Quotes on Genes

I maintain, despite the moment's evidence against the claim, that we are born and grow up with a fondness for each other, and we have genes for that. We can be talked out of it, for the genetic message is like a distant music, and some of us are hard-of-hearing. Societies are noisy affairs, drowning out the sound of ourselves and our connection.

No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?

We’ve got ninety-nine per cent the same genes as any other person. We’ve got ninety per cent the same as a chimpanzee. We’ve got thirty per cent the same as a lettuce. Does that cheer you up at all? I love about the lettuce. It makes me feel I belong.

Early experience shapes the structure and function of the brain. This reveals the fundamental way in which gene expression is determined by experience.

A large animal needs a large area. If you protect that area, you're also protecting thousands of other plants and animals. You're saving all these species that future generations will want - you're saving the world for your children and your children's children. . . . The destruction of species is final. If you lose a species, you lose the genes, you lose all the potential drugs and potential foods that could be useful to the next generations. The ecosystems will not function as they have.

Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do explanations that appeal to upbringing.

Yes, genes are important for understanding our behavior. Incredibly important - after all, they code for every protein pertinent to brain function, endocrinology, etc., etc. But the regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.

Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.

Nearly every one of the genes that turns out to be a key player in cancer has a vital role in the normal physiology of an organism. The genes that enable our brains and blood cells to develop are implicated in cancer.

Most of what you hear about entrepreneurshi p is all wrong. It's not magic; it's not mysterious; and it has nothing to do with genes. It's a discipline and, like any discipline, it can be learned.

Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture.

The thing I'm most interested in is the nervous system. How do brains grow? How do genes build complicated nervous systems?

It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.

People think if you have deciphered the genome of humans that you can change everything. But you cannot change everything, because you do not know what the genes mean, and you have no methods for changing them, and you can't do experiments with humans like you can with animals.

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.

Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.

Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.

If the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies ... are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention ... The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.

For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.

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