Quotes About Genetics

Evolution is within us, around us, between us, and its workings are embedded in the rocks of eons past.

First cousins, for instance, have two common ancestors, and the generation distance via each one is 4. Therefore their relatedness is

It is the effects on the world of successful active germ-line replicators that we see as adaptations.

A stick insect looks like a replicator, in that we may lay out a sequence consisting of daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, etc., in which each appears to be a replica of the preceding one in the series. But suppose a flaw or blemish appears somewhere in the chain, say a stick insect is unfortunate enough to lose a leg. The blemish may last for the whole of her lifetime, but it is not passed on to the next link in the chain.

You may have heard that DNA is a 'blueprint' for a body, but that's deeply wrong. Houses and cars have blueprints. Babies don't. The difference is entirely separate from the fact that cars and houses are designed whereas babies aren't. Here's the deeper difference. In a blueprint there's a one-to-one 'mapping' between each bit of the house (or car) and each bit of the blueprint.

The second point of this present chapter is that the genes that bear upon any given extended phenotypic trait may be in conflict rather than in concert with one another.

If two beavers working on the same dam have different genes for dam height, the resulting extended phenotype will reflect the interaction between the genes, in the same way as bodies reflect gene interactions.

Why are genetic determinants thought to be any more ineluctable, or blame-absolving, than 'environmental' ones?

Finally, at the end of the chapter, we saw that genes 'sharing' a given extended phenotypic trait might come from different species, even different phyla and different kingdoms.

One is that phenotypes that extend outside the body do not have to be inanimate artefacts: they can themselves be built of living tissue.

The other idea is that wherever there are 'shared' genetic influences on an extended phenotype, the shared influences may be in conflict with each other rather than cooperative

evolutionarily stable strategy, an idea that he traces back to W. D. Hamilton and R. H. MacArthur. A 'strategy' is a pre-programmed behavioural policy. An example of a strategy is: 'Attack opponent; if he flees pursue him; if he retaliates run away.

The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.

The point is the obvious one that selection at any one locus is not independent of selection at other loci.

Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators

Natural selection is anything but random.

Tell me, do you get the ape in you from your mother's or your father's side of the family? - Cat

You only had to look at Noah and his wife, or at their three sons and their three wives, to realize what a genetically messy lot the human race would turn out to be.

They say things are determined by genetics, by parenting, by heredity, by climate, by diet, by geography, by time spent in the womb, by nature, by nurture. They fail to hear the elephant in the room, trumpeting away: history.

We live as if nature and nurture were equal parents when the evidence suggests that nature has both the whip hand and the whip.

It makes me wonder which tendencies are decided by birth, and which by desire.

A racist is a man who believes in history, genetics, and his eyes!

...congenital killers and criminals are possessed of not one but two Y chromosomes, bearing a double dose, as it were, of genetically undesirable maleness.

Man is the control experiment of heredity and environment; and since his heredity controls him, he tries to control his environment.