Quotes About Genetics

A "neurobiological" or "genetic" or "developmental" explanation for a behavior is just shorthand, an expository convenience for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective.

K. Kidd et al., An Historical Perspective on 'The World-Wide Distribution of Allele Frequencies at the Human Dopamine D4 Receptor Locus,' Human Genetics, 133 (2014): 431.

Our prototypical behavior has occurred. How was it influenced by events when the egg and sperm that formed that person joined, creating their genome—the chromosomes, the sequences of DNA—destined to be duplicated in every cell in that future person's body? What role did those genes play in causing that behavior?

What's a heritability score? "What does a gene do?" is at least two questions. How does a gene influence average levels of a trait? How does a gene influence variation among people in levels of that trait?

If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited. If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritability.

While average finger number is an inherited trait, the heritability of finger number is low—genes don't explain individual differences much.

Back to mutations. Can there be mutations in DNA stretches constituting promoters? Yes

In the 1970s Allan Wilson and Mary-Claire King at Berkeley correctly theorized that the evolution of genes is less important than the evolution of regulatory sequences upstream of genes (and thus how the environment regulates genes). Reflecting that, a disproportionate share of genetic differences between chimps and humans are in genes for TFs.

This is huge. Saying that a gene "decides" when it is transcribed is like saying that a recipe decides when a cake is baked. Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.

Stoutness and slimness seem to be matters of predestination

Then you can go home to the puppeteer worlds and tell them that mucking with human breeding habits is a chancy business. Tell them that enough Teela Browns could make a hash of all the laws of probability. Even basic physics is nothing more than probability at the atomic level. Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.

he doesn't have the normal share of miterosis.

In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.

I have a hunch that the unknown sequences of DNA will decode into copyright notices and patent protections.

The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.

Natural selection must be replaced by eugenical artificial selection. This idea constitutes the sound core of eugenics, the applied science of human betterment.

Genetic engineering is a result of science advancement, so I don't think that in itself is bad.

What more powerful form of study of mankind could there be than to read our own instruction book?

Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.

DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.

The science of genetics is in a transition period, becoming an exact science just as the chemistry in the times of Lavoisier, who made the balance an indispensable implement in chemical research.

Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation.