Sam Kean Quotes

The problem with the gene pool is that there's no lifeguard.

Jumping genes are fundamental because they're agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn - called Indian corn - that you buy in the fall.

If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible.

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

If you know the mother's genome and the father's genome, and you see that the children have some genes that neither parent has, then you know that difference is either a mutation or a processing error.

The interaction of the variation in our genes is what's responsible for lots of our attributes and vigor.

My genetics are good, but they aren't crazy He-Man style.

Heredity provides for the modification of its own machinery.

Genes are mysterious things, still unpredictable after all of our research, flecks of humanity that can destroy lives but, just as often, can teach us to appreciate the strange wonder of our existence.

Mutations are exciting, there aren't nearly enough of them.

I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.

Long before genetics became a flourishing field, Christians have spoken about sin as an inherited condition.

What does gene A do? What does gene B do? What does it do in different contexts? What's its importance? We know the answer to that for a very small number of genes, the ones that made themselves evident many years ago.

Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your DNA.

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

We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology.

Each part of our genome is unique. We would not be alive if there was not a single mathematical solution for our chromosomes. We would just be scrambled goo.

People are comprised of sets of DNA from each parent. If you looked at just the DNA from your father, it wouldn't tell you who you really are.

We haven't been able yet to determine in terms of genes what makes a human being a human and not another mammal.

Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.

Where we are going as a species is a big question. Human evolution certainly hasn't stopped. Every time individuals produce a new zygote, there's a reshuffling and recombination of genes. And we don't know where all of that is going to take us.

The origin of each of us stems from codes of genetic inheritance.

One of the things about genetics that has become clearer as we've done genomes - as we've worked our way through the evolutionary tree, including humans - is that we're probably much more genetic animals than we want to confess we are.

Transposons are just small pieces of DNA that randomly insert in the genetic code. And if they insert in the middle of the gene, they disrupt its function.

For each gene in your genome, you quite often get a different version of that gene from your father and a different version from your mother. We need to study these relationships across a very large number of people.