Quotes About Biology

A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form.

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.

As mechanistic biologists, we are hoping that by understanding how the virus works at the molecular level, we will be able to predict with more accuracy how it will evolve.

Virus particles contain single molecules of nucleic acid.

As long as we do not know how the cell works, we don't know the kind of havoc the AIDS virus creates in the cell.

Sea mammals, in particular, have evolved to take advantage of how well and far sound can travel under water, and to compensate for poor visibility in the dark deep.

But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.

push its own stomach out through its mouth and into the shell. After digesting the animal, the starfish then slides its stomach back into its own body. That sounds like something out of an alien movie!

eye at the end of each arm. But the starfish doesn't have an actual brain to tell it what it's seeing. Instead, nerves run from its mouth to each of its eyes, and sensors in its many tubelike "feet" actually find food. So the starfish is perfectly able to move and eat and do all that it needs to live, but it can't think. The starfish can't "see" what path it should take—it just goes where its body tells it to go.

Humans, having the most complex brains and intricate society, have the most prolonged period of total dependency of any species (Cacioppo & Berntson, 2002). Compared with the young of other primates, human babies are born quite early relative to the maturity of their brains. In fact, the first 3 months of life have sometimes been referred to as the fourth trimester. If we followed the pattern typical for other primates, we would stay inside our mothers for 24 months (Gould

Bruce conducted some groundbreaking experiments showing that our genes do not control biology. The idea that genes control biology is a faulty scientific assumption that was debunked by the Human Genome Project around the year 2003, a

One could not have isolated this retrovirus without knowledge of other retroviruses, that's obvious. But I believe we have answered the criteria of isolation.

There is no place in nature for extinction.

Unable to make babies, they make bombs instead. Men menstruate by shedding other people's blood.

The biological equipment of a man rigidly restricts the field in which he can serve.

race and species are only general concepts, except in so far as they exist in the individual being'.

Best friends," she said. We pressed our hands together, a promise sealed in blood. I knew it didn't work this way, because I had studied biology at Gymnasium, but I liked the thought of Darija's blood running through my veins. It made it easier to believe I was keeping a piece of her with me.

Have you had your first baby yet? I might have one myself, once they find a way for the man to carry it around the first nine months.

Some unfortunate people, by their own account, sweat like pigs, no matter what they do. The expression is actually inappropriate, because pigs have no perspiration apparatus. That's why they wallow in mud.

Joe Schwarcz

foods found in nature are ideally suited to the biological needs of the species.

Humans are primates, and all other primates eat a diet of predominantly natural vegetation.

cephalic thermogenesis. Thus

In biology especially, we have labels for everything—molecules, anatomical parts, physiological functions, organisms, ideas, hypotheses. The nominal fallacy is the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information.