Quotes About Biology

I have a theory that evolutionary biologists are more vain than particle physicists.

It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.

What is the evolutionary value of blushing? It seems not to be to our advantage to do it, to involuntarily reveal our inner emotions. If we're trying to manipulate or lie, actions in furtherance of individual goals as opposed to the goals of others, blushing would not seem to be helpful. And yet everyone blushes, except the psychopath.

In short, we evolved, like other animals, to win the reproduction game. That contest has a single aim, to leave as many descendants as possible.

people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A.

Recent discoveries about apes suggest, however, that a gorilla or common chimp stands at least as good a chance of being murdered as the average human.

from our point of view, genital sores, diarrhea, and coughing are "symptoms of disease." From a germ's point of view, they're clever evolutionary strategies to broadcast the germ. That's why it's in the germ's interests to "make us sick." But why should a germ evolve the apparently self-defeating strategy of killing its host?

diseases represent evolution in progress, and microbes adapt by natural selection to new hosts and vectors.

In an epidemic those people with genes for resistance to that particular microbe are more likely to survive than are people lacking such genes. As a result, over the course of history, human populations repeatedly exposed to a particular pathogen have come to consist of a higher proportion of individuals with those genes for resistance—just because unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies.

But for physical effort on the bug's own part, the prize still goes to worms such as hookworms and schistosomes, which actively burrow through a host's skin from the water or soil into which their larvae had been excreted in a previous victim's feces. Thus

big-bang reproduction, or semelparity: a single reproductive effort, followed by preprogrammed death.

But the largest number of primate species--thirty-four--have a promiscuous system in which females routinely associate and copulate with multiple males.

I had sequenced Pickwick at home using nothing more complex than average kitchen utensils and cultivated her in a denucleated goose egg.

Simulating enzymes. They create false biological events. They simulate a virus, a viral attack, thus triggering a reaction from antibodies, though since these have no target, there being no virus to destroy, they turn back against their own source. Let us celebrate this irruption of simulation within biology and wait to see where it will lead.

Culture contradicts all genetic capital. It is the touch of magic, the special touch which contradicts biology, heredity, etc. and condenses a whole dynasty into one generation. What cannot be obtained in a single generation is ease and courage. Mutants are cowards.

Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.

I discovered from my time in the brother that men's members, if bitten off or otherwise severed, do not grow again. This seems a great mistake on the part of nature, since men are so careless with their members and will put them anywhere without thinking.

Biology is destiny if you work for the patriarchy.

I discovered from my time in the brothel that men's members, if bitten off or otherwise severed, do not grow again. This seems a great mistake on the part of nature, since men are so careless with their members and will put them anywhere without thinking.

The school was very supportive. The only class that I had to attend every day was biology when we were doing dissections. I would take an 8 a.m. bio class, dissect my animal, and then run to work.

It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work.

Natural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work.

I can't be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It's at that level.

I have watched all the work going on there, and the more I see of it the more I am convinced that Mendelism has nothing to do with evolution.