Quotes About Biology

The cell contains highly organized physical structures, called intracellular organelles.

To summarize, the body is actually a social order of about 100 trillion cells organized into different functional structures, some of which are called organs.

In geopolitics, as in biology, expiration dates are never visible.

De acuerdo con las reglas usuales de la biología, los seres humanos también deberíamos ser clasificados como chimpancés (Pan sapiens), y es solo nuestra inclinación natural a vernos como algo especial la que nos lleva a clasificarnos como un género distinto, el Homo.

Biological determinism is a blight on science. It implies that the way things are is the way they must be. [...] This position is wrong, both empirically and morally.

Some physiologists will have it that the stomach is a mill; others, that it is a fermenting vat; others, again that it is a stew-pan; but in my view of the matter, it is neither a mill, a fermenting vat nor a stew-pan, but a stomach gentlemen, a stomach.

Like synaptic plasticity, "neurogenesis is clearly involved in our interactions with our environment, both emotionally and cognitively," says neuroscientist Fred Gage, of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

The result is that any girl who starts early and has a lifetime of menstrual regularity with few pregnancies (lean, athletic girls and women often do not menstruate regularly) has approximately twice as many periods and so twice as many bouts of hormone cycling as hunter-gatherer girls.

our short guts mean we can't eat grass, and this is no small thing, especially if you consider that two million years of evolutionary history occurred in savannas and grasslands. Grasslands are enormously productive in biological terms; that is, they efficiently convert solar energy into carbohydrates. But that energy is wrapped in the building block of all grasses, cellulose, and humans cannot digest it, not at all. Our primary method for overcoming our

Unlike humans, rodents seem to inherently enjoy physical activity, and Cotman's mice ran several kilometers a night. They were divided into four groups: mice running for two, four, or seven nights, and one control group with no running wheel. When their brains were injected with a molecule that binds to BDNF and scanned, not only did the scans of the running rodents show an increase in BDNF over controls, but the farther each mouse ran, the higher the levels were.

like every other aspect of our psychology, motivation is biological.

By showing that exercise sparks the master molecule of the learning process, Cotman nailed down a direct biological connection between movement and cognitive function.

Noggin is a protein that forms the skull.

In fact, biology is chaos. Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process. Life does not choose the logically best design to meet a new situation. It adapts what already exists...The result, unlike the clean straight lines of logic, is often irregular, messy.

biology is chaos. Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process.

Once it is common, cooperation is evolutionarily stable. The problem is how it becomes common in the first place, because defection is also stable.

In six thousand years, you could never grow wings on a reptile. With sixty million, however, you could have feathers, too.

The more you exercise, the more tissues you can feed and the more toxic waste you can remove.

Stress hormones can do some truly nasty things to your brain if boatloads of the stuff are given free access to your central nervous system.

The mammalian brain's functions include what researchers call the "four F's": fighting, feeding, feeling and ... reproductive behavior.

Mammals, apparently, were pretty funny to a carnivorous plant.

To an extent that has surprised us and the rest of the scientific community, telomeres do not simply carry out the commands issued by your genetic code. Your telomeres, it turns out, are listening to you. They absorb the instructions you give them. The way you live can, in effect, tell your telomeres to speed up the process of cellular aging. But it can also do the opposite.

Hayflick limit, the natural limit that human cells have for dividing, and the stop switch happens to be telomeres that have become critically short. Are

Why do people age differently? One reason is cellular aging.