Quotes About Biology

The fetus was minute - a congregation of loitering cells - and as with anything that informal, there was a good chance that it might disperse.

How can you not want to know what your parasites are talking about?

The resistant mice were able to mount a powerful defense, thanks to their immune system, even after cancer had taken hold.

Long-term rational planning drops off the chart when men are thinking about women. It's how they're wired. Of course, we're not all that rational about them sometimes

La obsesión de colocarnos en el centro de todo es la ruina tanto de los teólogos como de los zoólogos.

Por qué, entre todos los animales, en el largo curso del mundo, solo los pechos de la hembra humana habían llegado a ser hermosos? ¿No era para la gloria de la raza humana que los pechos femeninos hubiesen adquirido semejante belleza?

I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human—I only love to be so.

A man can abuse his body a lot more than a woman can. And that's a fact.

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.

Coming out of college, many of our analysts are steeped in genomic research.

Very ancient parts of the brain are involved in moral decision making.

Our instinctual understanding of reality is the same as most other animals.

There are five kinds of great apes: bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, and the one which people always think of last: Humans!

According to the Law of Biogenesis, life arises only from preexisting life.

No man should marry before he has studied anatomy and dissected the body of a woman.

The first great paper on allosteric proteins, written with Changeux and Jacob, was submitted to The Journal of Molecular Biology at the end of 1962.

one of the first assemblies of smart molecules had been the crew of that ingenious unit called the gene.† An even grander molecular fusion had been the chromosome—a knottily twisted rope of genes which not only worked together,* but fused so tightly that they formed a massive mega-molecule.

A superbly written, insightful, and beautifully illustrated history of evolution is David Young's The Discovery of Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992

The "four 'F's'" of animal behavior—fleeing, fighting, feeding, and…reproducing—all depend on acquiring information and

Every square inch of skin on your face contains about 65 hairs, 100 oil glands, 650 sweat glands, 78 yards of nerves, and 19 yards of blood vessels.

you must have carbon.23  Arsenic, boron, and silicon are the only other elements on which complex molecules can be based, but arsenic and boron are relatively rare and, where concentrated, poisonous to life, and silicon can hold together no more than about a hundred amino acids. Only carbon yields the chemical bonding stability and bonding complexity that life requires. Given the constraints of physics and chemistry, we now know that physical life must be carbon-based.

That the female of the species is deadlier than the male. —Rudyard Kipling

In fact, Wilson and King showed that the difference in the average protein-coding gene sequences of chimps and modern humans was about 1 percent. In other words, the proteins that we use in our day-to-day biology are nearly identical to those that chimpanzees and bonobos use.

In a word, Shakespeare comes across as a bit of a biological determinist.   Toward