Quotes About Biology

Dr. Melvin Connors sums it up nicely in just three words: culture stretches biology

Are you with women who only bleed monthly on their cycles?

The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.

My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.

The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.

The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance.

It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so long ago myself that I have no memory at all of that stage in my life.

Death is not a sudden-all-at-once affair; cells go down in sequence, one by one. You can, if you like, recover great numbers of them many hours after the lights have gone out, and grow them out in cultures. It takes hours, even days, before the irreversible word finally gets around to all the provinces.

How do people stay in love, anyway? Is it a choice? Or is it like those plants we studied in biology that mutate into something new and totally different but are still part of the same plant family?

Men were such victims to their own hormones. Machismo had killed a lot more people than PMS.

I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years.

For heaven's sake, was there anything of value in the Y chromosome? One ounce of intelligence to go with all that raging testosterone?

Evolution as such is no longer a theory for a modern author. It is as much a fact as that the earth revolves around the sun.

You can't really be scientifically literate if you don't understand evolution. And you can't be an educated member of society if you don't understand science.

Novel technologies and ideas that impinge on human biology and their perceived impact on human values have renewed strains in the relationship between science and society.

The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.

There's biology in everything, even when you're feeling spiritual.

The reason we call that pitch up and in is because the arms are attached to the shoulder.

The biological factors underlying race differences in sports have consequences for educational achievement, crime and sexual behavior.

Guys do not have a genetic blueprint that allows them to understand or love sports.

It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.

Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.

Cruelty and compassion come with the chromosomes

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.