Quotes About Biology

I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy.

Of course, any scenario involving quantum mechanics in the origin of life three billion years ago remains highly speculative. But, as we have discussed, even classical explanations of life's origin are beset with problems: it isn't easy to make life from scratch!

So, could the solution to the mystery of how birds find their way around the globe lead to a revolution in biology? The

there is in fact no evidence that quantum mechanics is actually needed at all to account for consciousness—unlike other biological phenomena that we have considered in this book such as enzyme action or photosynthesis.

For days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.

For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.

In every cell in every body in every living thing, strings of words make sentences, meanings locked together

The human genome is a script, waiting for the amino actors, the protein players to strut and fret their hour.

Genes do not make an individual homosexual. They play their part, but so does the rest of the universe.

There's one thing this Matt Ridley bloke hasn't factored in," I said. Will looked up from his computer screen. "Oh yes?" "What if the genetically superior male is actually a bit of a dickhead?

I do think everyone would be a lot happier if we laid eggs on our own and could just have friendship and didn't need to mount and penetrate one another.

In exchange for the male being the ultimate couch potato, the female never has to wonder where her mate is on a Saturday evening. It turns out that some males do indeed amount to little more than an appendage.

See how (for instance) the cultural can be freed from the tyranny of the natural; gender from biology; how social change has occurred, and how it can change again; how to reveal and defend (without fetishizing) cultural difference; how to make visible the 'political unconscious' of our culture.

human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore's dilemma. Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overly disgustable cousins while consuming fewer dangerous microbes than their insufficiently disgustable cousins.

Evolution is a design process; it's just not an intelligent design process.

oxytocin made men more willing to hurt other teams (in a prisoner's dilemma game) because doing so was the best way to protect their own group.

happiness formula:" H = S + C + V The level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do. 34

Human nature is a complex mix of preparations for extreme selfishness and extreme altruism. Which side of our nature we express depends on culture and context. When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.

It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective.

And human babies, whose brains are so enormous that a child must be pushed out through the birth canal a year before he or she can walk are bets so huge that a woman can't even put her chips on the table by herself.

If the hive switch is real—if it's a group-level adaptation designed by group-level selection for group binding—then it must be made out of neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones.

As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin's ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play

Group selection may or may not be common among other animals, but it happens whenever individuals find ways to suppress selfishness and work as a team, in competition with other teams.