Quotes About Biology

Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. And later when it became necessary, geography became biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and

In reference to cases of testicular feminization]: "The incredible lesson about our sexual biology is that all men at one point in their fetal development have the capacity to be women. Moreover the body is programmed to develop as a female unless it sees and recognizes specific biochemical signals such as testosterone and anti-mullerian factor that tell it to develop as a male.

For about the first two billion years of Earth's history, its atmosphere contained only minute traces of oxygen, even though it had long been a home to life. For

Duplication and transfer from other genetic sources are examples of nature's ability to co-opt existing tools: evolution the tinkerer. Evolution also creates from scratch. We call these de novo mutations, and they arise when a seemingly nonsensical run of DNA mutates and changes into a readable sentence.

The seven billion of us alive today are, according to all the evidence available to us, the last remaining group of human great apes from a set of at least four that existed 50,000 years ago.

But they also became us, and we will find them in the old bones and inside our own cells. We carry the past with us. There was no beginning, and there are no missing links, just the ebb and flow and ebb again of living through epochs. Those ancient people never went extinct—we just merged.

DNA also reveals behavior. Culture can become embedded in our cells just as it gets buried in the floors of caves, bogs, and dwellings.

There are no spaces in genes, but cells still understand the three-letter structure. De novo genes arise when a clump of letters is converted into a meaningful sentence by chance, and thus suddenly becomes understandable by the mechanics of the cell, and translated into a protein. The protein that results is utilised in some way. If it is used, then the organism that has acquired this new gene will pass it on.

By the time of the agricultural revolution, we see multiplication and expansion of genes that encode salivary amylase, an enzyme in your spittle that initiates the digestion of complex molecules. Some people have eighteen copies of it, but chimpanzees only have two.

Biologists sometimes get physics envy, because every time we find out one of our big rules – universal genetics, evolution by natural selection – things look more complex within them as soon as we begin to look.

But we don't have more protein-coding genes than a chimpanzee. In fact, we have fewer genes than a roundworm. Or a banana.

Are we still evolving?' is a question that geneticists get asked a lot. Here is the answer: yes.

As long as humans keep having sex and that sex results in more humans, then we are evolving. We can avoid these evolutionary changes no more easily than we can change the weather.

Homo sapiens comes into being from 300,000 years ago, according to specimens from Morocco and east Africa, and by 100,000 years ago we have bodies pretty much the same as we do today.

A similar result from Bristol scientists using a huge dataset called the Avon Longitudinal Study—the gold standard of transgenerational research—showed that men who smoked before puberty sired fatter sons than those who smoked after. Again, something was apparently being acquired and passed on.

Nowadays, only the willfully ignorant dismiss the truth that we evolved from earlier ancestors.

There are maybe 9,000 bird species living today, which is not quite double the number of mammal species.

In the genomes of the dead we can see natural selection at work.

Our brains are large for our body size, but that ratio is much greater in ants and shrews.

The mammals—hairy creatures that produce milk to nurture their young—are a small group of organisms on Earth, with only around 6,000 types known, one-fifth of which are different styles of bat.

scientific research, one that underwrites every single aspect of the life sciences. "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution

This is a seam that will run throughout this book, confronting and dispelling the culturally ubiquitous idea that genes are fate, and a certain type of any one gene will determine exactly what an individual is like. That this is a fallacy is universally known among geneticists, yet it is still an idea that carries a lot of cultural significance, fueled frequently by the media and an ultra-simplistic understanding of the absurd complexities of human biology.

males and females can be made. In the second broad category of being a sexual organism are the species that have dozens of sexes, possibly thousands.

Genes never work in isolation, and almost never have just one role.