Quotes About Biology

testosterone increases the excitability of amygdaloid neurons, and glucocorticoids decrease excitability of prefrontal cortical neurons.

when women are ovulating, their fusiform face areas respond more to faces, with the ("emotional") vmPFCs responding more to men's faces in particular.

Schultz's group has shown that the magnitude of an anticipatory dopamine rise reflects two variables. First is the size of the anticipated reward. A monkey has learned that a light

Josh Greene and Jonathan Cohen of Princeton wrote an extremely clearheaded piece on this, "For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything." Where neuroscience and the rest of biology change nothing is in the continued need to protect the endangered from the dangerous.30

So dopamine is more about anticipation of reward than about reward itself.

Back to mutations. Can there be mutations in DNA stretches constituting promoters? Yes

In the 1970s Allan Wilson and Mary-Claire King at Berkeley correctly theorized that the evolution of genes is less important than the evolution of regulatory sequences upstream of genes (and thus how the environment regulates genes). Reflecting that, a disproportionate share of genetic differences between chimps and humans are in genes for TFs.

The frontal cortex is the last brain region to fully mature, with the most evolutionarily recent subparts the very last. Amazingly, it's not fully online until people are in their midtwenties.

Is it actually the case that no one can tell you with any degree of authority when the life of a human being actually begins? No, it is not. Treating the question as some sort of grand mystery, or expressing or feigning uncertainty about it, may be politically expedient, but it is intellectually indefensible. Modern science long ago resolved the question. We actually know when the life of a new human individual begins.

It is virtually impossible to understand how biology works outside the context of environment.

This is huge. Saying that a gene "decides" when it is transcribed is like saying that a recipe decides when a cake is baked. Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.

While this neurobiology is mighty impressive, the brain is not where a behavior 'begins'. It's merely the final common pathway by which all the factors in the chapters to come converge and create behavior.

I suspect that it's because their belief system has segmented their world into a moral in-group and out-group so decisively that they're unconflicted about what they're doing. To them, the people they're killing are scarcely human. I think you share my concern about bad ideas being the malware that can get even psychologically normal people, biologically normal people, to do the unthinkable. How do you view this, in the context of your research?

This business of humanity having two different sexes makes for all kinds of headaches.

brachiating hominids.

dealt with biology, and Fistarteh-thuktun had studied it before. Hierarchies of plant life to the left, animal life to the right. Tiny, ancient single-nucleated life at the bottom, scaling toward complex warm-blooded air breathers at the top. Simple sketches at every level.

he doesn't have the normal share of miterosis.

Richard either didn't hear me, or chose to ignore it. Smart, handsome, junior high science teacher, degree in preternatural biology, what more could i ask for? Give me a minute and I'd think of something.

He said, softly, "Sorry, Jimmy." He still didn't cry. I would have cried. But then, women have more chemicals in their tear ducts. It makes us tear up easier than men. Honest.

My first class is biology. I can't find it and get my first demerit for wandering the hall. It is 8:50 in the morning. Only 699 days and 7 class periods until graduation.

One of the seeds has split its shell and reaches a white hand upward. An apple tree growing from an apple seed growing in an apple. I show the little plantseed to Ms. Keen. She gives me extra credit. David rolls his eyes. Biology is so cool.

The room does not smell like apple. It smells like frog juice, a cross between a nursing home and potato salad. The Back Row pays attention. Cutting dead frogs is cool.

Cutting dead frogs is cool.

you have a better chance to get pregnant if you keep your knees way up and stay that way as long as you can.