Genes Quotes

I see worries in the fact that we have the power to manipulate genes in ways that would be improbable or impossible through conventional evolution. We shouldn't be complacent in thinking that we can predict the results.

Colin Blakemore

Thinking, Gmos, Worry

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Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

Lewis Thomas

Science, Animal, Survival

Lewis Thomas (1984). “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony”, Bantam

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Scientists have found the gene for shyness. They would have found it years ago, but it was hiding behind a couple of other genes.

Jonathan Katz

Couple, Years, Shy

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But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.

Steven Pinker

Possibility, Cases, Taboo

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It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.

Lewis Thomas

Cells, Resemblance Is, Whales

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Talent is an accident of genes - and a responsibility.

Alan Rickman

Responsibility, Acting, Talent

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One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator.

Susan Blackmore

Mistake, Thinking, People

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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.

Richard Dawkins

Selfish, Science, Survival

1976 The Selfish Gene, ch.2.

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I guess I'm just lucky with my genes.

Jamie Dornan

Lucky

"Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive.

Richard Dawkins

Science, Survival, Quality

Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.65, W. W. Norton & Company

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They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Richard Dawkins

Names, Long, Survival

Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition”, p.41, Oxford University Press

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In the process of natural selection, then, any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species.

E. O. Wilson

Science, Generations, Evolution

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First of all, many human diseases are influenced by, if not caused by mutations in genes.

Daniel Nathans

Mutation, Disease, Firsts

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Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Attitude, Philosophy, Teaching

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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.

Steven Pinker

Children, Mean, Kids

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Natural selection based on the differential multiplication of variant types cannot exist before there is material capable of replicating itself and its own variations, that is, before the origination of specifically genetic material or gene-material.

Hermann Joseph Muller

Science, Differences, Variation

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We are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and the gene. When we have progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms...the result might be hard to accept.

E. O. Wilson

Knowledge, Science, Neurons

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Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

Richard Dawkins

Selfish, Philosophical, Thought Provoking

Richard Dawkins (2006). “The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary edition”, p.9, OUP Oxford

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Fossil bones and footsteps and ruined homes are the solid facts of history, but the surest hints, the most enduring signs, lie in those miniscule genes. For a moment we protect them with our lives, then like relay runners with a baton, we pass them on to be carried by our descendents. There is a poetry in genetics which is more difficult to discern in broken bomes, and genes are the only unbroken living thread that weaves back and forth through all those boneyards.

Jonathan Kingdon

Lying, Home, Science

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Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

Richard Dawkins

Selfish, Generosity, Design

The Selfish Gene ch. 1 (1976)

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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?

John Updike

Sex, Health, Order

John Updike (2012). “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs”, p.230, Random House

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But we live in an age, ladies and gentlemen, where we are keeping morons alive in our gene pools by putting warnings on items that should not require warnings. The hotel I am staying in has a hair dryer, on the cord of the hair dryer there is a warning and this is what it says: “Warning! Do not use in shower!” Ladies and gentlemen if you have a friend who wants to use their hair dryer in the shower, you let them.

Wil Anderson

Hair, Gentleman, Age

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In 15 years we'll have all the sequence, a list of the genes everyone has in common and those that differ among people. We know only something like a tenth of 1 percent of the sequence at the moment.

Walter Gilbert

Years, People, Lists

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Just like a single cell, the character of our lives is determined not by our genes but by our responses to the environmental signals that propel life.

Bruce H. Lipton

Life, Character, Science

Bruce H. Lipton (2015). “The Biology of Belief 10th Anniversary Edition: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles”, p.12, Hay House, Inc

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Even in chimps there is true altruistic behaviour; behaviour that doesn't fit into the sociobiological model that says you either help a close relative and thereby your own genes, or you help somebody else now in return for their help in the future. When a very high-ranking male chimpanzee rescues a little orphan, saving his life, that kind of explanation doesn't work.

Jane Goodall

Saving, Littles, Return

Source: www.egonzehnder.com

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