Quotes About Biology

Yet no litany of sexually transmitted diseases was likely to scare Edward Bonshaw away; sexual attraction isn't strictly scientific.

All blue-eyed people are mutants. The first ones appeared as recently as 5,000 years ago.

The boa constrictor is the only living animal whose common name is exactly the same as its scientific name.

There are over 1,200 species of bat in the world and not one of them is blind. There are 4,800 species of frog in the world but only one of them goes 'ribbit'. Eight times as many people belong to the National Trust as to the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties combined. Every human being starts out life as an arsehole: it's the first part of the body to form in the womb.

Your hair grows more quickly when you're anticipating sex.

Kangaroos have three vaginas.

The cockeyed squid has one regular-sized eye and one giant eye.

The largest egg in comparison with the size of the bird is that of the little spotted kiwi. Its egg accounts for 26 percent of its own weight: the equivalent of a woman giving birth to a six-year-old child.

What's the most dangerous animal that has ever lived? Half the human beings who have ever died, perhaps as many as 45 billion people, have been killed by female mosquitoes (the males only bite plants).

A single sperm contains 37.5 MB of DNA information. One ejaculation represents a data transfer of 15,875 GB

To find out what color egg a hen will lay, examine her earlobes. Hens with white earlobes lay white eggs; hens with red earlobes lay brown ones.

Whales' vaginas can be large enough to walk through.

All influenza viruses mutate constantly

most scientific rival of the germ theory explained disease in terms purely of chemistry. It saw disease as a chemical process.

virus has only one function: to replicate itself.

Disease began to be seen as something that invaded solid parts of the body, as an independent entity, instead of being a derangement of the blood. This was a fundamental first step in what would become a revolution.

NATURE CHOSE to rage in 1918, and it chose the form of the influenza virus in which to do

Influenza is an RNA virus. So are HIV and the coronavirus.

From the time an influenza virus first attaches to a cell to the time the cell bursts generally takes about ten hours, although it can take less time or, more rarely, longer. Then a swarm of between 100,000 and 1 million new influenza viruses escapes the exploded cell. The word "swarm" fits in more ways than one. •

But sometimes mutations change the shape of the hemagglutinin or neuraminidase enough that the immune system can't read them.

Louis Sullivan, the first great modern architect, declared that form follows function. To understand viruses, or for that matter to understand biology, one must think as Sullivan did, in a language not of words, which simply name things, but in a language of three dimensions, a language of shape and form. For in biology, especially at the cellular and molecular levels, nearly all activity depends ultimately upon form, upon physical structure—upon what is called "stereochemistry.

But the virus can adapt to man. It can do so directly, with an entire animal virus jumping to humans and adapting with a simple mutation. It can also happen indirectly. For one final and unusual attribute of the influenza virus makes it particularly adept at moving from species to species.

In fact, biology is chaos. Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process.

Natural selection is intolerant of idle verbosity.