Quotes About Genetics

Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your DNA.

Exactly what was wrong with her? And could she pass it on to any children she may have?

With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears.

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together.

Your genes want you to get pregnant, and hormones are their magic wand.

Genetic differences in thermoregulation—efficient/inefficient, left side/right side, you name it—are surprisingly large and well worth paying attention to, given our seemingly permanent posture of fighting extremism in the Middle East. Dianna

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.

someone who knows a little more than diddly. I'm scheduled to meet with the Center's wildlife genetics staff, upstairs in the Long Speak Room, which is an amusingly apt name for a government conference room (except that it isn't—a realization that will dawn when I take note of the plaque by the door, which reads: Longs Peak Room).

Yet the evidence, from twin studies, from the children of immigrants and from adoption studies, is now staring us in the face: people get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not from their parents.

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both.

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 think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheimer's disease, to discover the secrets of human history, to reconstruct the organisms that populated the pre-Cambrian seas – these seem to me to be immense blessings.

The genome is as complicated and indeterminate as ordinary life, because it is ordinary life. This should come as a relief. Simple determinism, whether of the genetics or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.

The influence upon our intelligence of events that happened in the womb is three times as great as anything our parents did to us after our birth.

They may direct the construction of the body and brain in the womb, but then they set about dismantling and rebuilding what they have made almost at once—in response to experience.

É claro que não há um único gene, mas há algo infinitamente mais enaltecedor e magnífico: toda uma naturza humana, flexivelmente pré-ordenada em nossos cromossomos e indiossincrática de cada um de nós. Todo mundo tem uma única e distina natureza endógena. Um self.

Studies of criminal records of adoptees in Denmark revealed a strong correlation with the criminal record of the biological parent and a very small correlation with the criminal record of the adopting parent – and even that vanished when controlled for peer-group effects, whereby the adopting parents were found to live in more, or less, criminal neighbourhoods according to whether they themselves were criminals.

You are descended not from your mother but from her ovary. Nothing that happened to her body or her mind in her life could affect your nature

In fact the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, which became known to the world in 1900, ought to have killed eugenics stone dead.

A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience. Why?

It is pure fatalism, undiluted by environmental variability. Good living, good medicine, healthy food, loving families or great riches can do nothing about. Your fate is in your genes. Like a pure Augustinian, you go to heaven by God's grace, not by good works. It reminds us that the genome, great book that it is, may give us the bleakest kind of self-knowledge: the knowledge of our destiny, not the kind of knowledge that you can do something about, but the curse of Tiresias.

evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory put it, anyone who thinks he or she can assign a function to every letter in the human genome should be asked why an onion needs a genome that is about five times larger than a person's. Who's resorting

It makes more sense to see the body as serving the needs of the genes than vice versa. Bottom–up.