Genetics Quotes

1. "Curse the genetics that turn me into a lobster after one hour in the sun while everyone else gets to look like a sexy peanut."
Author: A.M. Robinson

2. "[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate. The reason owes nothing to climate or genetics, added Keene, but is the result of the actions of writers, painters and theorists, who had actively shaped the sense of beauty of their nation.Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. 'Culture' is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to."
Author: Alain De Botton

3. "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."
Author: Alvin Toffler

4. "I got a hundred bucks says my baby beats Pete's baby. I just think genetics are in my favour."
Author: Andre Agassi

5. "Genetics means that my parents really aren't my parents. I know Galen has thought this all along, but I still can't accept it. I also can't completely shun the possibility either. Especially after I just conducted a symphony of fish. How would I even start that conversation with my mom? "So, Galen thinks you've been lying to me for the past eighteen years." Even if I didn't say it directly, that's what it amounts to. And when she asks where I'd get an idea like that? "Well, I recently discovered I can hold my breath for almost two hours and tell fish what to do. I couldn't help but notice that you can't." Yeah, not happening. There's got to be some other way..."
Author: Anna Banks

6. "I work out like a maniac and I spray tan a lot. Genetics were kind, but I work very hard."
Author: Anna Paquin

7. "Genetics is all about showcasing human beauty along with high-quality performance."
Author: Bela Karolyi

8. "Genetics do play a role in how you consciously or subconsciously manifest your true self."
Author: Ben Harper

9. "Marrying cousins was astoundingly common into the nineteenth century, and nowhere is this better illustrated than with the Darwins and their cousins the Wedgwoods (of pottery fame). Charles married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his beloved Uncle Josiah. Darwin's sister Caroline, meanwhile, married Josiah Wedgwood III, Emma's brother and the Darwin siblings' joint first cousin. Another of Emma's brothers, Henry, married not a Darwin but a first cousin from another branch of his own Wedgwood family, adding another strand to the family's wondrously convoluted genetics. Finally, Charles Langton, who was not related to either family, first married Charlotte Wedgwood, another daughter of Josiah and cousin of Charles, and then upon Charlotte's death married Darwin's sister Emily, thus becoming, it seems, his sister-in-law's sister-in-law's husband and raising the possibility that any children of the union would be their own first cousins."
Author: Bill Bryson

10. "As this book will show, objectively defined races simply do not exist. Even Arthur Mourant realized that fact nearly fifty years ago, when he wrote: 'Rather does a study of blood groups show a heterogeneity in the proudest nation and support the view that the races of the present day are but temporary integrations in the constant process of . . . mixing that marks the history of every living species.' The temptation to classify the human species into categories which have no objective basis is an inevitable but regrettable consequence of the gene frequency system when it is taken too far. For several years the study of human genetics got firmly bogged down in the intellectually pointless (and morally dangerous) morass of constructing ever more detailed classifications of human population groups."
Author: Bryan Sykes

11. "A big tree seemed even more beautiful to me when I imagined thousands of tiny photosynthesis machines inside every leaf. So I went to MIT and worked on bacteria because that's where people knew the most about these switches, how to control the genetics."
Author: Cynthia Kenyon

12. "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 river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it."
Author: David Brooks

13. "It is easy sometimes to blame genetics, some obesity gene perhaps. But even if this were true, we'll still be referring to the machine. Genetics are predispositions. The body is designed as a closed system, physiologically speaking and unless acted upon by an outside or higher force it maintains its functions. It is designed to sustain its own survival. The psychological (self-ordinate command) is essential for this survival because the body also belongs to a self, one that can overfeed it, starve it or kill it as may be. It is also by material urges that you seek to acquire wealth and by self command, suppose what you consider a higher more fulfilling purpose that you choose to give it all away.The hard core truth is that despite some obesity gene, you can starve yourself to death if you want, or perhaps if you feel you have an ulterior higher purpose like an anorexic might, to look thin and beautiful in the eyes of the communal."
Author: Dew Platt

