Quotes About Biology

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time.

he was mentally calculating my worth in terms of the breakdown of the chemical components of my body!

Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.

Instead of being assembled by genes, the worm was assembled by "memes," a word coined by British scientist and polemicist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are original ideas. Dawkins argued that they play the same role in cultural evolution as genes play in biology, getting passed along from person to person, surviving and adapting as they move.

Although there are occasions when it is more pronounced and awful and occasions when it is actually horrific, trauma does not just happen to a few unlucky people. It is the bedrock of our biology.

Every time you take a bite of food, consider that you are programming your biology for health or disease. When you eat healthy food, you are, in fact, eating medicine.

Marine ecology is complex and tightly interwoven.

Humans are the only mammals that consume milk past weaning, apparently in defiance of a basic rule of nature.

Form follows function in the created world, so far as I know, and the creature that functions, however bizarre, survives to perpetuate its form.

I believe that the human animal evolved as it did—with eyes in the front of its head, long legs, fingernails, eyeteeth—so that it could better chase down slower, stupider creatures, kill them, and eat them; that we are designed to find and eat meat—and only became better as a species when we learned to cook it.

Neither anguish nor the elation that love or art can bring about are devalued by understanding some of the myriad biological processes that make them what they are. Precisely the opposite should be true: Our sense of wonder should increase before the intricate mechanisms that make such magic possible. Feelings form the base for what humans have described for millennia as the human soul or spirit.

The immune system, the hypothalamus, the ventro-medial frontal cortices, and the Bill of Rights have the same root cause.

The self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state.

most of our decision making was shaped by somatic states related to punishment and reward. But

A secretor is somebody whose blood type appears in his or her body fluids as well as in the blood itself—handy if all you've got is a sweaty shirt or, as in this case, semen. A nonsecretor's blood type can only be ascertained through the blood.

Kids from small families grow about an inch taller than those from large families. This is true regardless of income and social class, because a body can't grow well while fighting off nine siblings' cold viruses.

We smugly assume that we are the tallest humans to ever grace the earth. Quite the contrary. The Cro-Magnon people living thirty thousand years ago were about our size and 10 percent more muscular. Hunting, gathering, when food sources were abundant, was an exquisitely healthy lifestyle.

The female is, as it were, a mutilated male, and the catamenia are semen, only not pure; for there is only one thing they have not in them, the principle of soul.

By a male animal we mean that which generates in another, and by a female that which generates in itself.

I thought this couldn't happen in astronomy. Isn't celestial mechanics supposed to be an exact science? So we poor backward biologists were always being told.

Some believe what separates men from animals is our ability to reason. Others say it's language or romantic love, or opposable thumbs. Living here in this lost world, I've come to believe it is more than our biology. What truly makes us human is our unending search, our abiding desire for immortality.

childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable. It is not fun. (Like shitting a pumpkin, a friend of mine told me when I inquired about the Great-Experience-You-Are-Missing.)

Anatomy is destiny.