Quotes About Biology

Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable.

A branch of one of the cranial nerves, the recurrent laryngeal runs from the brain to the larynx. It doesn't go straight there, however. Instead, it dives down into the chest, loops around one of the main arteries leaving the heart, and proceeds back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe the detour is significant (British understatement) and it is presumably costly. The explanation lies in history, in the nerve's emergence in our fish ancestors before a discernible neck evolved.

There are more cells in your brain than there are brains in your entire body.

As I have put it before, if the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we would none of us be here. We all can regard ourselves as exquisitely improbable. But here, in a triumph of hindsight, we are.

But perhaps life has a tendency to converge on a pathway, something like a magnetic pull that draws it back despite temporary deviations.

White and black citizens are bound together in the most fundamental way possible—at the level of the genome," he writes, and yet divided by the racial pseudoscience originally devised to justify slavery and perpetuated in slightly shifting forms ever since.

The idea is that criminals are distinctive in psychological (perhaps even biological) ways. They are deficient, depending on the particular theory, in conscience or in self-restraint. They lack normal attachment to the mores of their culture, or they are peculiarly indifferent to the feelings or the good opinion of others. They

the liver of the bear is poisonous – the only part of any quadruped known to be so.

Testosterone is the world's most dangerous drug. Get one molecule on you and you're helpless.

advocates of evolutionary theory since Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) have found altruism problematic.

Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom.

Humans believed they thought things consciously when most of the time they were simply rationalizing instinctive reactions as basic as the amoeba's, and after those reactions had already taken place.

Sperm is high in fat and protein, which takes time for the digestive system to process.

Un niño escribió: El cuerpo humano está formado por el cerébreo, el bórax y la cavidad abominable. El cerébreo contiene el cerebro. El bórax contiene los pulmones, el hígado y otros seres vivos. La cavidad abominable contiene los intestinos, que son dos: el gordo y el flaco.1 Es

I've heard that we're constantly shedding skin and it is totally replaced every seven years. So every seven years you're a different person. That's why people get the seven-year itch and stop getting on with their partner – it's because they're a different person.

Sometimes I would like to cry. I close my eyes. Why weren't we designed so that we can close our ears as well? (Perhaps because we would never open them.) Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?

The more a man follows nature, and is obedient to her laws, the longer he will live; the farther he deviates from these, the shorter will be his existence.

...congenital killers and criminals are possessed of not one but two Y chromosomes, bearing a double dose, as it were, of genetically undesirable maleness.

I've always felt that the placement of a man's testicles is an eloquent argument against intelligent design.

I think, men and women are different. We have different challenges.

Of all the wonderful things that men and women share, shoes, tragically, are not one of them. This is because men lack the shoe chromosome.

Almost no germ is unconditionally dangerous to man; its disease-producing ability depends upon the body's resistance.

In general, men are wired to notice obvious signs that convey interest in mating - a warm smile, for example - and ignore other subtleties, like if your lipstick is faded.

Men and women are different. I don't think men grow a brain until 26 or even 30. Girls mature a lot quicker.