Quotes About Biology

neurotransmitters, a paramecium

Earth's ancestral vertebrate had five digits, not six, and no Earthly animal had ever evolved with more than five. The alien's digits were arranged as four fingers flanked on either side by an opposable thumb.

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?

That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another — that, in fact, has never been observed.

Mr. Lockery—my biology teacher—says if dinosaurs were magically brought forward in time today, we'd have nothing to worry about. Dogs, wolves, and bears would make short work of tyrannosaurs." She nodded at Schrödinger, who was now padding across the floor in the opposite direction. "Big cats, too. They're faster, tougher, and brighter than anything that existed seventy million years ago. Everything is always ramping up, always escalating.

We've known since 2007 that there's superposition in chlorophyll, for instance. Photosynthesis has a ninety-five percent energy-transfer efficiency rate, which is better than anything we can engineer. Plants achieve that by using superposition to simultaneously try all the possible pathways between their light-collecting molecules and their reaction-center proteins so that energy is always sent down the most efficient route; it's a form of biological quantum computing.

Modern science cannot explain why the laws of physics are exactly balanced for animal life to exist.

In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust.

pain makes aggressive people more aggressive, while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals.

Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, "Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.

We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.

natural selection didn't design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.

This is a reminder that natural selection didn't design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.

It was infinitely easier to deal with the complications of intracellular life than the uncertainties of child rearing.

Y para estudiar en la universidad más tarde, donde me gradué en Biología y en Inglés.

You'd think BioMax could have improved on the defective male brain. . . .

I am also fascinated by how Darwin's theory of evolution applies to zombies.

In the present chapter, we tried to pinpoint the place in the brain where quantum action might be important to classical behaviour, and have apparently been driven to consider that it is through the cytoskeletal control of synaptic connections that this quantum/classical interface exerts its fundamental influence on the brain's behaviour.

The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas.

If amino acids can only be made where there is no free oxygen in the atmosphere, and porphyrins can only be made when there is free oxygen, then these things needed by every cell could not have existed together to form the first cell! What's more, many of these compounds are antagonistic. They will combine and destroy each other—anywhere except within a living cell.

What does this mean? Simply that to make DNA, you have to have DNA in the first place! You have to have the DNA code within the cell before you can make more DNA code. Without the complete code in the first place, there is no way to make the code necessary for every living cell!

Most right-handed people end up walking wide counterclockwise circles, because most right-handed people have left legs fractionally shorter than their right legs. Basic biology and geometry. I avoided that particular peril by stepping to the right of every tenth tree I came to, whether I thought I needed to or not.

A lesson learned long ago: the human brain was much more sensitive to side-to-side displacement than front-to-back. An evolutionary quirk, presumably, like most things.

Of course, there really is no chicken and egg problem; certainly there were eggs long before there were chickens.)