Quotes About Biology

Telomeres, which shorten with each cell division, help determine how fast your cells age and when they die, depending on how quickly they wear down.

a single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist.

When all of these were considered together, a pattern emerged: mass extinctions seemed to take place at regular intervals of roughly twenty-six million years.

If you count people as an invasive species—the science writer Alan Burdick has called Homo sapiens "arguably the most successful invader in biological history"—the process goes back a hundred and twenty thousand years or so, to the period when modern humans first migrated out of Africa.

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers.

According to Lamarck, there was a force—the 'power of life'—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

At the heart of Darwin's theory

Their extended evolutionary history means that even groups of amphibians that, from a human perspective, seem to be fairly similar may, genetically speaking, be as different from one another as, say, bats are from horses.

Erwin estimated that the tropics were home to as many as thirty million species of arthropods.

These included mealworms; a hairless, newborn mouse, known as a "pinky"; and the hindquarters of an adult mouse

Wood storks cool off by defecating on their own legs. (In

Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier

so Durrant stroked the area around his cloaca

The teeth had roots the length of a human hand, and each one weighed nearly ten pounds.

Coral sex is a rare and amazing sight.

In Cuvier's day, the most prominent proponent of transformisme was his senior colleague at the Museum of Natural History, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. According to Lamarck, there was a force—the "power of life"—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

Female African clawed frogs, when injected with the urine of a pregnant woman, lay eggs within a few hours.)

His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.

stored inside of them, in frigid clouds of nitrogen, are cell lines representing nearly a thousand species.

It's so weird how people like hamsters so much better than squirrels," Veblen added, knowing that hamsters were hindgut fermenters and coprophagists, whereas squirrels were nothing of the sort.

One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.

no matter what people looked like they still had a desire to undress and cling to each other—the pull of biology

Amoebas at the start Were not complex; They tore themselves apart And started Sex.

The limitations of Aristotle's teachings were becoming apparent just decades after his death. It was only after scientists began rigorously applying his methods instead of his doctrines that astronomy and physics and ultimately biology would begin to turn themselves around.