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22ebedb I have all these great genes, but they're recessive. That's the problem here. calvin calvin-and-hobbes comic comics dreams-calvin-and-hobbes genes genetics hobbes kids Bill Watterson
eaa2b58 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. genetics science Richard Dawkins
82b4eab "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." genetics lamarckian-evolution nature-vs-nurture satan Terry Pratchett
95747a3 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. family fathers genetics parents traits Salman Rushdie
d86f650 More than any other single trait, it is the apple's genetic variability--its ineluctable wildness--that accounts for its ability to make itself at home in places as different from one another as New England and New Zealand, Kazakhstan and California. Wherever the apple tree goes, its offspring propose so many different variations on what it means to be an apple--at least five per apple, several thousand per tree--that a couple of these novelties are almost bound to have whatever qualities it takes to prosper in the tree's adopted home. genetics variability Michael Pollan
5ba246d A four-letter alphabet called DNA. genetics heredity Matt Ridley
ebfe993 Diabetes is passed that way -- over and down, like a knight in chess. family genetics short-story spy-vs-spy Maile Meloy
b1eba03 I have had my mother's wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth. I almost prefer the more rambling and indirect and journalistic investigation, which seems somehow less... deterministic. ancestry british-isles central-europe determinism eastern-europe genealogy genetics history investigation journalism levant mediterranean-sea national-geographic savanna sub-saharan-africa Christopher Hitchens
fe0d25e ...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. genetics resemblance Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
c2d9230 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 tongue, and the taste of pure DNA appeared. It had a soft taste, unsweet, rather bland, with a touch of acid and a hint of salt. Perhaps like the earth's primordial sea. It faded away. freaky genetics science Timothy Ferris
96467b4 "I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by discovery discovery-of-dna dna francis-crick genetics james-watson nobel-laureate science watson-and-crick Linus Pauling
8f5e92a 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. genetics literature literaturegy science science-and-literature Matt Ridley
b26bb6e "The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living is, he will say . And indeed, has done a marvelous job of popularizing . But charles-darwin darwin darwinian dawkins evolution gene genetics irony richard-dawkins science Ernst Mayr
17f999d A remarkably consistent finding, starting with elementary school students, is that males are better at math than females. While the difference is minor when it comes to considering average scores, there is a huge difference when it comes to math stars at the upper extreme of the distribution. For example, in 1983, for every girl scoring in the highest percentile in the math SAT, there were 11 boys. Why the difference? There have always been suggestions that testosterone is central. During development, testosterone fuels the growth of a brain region involved in mathematical thinking and giving adults testosterone enhances their math skills. Oh, okay, it's biological. But consider a paper published in science in 2008. The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in 40 countries based on economic, educational and political indices of gender equality. The worst was Turkey, United States was middling, and naturally, the Scandinavians were tops. Low and behold, the more gender equal the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores. By the time you get to the Scandinavian countries it's statistically insignificant. And by the time you examine the most gender equal country on earth at the time, Iceland, girls are better at math than boys. Footnote, note that the other reliable sex difference in cognition, namely better reading performance by girls than by boys doesn't disappear in more gender equal societies. It gets bigger. In other words, culture matters. We carry it with us wherever we go. gender genetics mathematics Robert M. Sapolsky
ae38c89 Soon after Harris's HeLa-chicken study, a pair of researchers at New York University discovered that human-mouse hybrids lost their human chromosomes over time, leaving only the mouse chromosomes. This allowed scientists to begin mapping human genes to specific chromosomes by tracking the order in which genetic traits vanished. If a chromosome disappeared and production of a certain enzyme stopped, researchers knew the gene for that enzyme must be on the most recently vanished chromosome. Scientists in laboratories throughout North America and Europe began fusing cells and using them to map genetic traits to specific chromosomes, creating a precursor to the human genome map we have today. genetics hela henrietta-lacks human-genome medical-research Rebecca Skloot
5f3ae05 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. cells genes genetics genome Matt Ridley
493ab40 Anything with blood in it can probably go bad. Like meat. And it's the blood that makes me worry. It carries things you don't even know you got. disease genetics incest Tim Winton
3d5ec6a "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." genetics identity self-belief Karen Traviss
db2914f "After Lincoln became president he campaigned for colonization, and even in the midst of war with the Confederacy found time to work on the project, appointing Rev. James Mitchell as Commissioner of Emigration, in charge of finding a place to which blacks could be sent. On August 14th, 1862, he invited a group of black leaders to the White House to try to persuade them to leave the country, telling them that "there is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us." He urged them to lead their people to a colonization site in Central America. Lincoln was therefore the first president to invite a delegation of blacks to the White House--and did so to ask them to leave the country. Later that year, in a message to Congress, he argued not just for voluntary colonization but for the forcible removal of free blacks. Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, shared these anti-black sentiments: "This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men." Like Jefferson, he thought whites had a clear destiny: "This whole vast continent is destined to fall under the control of the Anglo-Saxon race--the governing and self-governing race." Before he became president, James Garfield wrote, "[I have] a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way . . . ." Theodore Roosevelt blamed Southerners for bringing blacks to America. In 1901 he wrote: "I have not been able to think out any solution to the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent . . . ." As for Indians, he once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't inquire too closely into the health of the tenth." William Howard Taft once told a group of black college students, "Your race is adapted to be a race of farmers, first, last, and for all times." Woodrow Wilson was a confirmed segregationist, and as president of Princeton he refused to admit blacks. He enforced segregation in government offices and was supported in this by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, who argued that "civilized white men" could not be expected to work with "barbarous black men." During the presidential campaign of 1912, Wilson took a strong position in favor of excluding Asians: "I stand for the national policy of exclusion. . . . We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. . . . Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson." Warren Harding also wanted the races kept separate: "Men of both races [black and white] may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. This is not a question of social equality, but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference. Racial amalgamation there cannot be." colonization diversity equality genetics learning race Jared Taylor
a7f1f8f "Anzick-1's "Clovis connection" is of immediate relevance to our quest here--which is that although Clovis did, at the limits of its range, extend into some northern areas of South America, its heartland was in North America. Intuitively, therefore, we would expect the Montana infant, a Clovis individual, to be much more closely related to Native North Americans than to Native South Americans. Further investigations, however, while reconfirming that Anzick-1's genome had a greater affinity to Native Americans than to any extant Eurasian population, revealed it to be much more closely related to native Americans than to Native North Americans!" deep-human-history genetics migrations Graham Hancock
84408f3 Some Amazonian Native Americans descend partly from a Native American founding population that carried ancestry more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders than to any present-day Eurasians or Native Americans. This signature is not present to the same extent, or at all, in present-day Northern and Central Americans or in a 12,600-year-old Clovis-associated genome, suggesting a more diverse set of founding populations of the Americans than previously accepted. [Quoting Pontus Skoglund] founding genetics migrations Graham Hancock
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