Quotes About Biology

New developments in neurology provide biological explanations for how our learning is affected by our feelings.167 We learn best in stimulating environments when we feel sure we can succeed.

Miniture protoplasm, the dirty little bastard!

The world depends on so many different species, each a nutty experiment

photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation's entire cathedral.

No strangeness stranger than the strangeness of living things.

I love your smell, she said. I told her, "You don't love me. You love my microbiome.

I let the class out, ten minutes early. My students would have to figure out the rest of the origin of life on their own.

In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple. This emerging virus was ike a bat crossing the sky at evening. Just when you thought you saw it flicker through your field of view, it was gone.

virus. In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath.

The Ebola virus particle contains only seven different proteins—seven distinct types of large molecules arranged in a long braided structure that is the stringy Ebola particle. Three of these proteins are vaguely understood, and four of the proteins are completely unknown—their structure and their function is a mystery. Whatever these Ebola proteins do, they seem to target the immune system for special attack.

What made it particularly interesting was that it multiplied easily in various species, in monkeys, humans, guinea pigs. It was extremely lethal in these species, which meant that its original host was probably not monkeys, humans, or guinea pigs but some other animal or insect that it did not kill. A virus does not generally kill its natural host.

A virus makes copies of itself inside a cell until eventually the cell gets pigged with virus and pops, and the viruses spill out of the broken cell. Or viruses can bud through a cell wall, like drips coming out of a faucet—drip, drip, drip, drip, copy, copy, copy, copy—that's the way the AIDS virus works.

A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out

A virus does not "want" to kill its host. That is not in the best interest of the virus, because then the virus may also die, unless it can jump fast enough out of the dying host into a new host.

The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years.

there'll never be equality of the sexes till men can get pregnant;

Another werewolf thing. Like most animals, we spent a large part of our lives engaged in the three Fs of basic survival. Feeding, fighting and... reproduction.

Am I the only one around here who thinks Maya has a hidden Y chromosome?" Hayley said. "If she does, she's hiding it pretty good," Corey said, giving me a lascivious once-over.

Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.

Natural selection is almost always handled in general temps . . This means that it has no explanatory power when specific problems arise.

...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.

Life is a relationship among molecules and not a property of any molecule.

An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind.

Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.