Quotes About Biology

Regardless of your sex, if you have elevated testosterone levels in your blood, you're more likely to think a face with a neutral expression is instead looking threatening.

Genes are effectively one-dimensional. If you write down the sequence of A, C, G and T, that's kind of what you need to know about that gene. But proteins are three-dimensional. They have to be because we are three-dimensional, and we're made of those proteins. Otherwise we'd all sort of be linear, unimaginably weird creatures.

Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating.

Ever since then, all descendant vertebrates have had the forward end of the digestive system and the forward end of the respiratory system very much involved with each other. This manifests itself in the human body with a crossing of the two systems in the throat.

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.

We have spoken of beings so low in the scale that the individuals throughout their whole existence are not sufficiently specialized to be distinctively plant or animal: yet these are definite life in simpler shape.

Dinosaurs are built just like birds - they can squat down, they can get up. Mammals, when we lay down, we throw our legs out to the sides - birds cannot do that. Dinosaurs could not do that either.

In 'The Violinist's Thumb,' I talk about the poignancy of cells leaking across the placenta into both the mother and the child.

I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.

Some spider silks are really strong, but not all of them are. The ones that are really strong can actually rival steel and approach the tensile strength of Kevlar. Thus far, the dragline silk seems to be the strongest.

It certainly would have been adaptive for ancestral man to have a chubby wife during stressful times of famine. Not only would she have had more calories to burn, and thus more energy and endurance, but since fat stores estrogen, she would have remained fertile for longer.

Most people, even most doctors, learn that the placenta is a nice, tight seal that prevents anything in the mother's body from invading the fetus, and vice-versa. That's mostly true. But the placenta doesn't seal off the baby perfectly, and every so often, something slips across.

is biology destiny? And the answer is yes, sometimes it is. Women who have the fewest choices of all exercise their right to abortion the most.

When we see something we want to eat, when we receive praise, and even when we hug our children, our mouths literally water," says Huron. In any type of pleasure state, our mouths produce more saliva. Our tongue moves more fluidly within the mucous membranes of our mouth, creating what Huron calls "oral wetness cues." Oral wetness is a subtle and involuntary reflex; however, it broadcasts our emotional state.

In the late 1970s, an intriguing diagnosis of the species problem was given by the biologist Michael Ghiselin and the philosopher David Hull . They argued that the problem as traditionally formulated rested on a mistaken assumption, namely that a biological species is a kind, or type, of thing. Instead, they argued that a species is a complex individual; that is, a particular thing.

its adult size by nine months and nearly three-quarters by two years of age, a baby's head must be large and grow rapidly to accommodate the rest of the body's growth. On average, the brain reaches its maximum size in girls at about eleven and a half years of age and fourteen and a half on average for boys—but again it will not be fully mature in terms of its internal development and executive functioning until about twenty-five

Just because humans have become -advanced- enough to vaccinate their young, write histories, and speculate about our origins, this does not mean that evolutionary processes have ceased to operate.

Just because humans have become "advanced" enough to vaccinate their young, write histories, and speculate about our origins, this does not mean that evoutionary processes have ceased to operate.

We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn't changed much... We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time.

The supersession of dualism in biology begins to occur in this science at the moment when the 'time' factor is taken into consideration.

Ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's time.

During its development the animal passes through all stages of the animal kingdom. The foetus is a representation of all animal classes in time.

A young woman in her teens has about 300,000 eggs in her ovaries. By the time she is menopausal, none are left.

Women aren't physically afraid of men; women are genetically afraid of men. It's happened for such a long time.