Quotes About Biology

To look is a territorial activity. It is to observe one thing after another within a bounded space-as though in time it can all be seen. Academic fields are such territories. Sometimes everything in a field finally does get looked at and defined-that is, placed in its proper location. Mechanics and rhetoric are such fields. Physics may prove to be. Biological mysteries fall away at an astonishing rate. It becomes increasingly difficult to find something new to look at.

this sudden appearance of Homo sapiens is attributable to the rapid mutation of only seventeen brain-building genes. A scant few, really.

from any anatomical disgust

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?

Q: What's the difference between an enzyme and a hormone? A: You can't hear an enzyme.

Thinking on this issue tends to fall into two camps: either race is a social category that has nothing to do with the biological causes of disease, or race is a biological category that causes differences in disease. Both approaches fail to grasp the way in which race as a social grouping can affect health—because of different life experiences based on race, not because of race-based genetic difference.

There is less genetic variation in the entire human race than in a typical wild population of chimpanzees.

race was presumed to be an essential biological category. This is not a happy-ending tale of science overcoming racism.

Because the children of two people from different races were fertile, Buffon's rule meant that all human beings belonged to the same species.

So let me be clear: race is not a biological category that naturally produces health disparities because of genetic differences. Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people's health.

Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

Not content with ignoring the normal requirements of biology, the cat was also in clear breach of the laws of physics.

There is of course an extremely good reason for wearing shorts when you're young, even in the depths of an English winter (and they were colder then, weren't they?). According to Wired magazine, we can't expect to see self-repairing fabrics until about the year 2020, but ever since we emerged from whatever trees or swamps we lived in five million years ago, we have had self-repairing knees.

You're right, a spleen is a strange thing-we technically don't need one, but maybe spleens are kept in our bodies in case we mutate or evolve, and if we grow wings or tentacles we need to have the spleen in place in order for them to work.

Inside the "cells" there were no normal-looking organelles, no nuclei, endoplasmic reticulum, mitochondria, or Golgi bodies.

sometimes she didn't know her own strength, and she didn't understand that people were a lot more fragile than she was. Sometimes she was rougher than she intended, you see. Did you know that a full-grown female chimpanzee is three to five times stronger than a man?

The Internet is indeed a non-state form of social control — but one that is severely dysfunctional. The ugliness on the Internet is not white noise. It lasts forever. It cannot be ignored. It causes terrible things happen in the real world. The Internet is a place where our darkest evolutionary biology runs riot.

We compared the domesticated dog with the hyena

I had a botfly bite once, on my forehead. Felt like a mosquito at first. It began to swell and turn red. Hurt like the devil. A month later it erupted, and inch-long botfly maggots started squirming out and dropping to the ground.

Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.

The real excitement of being a girl - of being, that is, a woman in embryo - was that life was such a wonderful gamble. You didn't know what was going to happen to you. That was what made being a woman so exciting. No worry about what you should be or do - Biology would decide. You were waiting for The Man, and when the man came, he would change your entire life, you can say what you like, that is an exciting point of view to hold at the threshold of life.

Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being." She cleared her throat again. "Biology, you see. It's because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live.

My kidneys were expecting orange juice. Silly kidneys.