Quotes about genetics

Elizabeth Emken -

The genetics of autism are real, but there are also environmental triggers.

Steve Jones -

To the question of whether sharing 96% of our genetic make-up with chimps makes us 96 percent chimp we also share about 50% of our DNA with bananas - that does not make us half bananas!

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

Haruki Murakami - 1Q84

Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.

James D. Watson -

Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. . . .

Timothy Ferris - The Best American Science Writing 2001

I placed some of the DNA on the ends of my fingers and rubbed them together. The stuff was sticky. It began to dissolve on my skin. 'It's melting -- like cotton candy.' 'Sure. That's the sugar in the DNA,' Smith said. 'Would it taste sweet?' 'No. DNA is an acid, and it's got salts in it. Actually, I've never tasted it.' Later, I got some dried calf DNA. I placed a bit of the fluff on my tongue. It melted into a gluey ooze that stuck to the roof of my mouth in a blob. The blob felt slippery on my

J.B.S. Haldane -

I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane -

The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

Kate McGahan - Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge

A cell has a nucleus and some other parts like membranes, plasmas and other stuff. Its energy is made up of protons, neurons and electrons. Genetic scientists, however, have discovered that the majority of a cell is made up of something unknown. Something akin to space filled with electromagnetic fibers of light. The human body is made up of some 37 trillion cells. What do you think you are made of? Who do you think you are?

Scott Solomon - Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution

We live in an exciting time. We now know more than ever about our biology and about our history, allowing us to peer into the future with greater clarity than has previously been possible. But at the same time, the changes we are undergoing, brought about by our own advances in technology, medicine, transportation-- and by the growing impact we are having on the world around us-- mean that we live in a time in which the future looks increasingly less like the past. We have become an odd species,

Amit Ray - Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

Meditation works in many layers. It works in our genes, in our DNA

Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Gene: An Intimate History

If we define "beauty" as having blue eyes (and only blue eyes), then we will, indeed, find a "gene for beauty." If we define "intelligence" as the performance on only one kind of test, then we will, indeed, find a "gene for intelligence." The genome is only a mirror for the breadth or narrowness of human imagination.

Tim Burton -

We all know interspecies romance is weird.

Toba Beta - My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

There were three things sought by invaders who crossed oceans to discover America. Those were gold, gospel, glory. There are four things sought by aliens who crossed heavens to discover planet earth. Those are gold, gospel, glory, gene.

Amit Ray - Yoga The Science of Well-Being

The more you treat your body and the cells as intelligent being the more you will be sharp, quick, competent, and fulfilled.

Matt Ridley -

...because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process...no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbours. We do not organise societies that way...Perhaps we should try.

Karen Traviss - Going Grey

I know genes are a big deal, son, but they're not the be-all and end-all." Rob slowed to a halt at the lights, wishing the dickhead behind would back off. "If they were, you'd be in a seafood salad and I'd be in prison.

Laurie Perez - Atomic Truths and Stellar Seeking: A Joybroker's Guide to the Stars Inside

Shake off the tonnage of old genetics, nitpicking naysayers and hand-me-down Egos hoarding junk in the back of your mind.Be a Friday night liberty set loose on Monday morning.

Jack Gantos - The Love Curse Of The Rumbaughs

Eventually, her designed genetic material will be implanted into my egg, which first would have had my genetic material removed. Then my mother could become my baby. And someday, when I get old, I can become her baby. Then she will be mine, and I will be hers.

Steven Magee -

If you are living in the electrified wireless west, then you are living a very abnormal lifestyle that your genetics has no adaptation to.

Amit Ray - Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

Bhramari Om Chanting or Humming Om chanting sends positive messages to the brain and the cells in our body and can actually reprogram our health and behavior.

J. Craig Venter -

It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum.

Matt Ridley - Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

Imagine that the genome is a book.There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES.Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES.Each story is made up of paragraphs, called EXTONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS.Each paragraph is made up of words, called CODONS.Each word is written in letters called BASES.

Matthieu Ricard -

Meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree. It completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are.

Thomas Browne - Religio Medici; And Other Writings

It is the common wonder of all men, how, among so many million faces, there should be none alike.

Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Gene: An Intimate History

If the history of the last century taught us the dangers of empowering governments to determine genetic “fitness” (i.e., which person fits within the triangle, and who lives outside it), then the question that confronts our current era is what happens when this power devolves to the individual. It is a question that requires us to balance the desires of the individual— to carve out a life of happiness and achievement, without undue suffering— with the desires of a society that, in the short term

Guy Murchie -

The family trees of all of us, of whatever origin or trait, must meet and merge into one genetic tree of all humanity by the time they have spread into our ancestries for about 50 generations.

