Environmental Factors Quotes

Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic "causes" of these "conditions"?

Know the enemy, know yourself; your victory will never be endangered. Know the ground, know the weather; your victory will then be total.

The human being is a self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences. Willful and predetermined though they appear, his actions are governed not from within, but from without. He is like a float tossed about by the waves of a turbulent sea.

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

Man is a child of his environment.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives. Nor is it the most intelligent. It is the members of the species that are most adaptive to change.

Half of what creates psychopaths is genetic, but the other half is conditioning.

Reactive people... are often affected by their physical environment. They find external sources to blame for their behavior.

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.

I think humanity is not wise enough to know what genotype or somatype is going to be the most successful or the most fit - simply because we're not fully in control of our environment.

You're not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you.

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.

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

Geography determines the course of history.

Only 20 percent of our longevity is genetically determined. The rest is what we do, how we live our lives and increasingly the molecules that we take. It's not the loss of our DNA that causes aging, it's the problems in reading the information, the epigenetic noise.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

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. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.

Your genetics load the gun. Your lifestyle pulls the trigger.

I am a student of evolution and adaptation.

There are absolutely ways to manipulate behavior, because our behavior is endlessly being manipulated by the world around us.

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.

Health is a function of three things. 1. Luck 2. Genetics and 3. Choices in your lifestyle.

Having examined the principal points in which the several tribes of the human species differ from each other... I proceed to inquire whether the diversities enumerated ... are to be considered as characteristic distinctions coeval with the origin of the species, or as a result of subsequent variation; and in the event of the latter... whether they are the effect of external... causes, or of native or congenital variety.