14. "Humanity is a biological species, living in a biological environment, because like all species, we are exquisitely adapted in everything: from our behavior, to our genetics, to our physiology, to that particular environment in which we live. The earth is our home. Unless we preserve the rest of life, as a sacred duty, we will be endangering ourselves by destroying the home in which we evolved, and on which we completely depend."
Author: Edward O. Wilson

15. "Sure, genetics do play a role in alcholism. You're more likely to be an alcoholic if one or both of your parents are also alcoholics. But that's just one part of the equation; the other part is your behavior. You can't become an alcoholic if you never take a drink. So if you know you're predisposed to addiction because of your family history, then just don't get started, and you'll never find yourself on that path. Same with any other type of 'family curse.' If you parents smoke, don't pick up a cigarette. If your parents are obese, work hard to exercise and eat right so you don't follow in their foosteps. But some people find it easier to play the victim. They do whatever bad habits they want to because they think they have a built-in defense - "I grew up this way."
Author: Gaby Rodriguez

16. "The truth, it is said, is rarely pure or simple, yet genetics can at times seem seductively transparent."
Author: Iain McGilchrist

17. "It's in our genetics. It's why women are the master species. We give birth and we can walk in heels."
Author: Jaci Burton

18. "If people lived to be a thousand years old, there'd be extreme inequality, based not on class like now, but on genetics. Think how far behind unmotivated and lazy people lag now after only 65 years on earth, and then multiply that by 15."
Author: Jarod Kintz

19. "It was indeed a long wait, well over two hours. I sat in the car and listened to the radio and tried to picture, bite by bite, what it was like to eat a medianochesandwich: the crackle of the bread crust, socrisp and toasty it scratches the inside of your mouth as you bite down. Then the first taste of mustard, followed by the soothing cheese and the salt of the meat. Next bite—a piece of pickle. Chew it all up; let the flavors mingle. Swallow. Take a big sip of Iron Beer (pronounced Ee-roan Bay-er, and it's a soda). Sigh. Sheer bliss. I would rather eat than do anything else except play with the Passenger. It's a true miracle of genetics that I am not fat."
Author: Jeff Lindsay

20. "I stuff another handful of Raisinets in my mouth. What gets me is the 'pretty face' bit. 'Cause I won't mind being reminded I'm fat as long as you water it down first. Why not say, Hey I'm going to insult you, but first I will congratulate your fortunate genetics and appropriate appliclation of Bobbi Brown cosmetics to prevent you from hitting me. Sh*t; I kind of prefer being called a 'fat bitch.' At least it doesn't pull any punches."
Author: Jen Lancaster

21. "Truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like'. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all."
Author: Jerry A. Coyne

22. "I do not believe we can blame genetics for adultery, homosexuality, dishonesty and other character flaws."
Author: Jerry Falwell

23. "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."
Author: John B. Haldane

24. "Genetics is about how information is stored and transmitted between generations."
Author: John Maynard Smith

25. "I think the genetics of being Irish are that you sort of prefer when it's rainy and cloudy. It's just genetic."
Author: Kate Flannery

26. "Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable."
Author: Kenneth R. Miller

27. "The bradys must hold that, on the average, cumulative selection has to add a little information to the genome at each step. But of all the mutations studied since genetics became a science, not a single one has been found that adds a little information. It is not impossible, in principle, for a mutation to add a little information, but it is improbable. The NDT was an attractive theory. Unfortunately, it is based on the false speculation that many small random mutations could build up to large evolutionary changes."
Author: Lee Spetner

28. "Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows."
Author: Leon Kass

29. "Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever."
Author: Matt Ridley

30. "Your genetics load the gun. Your lifestyle pulls the trigger."
Author: Mehmet Oz

31. "Long before genetics became a flourishing field, Christians have spoken about sin as an inherited condition."
Author: Michael Horton

32. "The evidence from behavior genetics and twin studies indicating that 40to 50 percent of the variance among people in temperament,personality, and many political, economic, and social preferences areaccounted for by genetics."
Author: Michael Shermer

33. "It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science."
Author: Nicholas A. Christakis

34. "I decided that the University of Sussex in Brighton was a good place for this work because it had a strong tradition in bacterial molecular genetics and an excellent reputation in biology."
Author: Paul Nurse

