Chromosomes Quotes

The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.

Bella Abzug

Jobs, Women, Memorable

Bella S. Abzug (1972). “Bella!: Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington”, Saturday Review Press

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For it is not cell nuclei, not even individual chromosomes, but certain parts of certain chromosomes from certain cells that must be isolated and collected in enormous quantities for analysis; that would be the precondition for placing the chemist in such a position as would allow him to analyse [the hereditary material] more minutely than [can] the morphologists ... For the morphology of the nucleus has reference at the very least to the gearing of the clock, but at best the chemistry of the nucleus refers only to the metal from which the gears are formed.

Theodor Boveri

Enormous Quantities, Cells, Would Be

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I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reducing division as indicated above may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity.

Walter Sutton

Science, Law, Attention

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We have long been seeking a different kind of evolutionary process and have now found one; namely, the change within the pattern of the chromosomes. ... The neo-Darwinian theory of the geneticists is no longer tenable.

Richard Goldschmidt

Science, Long, Different

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Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cooacters can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes. In a word the cytoplasm may be ignored genetically.

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Science, Inheritance, May

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The male chromosome is an incomplete female chromosome. In other words the male is a walking abortion; aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.

Valerie Solanas

Sarcastic, Emotional, Abortion

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In mathematics and science, there is no difference in the intelligence of men and women. The difference in genes between men and women is simply the Y chromosome, which has nothing to do with intelligence.

Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

Men, Differences, Mathematics

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Yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well.

James Hillman

Class, Environment, Biology

Source: scottlondon.com

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Royal blood isn't blue, it is a jaundiced shade of red and riddled with broken chromosomes

Dean Cavanagh

Blood, Blue, Broken

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The male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage

Valerie Solanas

Abortion, Males, Female

The S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1967)

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This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons.' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful.

Rae Armantrout

Beautiful, Book, Dark

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The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that has an incomplete set of chromosomes.

Valerie Solanas

Males, Female, Scum

The S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1967)

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It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology.

Niels Kaj Jerne

Children, Mean, Science

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The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.

Christopher Hitchens

Religion, Half, Chimpanzees

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When the man who knows all about the fruit fly chromosomes finds himself sitting next to an authority on Beowulf, there may be an uneasy silence.

Brand Blanshard

Men, Fruit Flies, Silence

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Sometimes no matter how well you prepare, no matter how conservative your decision making, no matter how few Y chromosomes are along on your trip, you can still find yourself in a mud slide or a hurricane without a dry piece of clothing to your name. But those of us who have given our time and usually our hearts to outdoorsmen over the years know that, for many of them, it's not really a wilderness trip unless, MacGyver-like, they have to make a fire out of a pair of shorts, a glow stick, and a ketchup bottle; it's not really an adventure until someone gets airlifted out.

Pam Houston

Adventure, Heart, Years

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Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.

Richard Dawkins

Hands, Forever, Survival

Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition”, p.56, Oxford University Press

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It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.

Jean Baudrillard

Class, Bourgeoisie, Banality

Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.87, Verso

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Cartoons are like fruit flies. Biologists use fruit flies because their large chromosomes and short life cycle make them ideal for studying hereditary changes.

Robert Mankoff

Short Life, Fruit Flies, Cartoon

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Messengers and mountain bikers share a common chromosome.

James Bethea

Mountain, Bikers, Messengers

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Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed.... The combination of 23 chromosomes present in each pronucleus results in 46 chromosomes in the zygote. Thus the diploid number is restored and the embryonic genome is formed. The embryo now exists as a genetic unity.

Ronan O'Rahilly

Numbers, Unity, Ordinary

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I never 'plan' a stanza. Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.

Marianne Moore

Procedures, Plans, Clusters

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Of all the wonderful things that men and women share, shoes, tragically, are not one of them. This is because men lack the shoe chromosome.

Mimi Pond

Men, Shoes, Wonderful

Mimi Pond (1985). “Shoes never lie”, Berkley Pub Group

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Man's destiny was no longer determined from 'above' by a super-human wisdom and will, but from 'below' by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability. ...they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values and meaning. A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.

Arthur Koestler

Fate, Destiny, Men

"The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1959.

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... we find ourselves facing a rising tide of biologically active, synthetic organic chemicals. Some tinker with our hormones. Some attach themselves to our chromosomes and trigger mutations. Some cripple the immune system. Some light up our genes and so enhance the production of certain enzymes. If we could metabolize these chemicals into completely benign breakdown products and excrete them, they would pose less of a hazard. Instead, a good many of them accumulate.

Sandra Steingraber

Light, Good Man, Environmental

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