Quotes About Genetics

The Prokaryote-Eukaryote Transition is Rare

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.

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

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.

It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation).

Behavioral genetics confirms that aggressive tendencies can be inherited, and that gives natural selection material to work with in shifting the average violent tendencies of a population.

In either case genetics and neuroscience are showing that a heart of darkness cannot always be blamed on parents or society.

Today 8 percent of the men who live within the former territory of the Mongol Empire share a Y chromosome that dates to around the time of Genghis, most likely because they descended from him and

One doesn't have to invoke dominance to explain why Genghis Khan inseminated so many women that his Y chromosome is common in Central Asia today; it's enough to observe that he killed the women's fathers and husbands.

Clones, in fact, are just identical twins born at different times.

Genetic individuality gives us our different tastes and needs, and it also sets the stage for strife.

Autism, dyslexia, language delay, language impairment, learning disability, left-handedness, major depressions, bipolar illness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sexual orientation, and many other conditions run in families, are more concordant in identical than in fraternal twins, are better predicted by people's biological relatives than by their adoptive relatives, and are poorly predicted by any measurable feature of the environment.

Identical twins think and feel in such similar ways that they sometimes suspect they are linked by telepathy.

All five of the major personality dimensions are heritable, with perhaps 40 to 50 percent of the variation in a typical population tied to differences in their genes.

These fields include genetics, which explains the replicators that make natural selection possible, and game theory, which illuminates the fates of goal-seeking agents in a world that contains other goal-seeking agents.2

I believe that we all have the potential to love any human being, and that genetics, upbringing, choice, social conditioning and environment play a major part in which way we sway.

The only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.

smaller populations are inherently more variable.

Algunos investigadores, como Richard Klein, atribuyen dicha revolución cultural a una mutación genética, la cual se habría producido hace unos 50.000 años, que mejoró la capacidad cognitiva en nuestra especie.

The kid scared her sometimes, he was so smart. She wondered where he inherited it. Not from her gene pool, that was for sure. Richard, her first husband and Gabe's father, was smart enough but no genius. She also wondered from time to time whether being so precocious made him an outcast at his private boys' school. It couldn't be easy.

Sex is hereditary. If your parents never had it, chances are you wont either.

Insanity runs in my family, it practically gallops

You see, insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.

Once a genetic component has been established, the search for the genes involved can begin. This is a time-consuming and complex process that has recently been greatly facilitated by the information obtained by the Human Genome Project.51