Quotes About Genetics

We are all born with a unique genetic blueprint, which lays out the basic characteristics of our personality as well as our physical health and appearance... And yet, we all know that life experiences do change us.

Your genome sequence will become a vital part of your medical record, thereby providing critical information about how to optimize your wellness.

We need 10,000 genomes, not 100, to start to understand the link between genetics, disease and wellness.

Studies of immigration show that this resistance to heart disease is not just something in African or Chinese genes. When people move from low-risk to high-risk areas, disease rates skyrocket as they adopt Western diets and lifestyles.

When I was pregnant, I prayed that my daughter would have brown, green, or grey eyes.

I arrive a month premature, with my dad's brains but not much else.

I'm lucky. I've got pretty good genes.

I discovered I'm 60 per cent Viking. Well, more Danish, I suppose. I'm also two-and-a-half per cent Neanderthal.

Biologically, I'm lucky - an angular face and dark colouring which shows up well on camera.

Manic depression in general is something that runs in my family, and it's something that I battle with.

Anatomy is destiny.

My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don't need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.

A lot of the differences between people have biologic underpinnings. Now, we have a dogma of egalitarianism. Everyone's the same.

DNA, like a tape recording, carries a message in which there are specific instructions for a job to be done.

In college, I had an early introduction to classical genetics from Professor Dan Lindsley, also an extraordinary teacher who influenced me greatly.

If we can make it look like we are not really responsible for our fate, for what happens to us in life, then our apparent powerlessness is more palatable. For this reason we become attracted to certain narratives: it is genetics that determines much of what we do; we are just products of our times; the individual is just a myth; human behavior can be reduced to statistical trends.

Essentials of Physical Anthropology

A high incidence of 7R, associated with impulsivity and novelty seeking, is the legacy of humans who made the greatest migrations in human history.

Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies

As you study the trait in more environments, the heritability score will decrease. This is recognized by Bouchard: "These conclusions [derived from a behavior genetics study] can be generalized, of course only to new populations exposed to a range of environments similar to those studied."31

In other words, the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment.

EVOLUTION RESTS ON three steps: (a) certain biological traits are inherited by genetic means; (b) mutations and gene recombination produce variation in those traits; (c) some of those variants confer more "fitness" than others. Given those conditions, over time the frequency of more "fit" gene variants increases in a population.

Women prefer the smell of moderately related over unrelated men. And in a study of 160 years of data concerning every couple in Iceland (which is a mecca for human geneticists, given its genetic and socioeconomic homogeneity), the highest reproductive success arose from third- and fourth-cousin marriages.

Amazingly, prison sentences for murderers have now been lessened in at least two cases because it was argued that the criminal, having the "warrior gene" variant of MAO-A, was inevitably fated to be uncontrollably violent. OMG.