Peter Medawar Quotes

You can't have life without the genetic code.

The elementary particles which form the embryo are each drawn from the corresponding structure in the parent, and conserve a sort of remembrance of their previous form, so that in the offspring they will reflect and reproduce a resemblance to the parents ... We can thus readily explain how new species are formed... by supposing that the elementary particles may not always retain the order which they present in the parents, but may fortuitously produce differences, which, multiplying and accumulating, have resulted in the infinite variety of species which we see at the present time.

Only engineers would do something like random mutagenesis.

Hormones get no respect. We think of them as the elusive chemicals that make us a bit moody, but these magical little molecules do so much more.

Scientific careers rely on inheritance, environment, and random events, like all biological phenomena.

SpongeBob is just made of cellulose, but he has parents who are natural sponges - he got the square gene.

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can't do anything about them.

Statistical differences between races are not automatically due to race— either in the sense of being caused by genetics or being a result of racial discrimination.

We are not evolved but evolving.

All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.

When two plants, constantly different in one or several traits, are crossed, the traits they have in common are transmitted unchanged to the hybrids and their progeny, as numerous experiments have proven; a pair of differing traits, on the other hand, are united in the hybrid to form a new trait, which usually is subject to changes in the hybrids' progeny.

Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.

Each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ratio . . . each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction . . . The vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.

Galen , in the third section of his book, "The Use of the Limbs," says correctly that it would be in vain to expect to see living beings formed of the blood of menstruous women and the semen virile, who will not die, will never feel pain, or will move perpetually, or shine like the sun. This dictum of Galen is part of the following more general proposition: Whatever is formed of matter receives the most perfect form possible in that species of matter; in each individual case the defects are in accordance with that individual matter.

The succession of individuals, connected by reproduction and belonging to a species, makes it possible for the specific form itself to last for ages. In the end, however, the species is temporary; it has no "eternal life." After existing for a certain period, it either dies or is converted by modification into other forms.

I'm originally from Tampa and grew up on beach. I'm also naturally fair-skinned. The funny thing is, my parents are both pretty tan, but for some reason I didn't get those genes.

Evolution usually occurs in response to a crisis situation, and we now are faced with such a crisis situation. This is why there is indeed an enormous acceleration in the awakening process of our species.

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

A gene can be either dominant or recessive, depending on which type of gene it is.

Generation by male and female is a law common to animals and plants.

Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can only be doubted by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or plain bigotry.

Millions of human vermin swarm sweating along the night-arched cavernous roads. (Happily rapid chemical processes will disintegrate them all.

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

If you get three women and a dog together and they all mate together they're not gonna have a baby