Quotes About Genetics

Most psychologists believe that nature—genetics—accounts for about half of the reason why we tend to act the way we do. His point is simply that there are certain times and places and conditions when much of that can be swept away, that there are instances where you can take normal people from good schools and happy families and good neighborhoods and powerfully affect their behavior merely by changing the immediate details of their situation. This

Whatever mechanism passes on speech patterns probably passes on behavioral and emotional patterns as well.

If diet and exercise didn't explain the findings, then what about genetics?

Inspiration does not come genetically or automatically. Neither is it continuously present.

Ultimately, we'll help the people we discriminate against if we try to understand more about them; genetics will lead to a world where there is a sympathy for the underdog.

What makes some butterflies have such beautiful colors on their wings, and others not? The plain ones were born of parents who didn't know how to paint.

Our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right from the start to environmental stimuli beyond our control.

We applaud the great strides made through genetic identification research, however, we do not condone the use of such information for eugenics and related purposes...The question of what lives are worth living is now answered in doctors' offices instead of in Nazis' T-4 programme. The forces of normalisation seem to be gaining ground.

Is DNA destiny?

We have this bias toward attractiveness because of out selfish-gene history: the unconscious mandate to reproduce, reproduce, reproduce, so that we as species don't go extinct. This deep-seated urge is so strong that studies have shown that men's mating motives are triggered by the mere presence of attractive women, even when they are trying to focus on something else.

Although all the characteristics of living things are dependent on both genetic and environmental factors, the differences between two individuals in their attributes may be due to either one or the other component (or both). That is, a difference in either genes or environment can generate a developmental difference arising from the interplay that always takes place between two factors within developing organisms.

We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.

Cancer will be understood properly only by positioning it within the great sweep of evolutionary history.

One amino acid does not a protein make-let alone a being.

All life is nucleic acid; the rest is commentary.

One large study (127 sets of identical twins and 111 sets of fraternal twins) recently found that in 51 percent of the identical sets both twins had ADD, while only 33 percent of those in the fraternal group shared the ADD diagnosis.

raises a fundamental question: are we also evolving genetically? Medical research, added to a deepening analysis of the three billion nucleotide letters of the human genome, has revealed that evolution is indeed still occurring

We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners, champions of the truth and hypocrites – not because humanity has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal, but because of the way our species originated across millions of years of biological evolution.

no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history. Species may have vast potential for material and mental progress but they lack any immanent purpose or guidance from agents beyond their immediate environment or even an evolutionary goal toward which their molecular architecture automatically steers them.

primary mental abilities and perceptual and motor skills are the most influenced by heredity, while personality traits are the least influenced. If

A great deal remains to be learned about the genetic control of brain development

How you lose or keep your hair depends on how wisely you choose your parents.

If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter.

Recent research by neuroscientists adds a twist here. Evidence exists that the human brain is "hardwired" (genetically programmed) for belief. Whether, if true, this wiring reflects an Intelligence beyond the universe depends on one's worldview. As Lewis states, what we learn from evidence "depends on the kind of philosophy we bring" to the evidence.