Quotes About Biology

As delightful as the Just So explanations are of how spots, stripes, humps and horns came to be, biology can now tell us stories about butterflies, zebras and leopards that I contend are every bit as enchanting as Kipling's fairy tales. What's more, they offer some simple, elegant truths that deepen our understanding of all animal forms, including ourselves.

But in just the past hundred years or so, we have turned the tables and taken control of biology. Smallpox, a virus that killed as many as 300 million people in the first part of the twentieth century (far more than in all wars combined) has not merely been tamed but has been eradicated from the planet.

Darwin's great advantage over Paley and other thinkers of his generation was his grasp of the immensity of time. His

Albert Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for the discovery of vitamin C, once offered the opinion that "life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.

So neurons talk to each other by squirting electrically charged molecules from the axon of one to a dendrite on another.

Short-term memories were associated with synapses being strengthened, while long-term memories came from entirely new synapses being created.

For four - fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pondscum.

Time is an experience in consciousness. It is metabolized as our biological clock. Changing our experience of time can reverse aging.

It is time to lay to rest the notion that germs jump into people and cause diseases.

So the time line of when we consider a fetus 'human' is arbitrary after conception.

And you cycle throughout so that you do about five to six cycles throughout the night. And we spend more time in REM later on in the night than we do earlier on.

For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.

I've never been able to grow an organ back," Lana said. "Last time I tried... Let's just hope you don't end up with whip eyes.

The fundamental landscape of biology is undergoing a major upheaval, much as it did in the first decades of the 20th Century. This upheaval will take time to fully reveal its implications.

Ä°nsan, yüzü k?zaran ya da k?zarmas? gereken tek hayvand?r.

my point being, what if my attacks are enterly unrelated attributable in fact to something entirely else, perhaps for instance just warning shocks brought on by my own crumbling biology, tiny flakes of unknown chemical origin already burning holes through the fabric of my mind, dismantling memories, undoing even the strongest powers of imagination and reason? how then do you fly from that path?

All I hope for is one moment of rational thought and a shot at action before I'm lost to a great saddening madness, pithed at the hands of my own stumbling biology. [Johnny Truant]

Cuando experimentamos el miedo, estamos utilizando una herencia animal común, no exclusiva de los primates ni, tan siquiera, de los vertebrados. El miedo se remonta directamente al cerebro reptiliano.

On STDs] This be Nature's way of recommending monogamy.

Erections, as we all know, come to the teenager on a plate.

Depressions are indeed one of the states a capitalist economy can fall into. An economic theory that does not incorporate that possibility is as relevant as a theory of biology that excludes the risk of extinctions, a theory of the body that excludes the risk of heart attacks, or a theory of bridge-building that excludes the risk of collapse.

Ah, but we are women as well as teachers... We have needs that nature has given us fr the very preservation of our species

Whatever the nature of organizing relations may be,' J. Needham wrote in 1932, 'they form the central problem of biology, and biology will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognized. The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.

There is, for example, the hoary problem why the skin on the soles of our feet is so much thicker than elsewhere. If the thickening occurred after birth as a result of stress, wear and tear, there would be no problem. But the skin of the sole is already thickened in the embryo which has never walked, bare-foot or otherwise.