Desmond Tutu - The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World

All modern humans are related to what scientists call "Mitochondrial Eve." This refers to our common matrilineal ancestor. She lived approximately 200,000 years ago and depending on how you estimate the length of a generation, we are only 5,000 to 10,000 generations from one another. To put it another way, each of us is a cousin of one another at most 10,000 times removed. And yes, Mitochondrial Eve lived in Africa, so, in a very real way, we are all Africans.

Maile Meloy - Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It

Diabetes is passed that way -- over and down, like a knight in chess.

Salman Rushdie - West

At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.

Sahara Sanders - INDIGO DIARIES: A Series of Novels

It’s truly interesting to observe how genetics works in families, and what a huge lottery it is to inherit some of our relatives’ appearance features.

Alan Cumming -

We both lacked the same thing in our childhoods - the love of a father... We both sought to fill that lack in our adult lives with family and love, as everyone does, but also with thrills and sometimes periods of recklessness. Luckily, I have always come back from my recklessness. Tommy Darling did not.

Amit Ray - Enlightenment Step by Step

Our highest contribution is making this world peaceful and happy. That comes when we can radiate peace and harmony from every cell, gene and DNA of our body.

Allan J. Hamilton - Zen Horse: The Science and Spirituality of Working with Horses

I was drawn to horses as if they were magnets. It was in my blood. I must have inherited from my grandfather a genetic proclivity toward the equine species. Perhaps there's a quirk in the DNA that makes horse people different from everyone else, that instantly divides humanity into those who love horses and the others, who simply don't know.

Bill Murray -

There must be a bad chromosome somewhere in man that urges him to wound that which he can't conquer, deface that which is more beautiful, misunderstand and befoul the work of another.

Johnny Rich - The Human Script

Adam & Eve have been degraded, reduplicated forever, photocopies of photocopies, mistakes copied, magnified, augmented.

Savanna Robins -

Your full of yourself.""Duhh... genetics man.

Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Gene: An Intimate History

When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences. The parables of such scientific overreach are well-known: foreign animals, introduced to control pests, become pests in their own right; the raising of smokestacks, meant to alleviate urban pollution, releases particulate effluents higher in the air and exacerbates pollution; stimulating blood formation, meant to prevent heart attacks, thickens the blood and results in an increased risk of blood cl

Bruce H. Lipton - Matter and Miracles

Signal transduction science recognizes that the fate and behavior of an organism is directly linked to its perception of the environment.

Jenna Jameson - How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale

Ultimately, what really matters is not just the experiences you have at a young age, but whether or not you are equipped-by your parents, by your genetics, by your education-to survive and deal with them.

Gabriel García Márquez - Love in the Time of Cholera

...as he was combing his hair in front of the mirror...only then did he understand that a man knows when he is growing older because he begins to look like his father.

Johnny Rich - The Human Script

Genes do not make an individual homosexual. They play their part, but so does the rest of the universe.

David Epstein - The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance

If you want to know if your kid is going to be fast, the best genetic test right now is a stopwatch. Take him to the playground and have him face the other kids.' Foster's point is that, despite the avant-garde allure of genetic testing, gauging speed indirectly is foolish and inaccurate compared with testing it directly - like measuring a man's height by dropping a ball from a roof and using the time it takes to hit him in the head to determine how tall he is. Why not just use a tape measure?

Bill Watterson - The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

I have all these great genes, but they're recessive. That's the problem here.

Bryan Sykes - and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland

Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.

Bela Karolyi -

Genetics is all about showcasing human beauty along with high-quality performance.

Ben Shapiro -

When we say 'less fortunate,' we generally mean the poor rather than the disabled, who actually are less fortunate. In truth, the poor are generally 'less fortunate' only in terms of genetics. They are certainly not less fortunate in the amount of help they receive.

K. Valisumbra - Mortlake and Other Stories

Genetically we're just the third species of chimp, a physically weak but social animal. It was in our interests to communicate complex ideas so we could cooperate to hunt big, dangerous prey animals. I think as soon as humans developed language with grammar that allowed for abstract thought, we were set on a whole new evolutionary path, made by and for the spread of ideas instead of genes.

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the generations. [I]t is widely distributed in space among different individuals, and widely distributed in time over many generations. [A] successful gene will be one that does well in the environments provided by these other genes that it is likely to meet in lots of different bodies.

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. It must have an impartial exit channel into the future, for all the genes inside it. This is true of an individual wolf. The channel is the thin stream of sperms, or eggs, which it manufactures by meiosis. It is not true of the pack of wolves. Genes have something to gain from selfishly promoting the welfare of their own individual bodies, at the expense of other genes in the wolf pack. A bee-hive,

Friedrich Nietzsche -

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.

Matt Ridley - The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

Sharon Moalem - Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

In evolutionary terms, that means we asked for it.

Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Gene: An Intimate History

The problem with racial discrimination, though, is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristics from their race. The question is not, can you, given an individual's skin color, hair texture, or language, infer something about their ancestry or origin. That is a question of biological systematics -- of lineage, taxonomy, of racial geography, of biological discrimination. Of course you can -- an

B.C. Chase -

The platypus, as it turns out, derives its DNA from a menagerie of creatures. When its genome was fully decoded, it was found only to be 80% mammalian, and had genes found previously only in reptilian, bird, amphibian, and fish DNA.

B.C. Chase -

Now the leatherback turtle overcame the heat issue via a simple, but evolutionarily impossible solution; it is the only reptile that possesses fatty insulation known as brown adipose tissue, and the only reptile that regulates a high body temperature. This brown adipose tissue is the expression of the UCP1 gene, and, aside from the leatherbacks, is found only in mammals, amphibians, and fishes. Not one other reptile has UCP1.

William King Gregory -

As long as museums and universities send out expeditions to bring to light new forms of living and extinct animals and new data illustrating the interrelations of organisms and their environments, as long as anatomists desire a broad comparative basis human for anatomy, as long as even a few students feel a strong curiosity to learn about the course of evolution and relationships of animals, the old problems of taxonomy, phylogeny and evolution will gradually reassert themselves even in competit

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck - Zoological Philosophy

First LawIn every animal which has not passed the limit of its development, a more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ, and gives it a power proportional to the length of time it has been so used; while the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively diminishes its functional capacity, until it finally disappears.Second LawAll the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature on individuals, th

Adrian Raine -

Genetics, accidents of birth or events in early childhood have left criminals' brains and bodies with measurable flaws predisposing them to committing assault, murder and other antisocial acts. .... Many offenders also have impairments in their autonomic nervous system, the system responsible for the edgy, nervous feeling that can come with emotional arousal. This leads to a fearless, risk-taking personality, perhaps to compensate for chronic under-arousal. Many convicted criminals, like the Una

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza -

If there's any interaction between genes and languages, it is often languages that influence genes, since linguistic differences between populations lessen the chance of genetic exchange between them.

Kate McGahan - Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge

Some say we are not like humans but we are more like them than we are different. Man and animals are in the same species as mammals as they have mammary glands that produce the milk to nurse their young. Their lungs breathe air and their blood is warm. They are vertebrates in that their skeletal system and well-designed spines hold their bodies together. Each cell is made of molecules, each molecule is made of atoms, and each atom is made of protons, neutrons and mostly electrons, which are made

Edward Tatum -

In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.

Terry Pratchett - Witch

Don't tell me from genetics. What've they got to do with it?" said Crowley. "Look at Satan. Created as an angel, grows up to be the Great Adversary. Hey, if you're going to go on about genetics, you might as well say the kid will grow up to be an angel. After all, his father was really big in Heaven in the old days. Saying he'll grow up to be a demon just because his dad _became_ one is like saying a mouse with its tail cut off will give birth to tailless mice. No. Upbringing is everything. Take

Carter Stroud - and the Origin of Evil

We are what we adapt to.

Lara Santoro - The Boy

The realization, early in high school, that a particle behaved differently if observed or left alone.

Hideo Kojima -

Genetic engineering is a result of science advancement, so I don't think that in itself is bad. If used wisely, genetics can be beneficial, but they can be abused, too.

Alvin Toffler -

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.

Kōji Suzuki -

It wasn’t that we started to look at things because there was now a mechanism by which to see them. There first had to be a will to see, buried somewhere inside living things. Without it, the mechanism would never have taken shape.

Matt Ridley - Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves only when it detects evidence that he is about to mutiny.

Peter Gluckman - Mismatch: Why Our World No Longer Fits Our Bodies

...it is entirely illogical to consider biology in dichotomous terms of genes and environment—all of biology is based on the continuous interaction of both.

Walter S. Sutton -

I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reducing division as indicated above may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity.

Theodor Boveri -

For it is not cell nuclei, not even individual chromosomes, but certain parts of certain chromosomes from certain cells that must be isolated and collected in enormous quantities for analysis; that would be the precondition for placing the chemist in such a position as would allow him to analyse [the hereditary material] more minutely than [can] the morphologists ... For the morphology of the nucleus has reference at the very least to the gearing of the clock, but at best the chemistry of the nu

Wilhelm Johannsen -

The science of genetics is in a transition period, becoming an exact science just as the chemistry in the times of Lavoisier, who made the balance an indispensable implement in chemical research.

Thomas Hunt Morgan -

Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cofactors can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes. In a word the cytoplasm may be ignored genetically.

R.A.Delmonico -

As the complexity in any system increases, the ability to form a correct understanding decreases exponentially.

David Brooks -

I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that

Related Quote Subjects

genetics

biology