Quotes About Biology

A promiscuous man would need to have sex with more than 130 women just to have 90 percent odds of outdoing the one baby a monogamous man might expect to father in a year.

Blood, for a mosquito, is a delicacy. They otherwise feed on the nectar of flowers.

A trademark of something that works well, the cat body has hardly changed since its inception. Like with today's cats, their digestive systems could handle only flesh. The lesson of the cat is that if you are to become a full-fledged carnivore, you have to commit everything to it. A house cat fed vegetarian food will shrivel and die.

Neoteny is a term coined by evolutionary biologists to explain the human capacity to perpetuate juvenile characteristics, such as curiosity, play, and imagination, into adult life.

Nunca he pretendido que una sola idea explicara la diversidad del mundo ni un Dios fuera más cierto que numerosos dioses Nunca he pretendido que la psicología excluyera a la biología, ni que tener un sexo excluyera al otro.

with her hormones and possibly even with

National pride may be an absurd feeling, yet a rooster's pride as he struts about in his own yard amid the hens is biologically useful. (The Captive Mind)

It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.

I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology.

Chance is hugely significant in biology. In fact, the presence of apparent randomness in so many aspects of biology - from mutations in DNA to the chance involved in that one sperm reaching that one egg that became you - suggests that randomness is useful, even necessary, in very many cases.

I loved anything to do with animals from a very early age.

For a very long time, we've been extraordinarily interested in the interaction between low temperature and low oxygen. We see that they're connected because we know people who are extremely cold are not getting oxygen to their cells. And yet, they're sometimes alive.

I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the '60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science.

While both plants and animals awaken via distinct changes in metabolic functioning, most plants prefer to err on the side of caution, waiting for hints of full-on summer before they bloom.

In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.

My interests span biology, though sometimes I feel like an anachronism, somebody from the Victorian era when there weren't so many boundaries dividing the sciences.

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.

I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.

While doing biology, she had begun to believe in a sort of witchcraft.

The heart, after all, was nothing more than a muscle.

By separating the function of adaptation from the function of maintaining the integrity of individual genes, sex allows much greater diversity while still keeping genes whole. Sex is not only fun, it is good engineering practice.

Men are not going to embrace eugenics. They are going to embrace the first likely, trim-figured girl with limpid eyes and flashing teeth who comes along, in spite of the fact that her germ plasm is probably reeking with hypertension, cancer, haemophilia, colour blindness, hay fever, epilepsy, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

There is not a simple gene pool entirely free of toxic waste.

Some people say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. In actuality, you have to make an incision through his skin, both dermis and epidermis, then carefully sever and separate the sternum. Only upon viewing the exposed thoracic cavity can you reach the heart--if indeed the male of the species actually possesses such an organ.