Quotes About Biology

Sunlight triggers a cutoff of melatonin, bringing on wakefulness. (Indoor light—particularly the light from tablets and smartphones—can also suppress melatonin, but nowhere near as dramatically as sunlight.) This is why night shift workers who drive home in the morning through sunlight and then struggle to fall asleep may find relief by buying amber-lensed Bono-style glasses that block the sun's blue light wavelengths. NSMRL

One woman confessed that her group had passed comment on the "extremely large genitalia" of their cadaver. (What she perhaps didn't realize is that the embalming fluid pumped into the veins expands the body's erectile tissues, with the result that male anatomy lab cadavers may be markedly better endowed in death than they were in life.)

Californians are like, 'Lions are everywhere now!' What's on the rise are home security cameras. Doorbell cameras are the mammograms of wildlife biology.

Edison believed that living beings were animated and controlled by "life units," smaller-than-microscopic entities that inhabited each and every cell and, upon death, evacuated the premises, floated around awhile, and eventually reassembled to animate a new personality—possibly another man, possibly an ocelot or a sea cucumber.

Human saliva contains histatins, which speed wound closure independent of their antibacterial action.

Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history. Lunch is an opening act.

The human brain most resembles that of Jersey cows at about six months."*

there are naturally large individual differences in the chemical makeup of people's saliva.

THE GREAT IRONY is that in the beginning, the gut was all there was. "We're basically a highly evolved earthworm surrounding the intestinal tract," Khoruts commented as we drove away from his clinic the last day I was there. Eventually, the food processor had to have a brain attached to help it look for food, and limbs to reach that food. That increased its size, so it needed a circulatory system to distribute the fuel that powered the limbs.

How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies? It is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.

Men and women . . . do not ingest nutrients, they consume food. More than that, they . . . eat meals. Although to the single-minded biochemist or physiologist, this aspect of human behavior may appear to be irrelevant or even frivolous, it is nevertheless a deeply ingrained part of the human situation." The

Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history. Lunch is an opening act. M

It's like a cat trying to imagine the taste of sugar. Cats, unlike dogs and other omnivores, can't taste sweetness.

Nature will castigate those who don't masticate' may hold some truth," concluded the paper, which appeared in the October 1980 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. On the whole-peanut diet, the subjects excreted 18 percent of the fat they'd consumed. When they switched to peanut butter, only 7 percent escaped in their stool.

The human liver is a boss-looking organ. It's glossy, aerodynamic, Olympian.

No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.

On human decay and what can be done about it

the little-known fact that the last portion of a man's ejaculate contains a natural spermicide- not intended to kill his own soldiers, obviously, but to annihilate the seed of any who come after him.

YOU NEVER THINK about the weight of your organs inside you. Your heart is a half-pound clapper hanging off the end of your aorta. Your arms burden your shoulders like buckets on a yoke. The colon uses the uterus as a beanbag chair. Even the weight of your hair imparts a sensation on your scalp. In weightlessness, all this disappears. You organs float inside your torso.* The result is a subtle physical euphoria, an indescribable sense of being freed from something you did not realize was there.

Catfish are basically swimming tongues

I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital...the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins

I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.