Quotes About Genetics

Some people were genetically predisposed to be brilliant; other poor souls were destined to be idiots.

The sheer number of ways that twenty distinct amino acids can be linked in a long chain makes this evident: for a chain with one hundred and fifty amino acids (a small protein), there are about 10195 different arrangements, far larger than the number of particles in the observable universe.

The human race is bound not only by common genetics but also by universal standards of behavior. Those who do not willingly follow the guidelines of civilization can no longer be considered truly human. —Bene Gesserit axiom

Kwisatz Haderach: "Shortening of the Way." This is the label applied by the Bene Gesserit to the unknown for which they sought a genetic solution: a male Bene Gesserit whose organic mental powers would bridge space and time.

Is It Baby Fat or Real Fat? The answer partly depends on the parents. A study of 854 Washington State children under three years old showed that a child is nearly three times as likely to grow up obese if one of his parents is obese. If you're overweight, your child has a 65–75 percent chance of growing up to be overweight. So, is that little paunch on your fourth grader baby fat? Not if you're sporting the same paunch.

It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically programmed behavior in human beings more than in any other species.

Dartmouth College employs computer learning techniques in a very broad array of courses. For example, a student can gain a deep insight into the statistics of Mendelian genetics in an hour with the computer rather than spend a year crossing fruit flies in the laboratory.

Somewhere in the steaming jungles of the Carboniferous Period there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes. It was an early reptile which, were we to come upon it in these sophisticated times, we would probably not describe as exceptionally intelligent… Much of the history of life since the Carboniferous Period can be described as the gradual (and certainly incomplete) dominance of brains over genes.

Until fairly recently it was thought that humans had fortv-eight chromosomes in an ordinary somatic cell. We now know that the correct number is forty-six. Chimps apparently really do have forty-eight chromosomes, and in this case a viable cross of a chimpanzee and a human would in any event be rare.

It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically preprogrammed behavior in human beings more than in any other species… Some substantial adjustment of the relative role of each component of the triune brain is well within our powers.

Those mothers with hereditary large pelvises were able to bear large-brained babies who because of their superior intelligence were able to compete successfully in adulthood with the smaller-brained offspring of mothers with smaller pelvises.

Those who avoid decapitation leave more offspring.

Death was hereditary. You got it from your ancestors.

I trace my genealogy back to the land. Human and wild, I can see myself whole, not isolated but integrated in time and place. Our genetic makeup is not so different from the collared lizard, the canyon wren now calling, or the great horned owl who watches from the cottonwood near the creek. Mountain lion is as mysterious a creature as any soul I know. Is not the tissue of family always a movement between harmony and distance?

Is this all we are? A necklace of chemicals? Where, in the double helix, does the soul lie?

It's easy to be beautiful - just be born that way.

Not only human beings, all creatures including plants and animals can have genetic disorders. So, its a part of nature. Lets accept it in natural way rather than creating discriminations.

It is no exaggeration to say that genes are essential to nearly every aspect of memory and the process of learning; without them, learning itself would not exist.

Because genes work in combination, the incremental effect of adding a new gene to a genome may be not linear, but exponential.

One key lesson learned from mapping the genome is that access to a rough initial map proved crucial to developing more detailed maps of small individual human differences.

What Jacob and Monod had discovered, in essence, was that each gene acts like a single line in a computer program.

If there is not preformation, and no blueprint, there is also no getting away from the environment. Genes do not guarantee particular products; rather, they provide particular options: To every gene there is an IF, and with that IF comes an option. In many cases, those options are selected based on cues from the environment, and it is for that reason, more than any other, that the answer to the nature-nurture question is not one or the other, but both.

With continued progress in the rapidly growing field known as pharmacogenetics, it will become possible to prescribe drugs based on each patient's own unique biology.

The first way that selection can cause ageing is to keep early-acting mutations rare in populations, while allowing ones with effects late in life to become common.