the environment we find ourselves in. If we continue to exist, we will by definition be smarter than the versions of us that did not survive, but that intelligence won't necessarily be comparable to what we have today.

There is evidence from ancient DNA that lighter skin, hair, and eye pigmentation was strongly selected for in Europe in just the last five thousand years.

Or, as Razib Khan, a geneticist and science blogger, put it, culture is chunky, whereas genes are creamy.

Of the 30 trillion cells in a 70 kg adult body, 25 trillion are erythrocytes. Fewer than 200 billion cells, under 1 percent, make up the brain, half of which are neurons. The same body also plays host to about 38 trillion bacteria, its microbiome (Sender, Fuchs, & Milo, 2016).

There are more than nine hundred species of bats, a figure that represents almost a quarter of all mammal species on earth,

The reverse can also happen: as a man becomes more and more attached to his family, levels of testosterone can decline. In fact, at the birth of a child, expectant fathers experience a significant decline in levels of testosterone.66 Even when a man holds a baby, levels of testosterone decrease. This

And when I look again she seems neither bird nor reptile, but a creature shaped by a million years of evolution for a life she's not yet lived.

There's no animal that sleep-deprives itself like the human.

Natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous actions, no plans for the future, or underlying purpose.

The famous sea squirt, beloved of popular neuroscience lectures, in its larval stage is motile and has a primitive nervous system (called a notochord) so it can navigate the sea – at least, its own very small corner of it. In its adult stage it fastens limpet-like to a rock and feeds passively, simply depending on the influx of seawater through its tubes. It then reabsorbs its nervous system – it is no longer needed since the creature no longer needs to move.

My 'I', my conscious self, writing these words, does not feel like electrochemistry, but that is what it is.

wish I were a sea squirt, If life became a strain, I'd veg out on the nearest rock And reabsorb my brain.