Biological Inheritance Quotes

The phrase 'nature and nurture' is a convenient jingle of words, for it separates under two distinct heads the innumerable elements of which personality is composed. Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence without that affects him after his birth.

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

I am terribly proud of-I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are DNA!

There is no escaping from the conclusion that nature prevails enormously over nurture.

I would love to have children, yes. Maybe even adopt them. I'm not sure that I should pass on my genes.

An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.

The elementary particles which form the embryo are each drawn from the corresponding structure in the parent, and conserve a sort of remembrance of their previous form, so that in the offspring they will reflect and reproduce a resemblance to the parents ... We can thus readily explain how new species are formed... by supposing that the elementary particles may not always retain the order which they present in the parents, but may fortuitously produce differences, which, multiplying and accumulating, have resulted in the infinite variety of species which we see at the present time.

Essentially, I mean the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.

You can inherit male-pattern baldness from your mother's father, but not a tendency to fight in the First World War.

Here he tells us that the new birth is first of all 'not of blood'. You don't get it through the blood stream, through heredity. Your parents can give you much, but they cannot give you this.

DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once - when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.

The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.

Some of the exponents of this theory of heredity have attempted to elude the difficulty of placing a whole world of wonders within a body so small and so devoid of physical structure as the germ.

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.

The general rule is that anything that is passed on in reproduction does not undergo senescence.

Genetics is about how information is stored and transmitted between generations.

My father had the curved feet, my mother the legs, so I am a bit of both.

I believe that we have more capability than any other creature to control our biological inheritance - and we do so most of the time.

The choices and decisions we make in terms of how we use the land ultimately affect our very DNA. Environmental issues are life issues.

You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer.

People still don't get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes.

We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behavior, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition.

Each man carries the vestiges of his birth; the slime and eggshells of his primeval past with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below.

We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves.