Quotes About Biology

DNA subtly changes over time via the genetic equivalents of typos—spelling mistakes which slip through due to inaccurate copyediting by the proteins that check the code after it has been replicated.

In the human genome, in total, there are around 3 billion individual letters of DNA. Of the analogies of scale, the one that gets trotted out most frequently is that this is equivalent to some twenty standard-issue phone books, though when I use that in lectures these days most school kids have never seen a phone book.

There's no trace of genetic fair skin between those two dates.

crunching. The amount of introgression from Neanderthals is proportionally lower on the modern X than on the rest of the chromosomes. X chromosomes are only passed on by males half of the time because we also have a Y, but all of the time by women, who have two Xs. The observation that there is less Neanderthal DNA on our Xs implies that the first encounters we had with them that resulted in procreation were male Neanderthals with female Homo sapiens.

from the point of view of a geneticist, race does not exist. It has no useful scientific value.

Biology is the study of what lives and therefore what dies. It's messy—wonderfully, frustratingly so—and imprecise and defies definitions.

In fact, sexual acts between members of the same sex abound in nature, in thousands of animals, and, for example, may well dominate male giraffe sexual encounters.

Bloody biology curses women every time.

If Nature doesn't wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, even less does she wish that a superior race should mix with an inferior one. In such a case, all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher type of being, might be rendered futile.

Evolutionary biology is now uttering and seeking those forces that link us with all those that have being. If we can discover the meaning in the trilling of a frog, perhaps we may understand why it is for us not merely noise but a song of poetry and emotion.

I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.

I am passionately devoted to the study of life, and particularly to the higher forms of life.

On some peculiar pigmented cells found in two mosquitoes fed on malarial.

I never wanted to be a scientist per se. I wanted to be a naturalist.

Early AI was mainly based on logic. You're trying to make computers that reason like people. The second route is from biology: You're trying to make computers that can perceive and act and adapt like animals.

Think about multicellularity on this Earth. Every living thing originally came from bacteria. So, who do you think made up the rules for how to perform collective behaviors? It had to be the bacteria.

Nature [provides] with the excitement of the dance in the interest of the reproduction of the species.

Life, though, really means a cell membrane. In biology, what defines life is the ability to self-reproduce. And only things with cell membranes can reproduce on their own.

Homosexuality is against nature. Sexual expression is permitted only within marriage, between man and woman, male and female. Anything else is an abnormality and is against nature.

A self-balancing, 28-jointed adaptor-based biped; an electro-chemical reduction plant, integral with segregated stowages of special energy extracts in storage batteries, for subsequent actuation of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps, with motors attached; 62,000 miles of capillaries....

the ectoderm gives rise to the brain and nervous system and the superficial epidermis (skin) • the endoderm gives rise to the digestive system and the digestive glands • the mesoderm gives rise to muscle, bone, blood, the urogenital system, and connective tissue in general

Sex is a matter of biology, while gender is a matter of grammar, and there is no earthly reason why sex should be involved in gender distinctions.

his mother had explained this anomaly to him by saying that the biological basis of parenthood was essentially antithetical to reason, and as such could be seen as a whole system of inverted logic.

Unlike other diseases, the vulnerability to cancer lies in ourselves. We always thought of disease as exogenous, but research into cancer has turned that idea on its head - as long as we live, grow, age, there will be cancer.