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

  51 Copy quote

• 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

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  49 Copy quote

• Talent is an accident of genes - and a responsibility.

  Alan Rickman

  Responsibility, Acting, Talent

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  79 Copy quote

• 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.

  62 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

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

  Steven Pinker

  Possibility, Cases, Taboo

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  25 Copy quote

• I guess I'm just lucky with my genes.

  Jamie Dornan

  Lucky

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

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  9 Copy quote

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

  Daniel Nathans

  Mutation, Disease, Firsts

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  46 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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)

  80 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Granted, we may try to help our own family members because they share our DNA. Or help someone else in expectation that they will help us later. But when you look at what we admire as the most generous manifestations of altruism, they are not based on kin selection or reciprocity. An extreme example might be Oskar Schindler risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers. That's the opposite of saving his genes.

  Richard Dawkins

  Opposites, Dna, Expectations

  Source: inters.org

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms - folded them into its genes - and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.

  E. O. Wilson

  Years, Storm, World

  "The Diversity of Life". Book by Edward O. Wilson, 1992.

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's in our genes, we were built to wander.

  Helen Fisher

  Infidelity, Wander, Built

  5 Copy quote