Quotes About Genetics

A solid foundation in genetics is increasingly important for everyone.

Each part of our genome is unique. We would not be alive if there was not a single mathematical solution for our chromosomes. We would just be scrambled goo.

There are some things that are in you because of your DNA and some things that are a product of your environment and what you've been around.

To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly.

The idea that you're made up of the people that come before you and you somehow have some kind of conscious dialog with your genetics - I think it's really deep and interesting stuff.

What is striking about them is that the father-leaning disorders tend to produce autistic symptoms. The mother-leaning disorders tend to produce schizophrenic ones.

defective genes.

Based on their research, the Sanger scientists estimated that an embryo gains two or three new mutations every time its cells double.

Mercado urged instead that people with the same defect not marry, because their children would be at greatest risk of developing the same hereditary disease. All people should seek out a spouse as different from themselves in as many individual characteristics as possible.

We humans have 23 pairs, but pea plants have only 7. Yeast have 16. Some butterflies have 134.

Chromosomes were chemical mixtures, including proteins as well as a mysterious molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA for short.

Each gene is a stretch of DNA, made up of thousands of bases.

single base may change from A to C. A stretch of a hundred bases may be accidentally copied out twice. A thousand bases may be cut out altogether. These are the mutations that scientists like Hugo de Vries and Thomas Hunt Morgan spent years trying to figure out. Mutations can produce new versions of genes—alleles, as they came to be known.

If a cat lost her tail and then gave birth to tailless cats, the scientific thing to do would be to track down the father and see if he had a tail or not. There was no need to invoke acquired characters to explain why musk ox have thick fur. Natural selection favored individuals that, for whatever reason, had warmer coats that made them less likely to freeze to death.

Since hominin skin doesn't fossilize, we can't say for sure what skin color our ancestors had four million years ago. But if our closest living primate relatives—gorillas and chimpanzees—are any guide, they likely had light skin.

There is thus more Neanderthal DNA on Earth today than when Neanderthals existed.

Some identical twins are recorded as fraternal at birth, and fraternal ones as identical. A genetic test can easily reveal the true nature of newborn twins, but doctors apparently don't bother with it much. In a 2004 study in Japan, researchers found that hospitals misclassify as many as 30 percent of twins. In the Netherlands, researchers tested the DNA of 327 pairs of twins and then asked their parents what kind of twins they were. Nineteen percent of the parents gave the wrong answer.

When he bred them, he would discover variations among their offspring.

Something must happen to 'stir up their heredities,' as I am fond of saying—to excite in them the variability that normally lies dormant," Burbank later explained

Burbank might produce thousands of hybrid offspring from which he might pick just a few to propagate into a new generation.

All told, a cell may need three weeks to finish meiosis.

If heredity is a kind of memory, methylation suffers radical amnesia in every generation.

Our own lineage split off from that of chimpanzees roughly seven million years ago.

In the 1400s, people began to use a new word to define a group of animals that shared the same blood: a race.