Quotes About Biology

To me it was plain silly. It is so obvious that life works in terms of species rather than individuals. The individual just has to be born, to develop to the point at which it can procreate, and then to fall away into death to make way for its successors, and humans are no exception whatever they may fancy.

We are all of us, men and women both, the creatures of culture: we do and feel what our societies ask us to, and the demands put upon us are not always consistent or precisely correlated with biology.

Nadie vive una emoción nada más que en su «corazón», o en su «mente». En cambio, la persona vive la emoción como reacciones químicas en el cuerpo y el cerebro. Estas reacciones químicas ocurren tanto a nivel de los órganos, estómago, corazón, grandes músculos y demás, como a nivel celular.

The renowned Russian geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky once remarked, "All species are unique,

The brain is the hungriest organ in the body, with a metabolic rate sixteen times that of muscle tissue per unit weight. In modern humans, it accounts for 20 to 25 percent of an adult's energy needs.

Incidentally because the gastrointestinal track is metabolically greedy any reduction in its size would have freed up energy for other demands, such as those of a bigger brain.

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: "We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."36

In the last 20,000 years, our brains have shrunk 10 percent—from 1,500 cubic centimeters down to 1,350—a loss of the volume of a tennis ball.

Once we know the rules that human vision uses to decode messages about fitness, we can use those rules to send the messages we want. Consider jeans.

This broader notion of fitness is called "inclusive fitness" to distinguish it from the notion of "personal fitness," which we have discussed until now.50 The two notions are not at odds. Inclusive fitness simply recognizes a broader spectrum of strategies by which genes muscle into the next generation.

The sclera—the white of the eye—affects attraction. No other primates have white scleras. Their scleras are dark, hiding their direction of gaze from predators, and from members of their own species—for whom a stare can be a threat.40 The white sclera of the human eye advertises gaze direction, making it a tool for social communication. It also advertises emotion and health.

When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit.

Life comes only from life.

Why would anyone believe it is possible to lay down such barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called insecticides, but biocides.

Our cells engage in protein production, and many of those proteins are enzymes responsible for the chemistry of life.

Life creates conditions conducive to life.

Great attention gets paid to rainforests because of the diversity of life there. Diversity in the oceans is even greater.

Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body - you thoughts, your actions, your food - the thing you feed your life.

I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.

What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.

Life originated in the sea, and about eighty percent of it is still there.

There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation.

Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.

She is oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus.