Biological Basis Quotes

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

We're all animals.

Exclusive homosexuality is not very common in nature.

For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.

People are really interested in these fundamental questions: Why is life based on carbon and not silicon?

To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception.

I can single handedly dispel any ideas that sexuality is acquired. Trust me, you're born with it. My brother is gay, and we knew when he was two.

I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.

The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, the sun of their microcosm, that upon which all growth depends, from which all power proceeds.

In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' operate on precisely the same principles that we do.

A cell is regarded as the true biological atom.

Childhood is analogous to language learning. It has a biological basis but cannot be realized unless a social environment triggers and nurtures it, that is, has need of it. If a culture is dominated by a medium that requires the segregation of the young in order that they learn unnatural, specialized, and complex skills and attitudes, then childhood, in one form or another, will emerge, articulate and indispensable.

Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.

What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

All spiritual interests are supported by animal life.

We do not know with any of these neuropsychiatric disorders what the ultimate basis is. Let's say you could find that too much of protein X was involved in schizophrenia. Would you then know what schizophrenia is? You would not.

The task of neural science is to explain behaviour in terms of the activities of the brain. How does the brain marshall its millions of individual nerve cells to produce behaviour, and how are these cells influenced by the environment...? The last frontier of the biological sciences – their ultimate challenge – is to understand the biological basis of consciousness and the mental processes by which we perceive, act, learn, and remember.

Ultimately, life is a chemical interaction.

'Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?

It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated. But this says nothing about their causation.

It is said that there is a principle of conflict which originated with the single cell and has never deteriorated.

Genes themselves are made of bits.

I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.

A solid foundation in genetics is increasingly important for everyone.