Biological Variation Quotes

We are all 99.9 percent genetically equal. It is one one-hundredth of one percent of genetic material that makes the difference between any one of us.

The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make' the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells. As a result, even the fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. Their temperaments, mental processes, abilities, life choices, disease histories, and death certainly differ despite the determined efforts of many parents to enforce as great a similarity as possible.

Brains, you see, vary a lot from person to person - they vary as much as faces do.

A few atoms added here, subtracted there, is all it takes to make the difference between male and female sex characteristics, between a harmless molecule and a deadly addictive one.

Plants, again, inasmuch as they are without locomotion, present no great variety in their heterogeneous pacts. For, when the functions are but few, few also are the organs required to effect them. ... Animals, however, that not only live but perceive, present a great multiformity of pacts, and this diversity is greater in some animals than in others, being most varied in those to whose share has fallen not mere life but life of high degree. Now such an animal is man.

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.

It is impossible to say with any certainty to which human race we belong. We all differ visibly in the color of our skin.

There's a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they're mismatched. That's all it is. It's not complicated, it's not a neurosis. It's a mix-up. It's a birth defect, like a cleft palate.

I do not deny certain kinds of biological differences. But I always ask under what conditions, under what discursive and institutional conditions, do certain biological differences - and they're not necessary ones, given the anomalous state of bodies in the world - become the salient characteristics of sex.

That the variability of an organism to a certain extent is a constant and certain condition of life we admit, otherwise there would be no distinguishable individuals of a species.

If your body produces testosterone naturally, fine. Mine doesn't.

A mutation can create an alternative form of a phenomenon - a phenotype or trait - and we can learn a lot by seeing this alternative state. Once I saw a mouse with no eyelids. It simply had a membrane over the eyes. I found it fascinating that there is a single gene required for eyelids to develop.

No two persons have the same mind or the same body.

There really is no such thing as race.

Charles Darwin sailed around the world for two years on the 'Beagle,' and he had quite a bit of interest in things like the iguanas of the Galapagos, even though they were primitive compared to your average Englishman.

We are one species, one people. Every individual on this earth is a member of 'homo sapiens sapiens,' and the geographical variations we see among peoples are simply biological nuances on the basic theme.

The best standardisation committee in the world is nature herself, but in nature standardisation occurs mainly in connection with the smallest possible units: cells. The result is millions of flexible combinations in which one never encounters the stereotyped.

The broadest pattern of history - namely, the differences between human societies on different continents - seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves.

The way to make a worm live longer is probably quite different from making a human live longer.

It is hard to explain the huge variety of diatoms - a microorganism that has 100,000 species - in terms of natural selection.

Following the creation concept that creation processes differed from preservation processes, it is suggested that God endowed each created kind, at the time of its creation, with potential for vast variety.

There's more variation among human groups than between human groups.

You cannot look at a person's genes and say with any accuracy whether they are from one racial group or another.

Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.

Your anatomy is a mystery that nobody bothers explaining to us. Even when we think we have mastered one woman's body, every body is different.