Quotes About Biology

Natural selection is an inanimate process, devoid of consciousness, yet is a tireless refiner, an ingenious craftsman.

They will, on the one hand, have sex with just about anything that moves, given an easy chance, like males in a low-MPI species. On the other hand, when it comes to finding a female for a long-term joint venture, discretion makes sense; males can undertake only so many ventures over a lifetime, so the genes that the partner brings to the project—genes for robustness, brains, whatever—are worth scrutinizing. The

Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species.

A female in a high-MPI species may seek signs of generosity, trustworthiness, and, especially, an enduring commitment to her in particular.

emotions are just evolution's executioners.

natural selection doesn't even care about our short-term happiness.

However the genes get the job done, it is selfish from their point of view, even if it seems altruistic at the level of the organism.

Almost all of the cells in the human body are sterile. Only the sex cells—our "queen bees"—get to make copies of themselves for posterity. That the zillions of sterile cells act as if they were perfectly content with this arrangement is doubtless grounded in the fact that the r between them and the sex cells is 1;

Natural selection doesn't "want" us to be happy, after all; it just "wants" us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.

All women alive today are the genetic descendants of the more cautious of female ancestors, not their more reckless contemporaries. Men, on the other hand, are genetically programmed to be urgent and single-minded about one-off sex. In past generations, men who were not urgent and persuasive were less successful reproductively than those who were. All men alive today are the genetic descendants of the more urgent of male ancestors, not their more complacent contemporaries.

Those men In Scene 34 who decided not to rape the young girl did not live to produce more children who would inherit their compassion, whereas one of the men who raped her did produce a child to inherit his lack of compassion. It is by this process of weeding the genes that do not enhance reproductive success that evolution has saddled the majority of men with the propensity to behave as rapists in the appropriate situation.

As for female mink, if they do not experience physical trauma at the male's hands, they do not ovulate.

Often, a woman is already pregnant when she settles down with a long-term partner, and occasionally this partner is not the father of her child. Sometimes he knows this and takes on the woman and her child anyway, for reasons we have discussed, but sometimes he doesn't know. The woman is least likely to be unfaithful in the weeks or months preceding the conception of her second child. Subsequent children, however, are more and more likely to be the product of infidelity.

The more men and women drink, the more they both seek intercourse — or, at least, the less they resist it.

Since the aim of masturbation is to give the male an edge over others in sperm warfare, he gains most if he masturbates but can dissuade those around him from doing so. That way, he gains competitive benefits that his rivals do not. The world-wide tendency to criticise, even victimise, other people for masturbating while continuing to masturbate oneself is thus as strategic as masturbation itself.

This conclusion does not mean, as people often assume, that a woman should therefore seek to be raped. On the contrary, it is reproductively important to the woman that her body collect genes from only the most successful of rapists. If she conceives to an inept rapist, doomed quickly to be caught and to suffer social retribution and incarceration, her male descendants would inherit unsuccessful characteristics.

Why had Althea's crazed words affected Etta like this? Then the answer came to him: she was pregnant. Women always behaved strangely when they were pregnant.

My wife could turn to me and she may say, 'Why do you love me?' And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, 'Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors.'

Everyone knows that for a woman to conceive in the act of coition she, as well as the man. must be satisfied. Is that not true? Of corse it is true.

One gram of moss from the forest floor, a piece about the size of a muffin, would harbour 150,000 protozoa, 132,000 tardigrades, 3,000 springtails, 800 rotifers, 500 nematodes, 400 mites, and 200 fly larvae. These numbers tell us something about the astounding quantity of life in a handful of moss.

The edge of a leaf is not simply uneven; there is a glossary of specific words for the appearance of a leaf margin: dentate for large, coarse teeth, serrate for a sawblade edge, serrulate if the teeth are fine and even, ciliate for a fringe along the edge. A leaf folded by accordion pleats is plicate, complanate when flattened as if squashed between two pages of a book. Every nuance of moss architecture has a word.

Carbon dioxide plus water combined in the presence of light and chlorophyll in the beautiful membrane-bound machinery of life yields sugar and oxygen.

The genus Dicranum has undergone considerable adaptive radiation, that is, the evolution of many new species from a common ancestor

Perpetual growth is simply not compatible with natural law