35. "If only every member of the family could have grown as straight and strong as Ann Garrity's beech tree. But as fate and genetics would have it, both sides of Fred and Alice Springsteen's lineage came with a shadow history of fractured souls. The drinkers and the failures, the wild-eyed, the ones who crumbled inside of themselves until they vanished altogether. These were the relatives who lived in rooms you didn't enter. Their stories were the ones that mustn't be told. They inspired the silence that both secreted and concentrated the poison in the family blood. Doug could already sense the venom creeping within himself."
Author: Peter Ames Carlin

36. "Successful long term relationships are all about power levels. A high power level male will attract and succeed with a high level power female.How do we define those power levels? We can't, they are inherently in us, and invisible to scientists, accountants, psychologists and spiritualists alike. None can explain the Universe in its entirety, and it is more than chemistry, biology, physics, genetics, horoscopes, religion, in-laws, fame, psychology and spirituality.We may be infatuated by a person, but as soon as we hold their hands, kiss their lips, and especially, make love or have sex with them, their power levels will be instantly exposed."
Author: Robert Black

37. "Human well-being is not a random phenomenon. It depends on many factors - ranging from genetics and neurobiology to sociology and economics. But, clearly, there are scientific truths to be known about how we can flourish in this world. Wherever we can have an impact on the well-being of others, questions of morality apply."
Author: Sam Harris

38. "Family," she announced. "They're the people in your life you don't get to pick. The ones that are given to you,as opposed to those you get to choose.""You're bound to them by blood," she continued, her voice flat. "Which, you know, gives you that much more in common. Diseases, genetics, hair, and eye color. It's like they're part of your blueprint. If something's wrong with you, you can usually trace it back to them."I nodded and kept writing."But," she said, "even though you're stuck with them, at the same time, they're also stuck with you. So that's why they always get the front rows at christenings and funerals. Because they're the ones that are there, you know, from the beginning to the end. Like it or not."
Author: Sarah Dessen

39. "Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest... The origin of species — Darwin's problem — remains unsolved."
Author: Scott F. Gilbert

40. "Calm down. I'm a demon, Nick. Hematite doesn't like my genetics. It doesn't mean anything other than I have really bad parentage.""Then why am I having flashes of you killing me?""What'd you eat this morning?"Nick didn't care for that answer. Not one little bit. "I saw it happen. You were choking the life out of me."Caleb rolled his eyes. "Oh yeah. That is definitely a figment of your overactive, over-Hollywood-stimulated imagination. I assure you. I don't kill people that way. Takes too long. I'm not into torture. I prefer a quick death so that I can move on to something more satisfying."Strangely enough, that he believed. Patience wasn't a virtue Caleb practiced. "You sure?""Dude, look at me. You think I'd have let the demons pound all over me last night so that you could escape if I had any intention of killing you? Really?"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

41. "Started to see that none of the accepted "causes" of cancer, in the absence of a high-animal-protein diet, mattered that much. Not genetics, not chemical carcinogens like AF,"
Author: T. Colin Campbell

42. "There tends to be a lot of autism around the tech centers... when you concentrate the geeks, you're concentrating the autism genetics."
Author: Temple Grandin

43. "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 it from me."
Author: Terry Pratchett

44. "We're all just people, some of us accidentally connected by genetics, a random selection of cells. Nothing more."
Author: Tracy Letts

45. "With our knowledge of modern-day genetics, we realize that it was possible for God to place the potential for all people throughout history into the genes of Adam and Eve when He created them."
Author: Walter Lang

46. "I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years."
Author: Watson

47. "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."
Author: Wilhelm Johannsen

48. "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 competition with brilliant and highly fruitful laboratory studies in cytology, genetics and physiological chemistry."
Author: William King Gregory

49. "This exciting new field of epigenetics--meaning literally "around" the gene--allows us to see how environmental factors alter our gene expression in a specific place within each cell. As a result, we now know that when we take active control of these factors, we can literally help control our health and genetic destiny."
Author: Woodson Merrell

50. "I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human—I only love to be so."
Author: Zadie Smith

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