Quotes About Biology

Putana thalassa pou se gamoun ta psaria." Meaning, "whore ocean where all the fish fuck each other.

Geneticists have confirmed that milk-drinking adults are the exception to the norm, identifying a deviant gene on the second chromo-some that causes lactase persistence. (The gene is SNP C/T13910, if you care.)

The body is the original asshole, it can put you on detention away from all pleasures, but still makes you write out the list of its needs, one hundred times. I will piss and shit. I will go hungry.

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint.

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land.

one of the deep mysteries of the origin of life is the almost indecent haste with which it arose on Earth.

The Prokaryote-Eukaryote Transition is Rare

Kangaroo farts, as fate would have it, don't contain methane.

Si se suman, por ejemplo, todos los hombres y mujeres del planeta, se comprobará que, por término medio, el humano adulto medio tiene una mama y un testículo…

Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there's not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago.

Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.

Right now we're in an arms race with the microbes, because, effectively, we're operating on the same scale that they are. The viruses are both our enemy and our arms manufacturer.

As Lynn Margulis writes: "All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years.

Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world's population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.

Build a tangled bank.

One gets the sense that Darwin would have been an avid Fitbit user.)

Evolutionary biologists have a word for this kind of borrowing, first proposed in an influential 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.

The typical imperative from biology is not Thou shalt... , but If ... then ... else.

Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes.

The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.

Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination.

Existen buenas razones evolutivas para que los miembros de una especie inteligente intenten vivir en paz.