Quotes About Genetics

Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is to be applied to modify our own habits and desires.

Part of the answer probably has to do with innate genetic causes.

Her face was soft now, damp from the steam of my bath and the heat of her news. Her eyebrows were as white as cornsilk, her eyelashes clear. My sister had a certain pale, bright beauty, while I was an almost blonde, a shadowy hybrid. Ginnie was willowy and golden, I was shorter and freckled. I imagined our in utero tug-of-war. How she had seized all those pale, paternal Scandinavian genes, pulled at those chromosomes until they stretched like taffy.

Good. It's better if my DNA isn't passed on." "Why? You're smart, beautiful, powerful." "I'm also mentally unstable and may have tendencies toward criminal insanity.

If I'm hunter-born and you're hunter-born, doesn't that mean that Father must behunter-born, too?' ... 'the ability isn't active in him, like it is in me and you. Do you understand?' A thoughtful nod ... 'Like he's asleep and we're awake.

She was only forty-seven according to the file his aide had put together for him, but had gone totally gray by thirty-two. That early sign of aging was a genetic family trait that hadn't been bred out, likely because it gave the possessors a regal appearance, regardless of their chronological age.

Never forget that half your genetic material came from me. Perhaps even the part that gave you your conscience.

Superior ability" was not "the exclusive possession of any one race or any one class," he said. Reacting to Adolf Hitler's Aryan fantasy, Wallace predicted that even a "master breeder" might over generations raise a group of people with the same skin, hair, or eye color, but he would just as likely produce a group of "blond morons.

No races, few permitted variant alleles. Anything else arouses hostility

humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes and that the pairs of chromosomes are the same in men and in women, with the exception of pair number 23—the sex chromosomes. In that case, women have two X chromosomes and men have one X and one Y. Moreover, a woman's two X chromosomes look pretty much like all her other chromosomes. Chromosomes resemble Xs.

I had to admit he looked nice. He has very regular features and straight teeth. I'd just read that even, regular features are universally recognized as beautiful. So no matter what I think of Brooks as a person, I'm genetically programmed to find him attractive. I resent that.

Each of us, A CEll Of Awareness... imperfect, and incomplete. Genetic blends, with uncertain ends.

A cipher, Anna thought, one of those people who by choice or genetics is incapable of stirring up much emotion.

Whereas cells in men have just a single, maternal X chromosome, cells in women have both a maternal and a paternal X chromosome. Female cells inactivate one of the two X chromosomes, resulting in a mosaic of cells with distinct combinations of gene variants. This variety could result in an immunity advantage compared to the more fixed expression in males.51

I själva verket är det så att den individuella lyckan verkar vara starkt genetiskt betingad, precis som alla andra personlighetsdrag.

Genes do amazing things inside our bodies, but even more amazing to me is what they do outside of them. Genes affect not only the structure and function of our bodies; not only the structure and function of our minds and, hence, our behaviors; but also the structure and function of our societies.

Between the intellectual and behavioral guardrails set by our genetic code, the

T]he upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease." —NICK BILTON, tech columnist, The New York Times

Nothing is more conservative than a bacterium.

It seems that all eukaryotic cells either have, or once had (and then lost) mitochondria. In other words, possession of mitochondria is a sine qua non of the eukaryotic condition

The myosin in our own skeletal muscles is more closely related to the myosin driving the flight muscles of that irritating housefly buzzing around your head than it is to the myosin in the muscles of your own sphincters

Men are even worse: a hundred rounds of cell division are needed to make sperm, with each round linked inexorably to more mutations. Because sperm production goes on throughout life, round after round of cell division, the older the man, the worse it gets. As the geneticist James Crow put it, the greatest mutational health hazard in the population is fertile old men.

All life on our planet is related, and the readout of letters in DNA shows exactly how. By comparing DNA sequences, we can compute statistically how closely related we are to anything, from monkeys to marsupials, to reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, crustaceans, worms, plants, protozoa, bacteria–you name it.

The two most pressing problems of the contemporary world: demographic expansion and genetic deterioration are unsolvable. Liberal principles prevent the solution of the first, egalitarian ones that of the second.