Genes Quotes

Meditation works in many layers. It works in our genes, in our DNA

~ Amit Ray

It was easier to ignore the consideration of paternal genes then than it would be now. We did not then consider ourselves held in the genetic trap. We thought each infant was born pure and new and holy: a gold baby, a luminous lamb. We did not know that certain forms of breast cancer were programmed and almost ineluctable, and we would not have believed you if you had told us that in our lifetime young women would be subjecting themselves to preventative mastectomies.

~ Margaret Drabble

We are, or rather our natural desire to evade pain and to attain pleasure is, the primary reason we do or say every single thing we do or say.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In many cases, it was the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that fell for her man.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In some cases, it is the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that has left her man for another.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

*Prostitution* is a euphemism for rape incidents that the victim and the economy profits from.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The difference between a ‘man’ and a ‘father’ is that the former shares his genes, but latter gives his life.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn't it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?

~ David Pearce

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event.

~ David Pearce

I just wanted to thank you' he says, his voice low.'A group of scientists told you that my genes were damaged, that there was something wrong with me - they showed you the test results that proved it. And even I started to believe it.' He touches my face, his thumb skimming my cheekbone, and his eyes are on mine, intense and insistent.'You never believed it,' he says 'Not for a second. You always insisted I was... I don't know, whole.

~ Veronica Roth

Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: 'all meanings depend on the key of interpretation.' What makes us human, and what makes each of us his or her own human, is not simply the genes that we have buried into our base pairs, but how our cells, in dialogue with our environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves. Life is a dialectic.

~ Jonah Lehrer

It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the act of learning all the way.

~ Lewis Thomas

In some rare cases, a friendship between two people benefits both of them, and what’s more, in some rarer cases, it benefits both of them equally.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Some of our friends are our friends only because we used to be friends.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Females and boys are the only creatures that propose others for friendship. As for the rest of us, friendship sort of just happens.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The only thing I hate about good people is that they like making their being good people bad people’s problem.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The pleasure or the benefit that the object of our deed derives from it is every now and then greater or even more important than the one we derive from the deed.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Every single good person is a good person for their own sake, not for the sake of humanity, not even for the sake of another human being.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

No single bad person regards themselves as a bad person.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

To label someone as selfless is symptomatic of having bought the preposterous claim that a human being can have great concern for other human beings and little concern for themselves, or that, when taken to extremes, a human being can have great concern for other human beings and absolutely no concern for themselves.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It is humanly impossible to be selfless. As a matter of fact, human beings are inherently selfish.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Experiences and memories make us who we are, not just our genes.

~ Merlyn Gabriel Miller

Our genes still expect us to eat a higher fat diet; they still see agricultural foods (and modern foods such as sugar), as poisonous; they still see lack of sunlight and exercise as problematic. We haven't genetically adapted to modern life because there is no selection pressure in the civilised world.

~ Mark Sisson

In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.

~ Matt Ridley

Genes are overrated...Genes never helped anybody pick the right foods or hit the gym floor at 6 am. Its you as a person, its always been YOU!

~ Dr Deepak Hiwale

GENESG raft of yourselfE endowmentN ew generationE volutionS urvival Kamil Ali

~ Kamil Ali

What shall it profit a male if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his immortal genes?

~ Richard Dawkins

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

The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance.

~ Lewis Thomas

Nature's stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be the gentlest.

~ Theodosius Dobzhansky

Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

~ Steven Pinker

Genetics, accidents of birth or events in early childhood have left criminals' brains and bodies with measurable flaws predisposing them to committing assault, murder and other antisocial acts. .... Many offenders also have impairments in their autonomic nervous system, the system responsible for the edgy, nervous feeling that can come with emotional arousal. This leads to a fearless, risk-taking personality, perhaps to compensate for chronic under-arousal. Many convicted criminals, like the Unabomber, have slow heartbeats. It also gives them lower heart rates, which explains why heart rate is such a good predictor of criminal tendencies. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, for example, had a resting heart rate of just 54 beats per minute, which put him in the bottom 3 per cent of the population.

~ Adrian Raine

The strange fact that out of millions of people in the world, your mother and father met and decided to get married to each other. And out of the millions of sperm, that the one with your genes was the one that made it to the egg and fertilised the egg. I'll never forget it.

~ A.j. Jacobs

She looked for any sign of the boy who'd taught her to whistle a hornpipe, who could palm an ace of hearts and make it reappear from her sleeve, but failed to find even a glimmer of him. Instead she saw Ida taking on a second life in the features of her only son, and for a quick heartbeat Jo was almost grateful for the scar tissue dimpled across her cheek, forehead, and chin. No one would ever be able to invade her face, she realized. She would always simply be herself, whether she liked it or not.

~ Tiffany Baker

The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortext from genes.

~ Robert M. Sapolsky

This exciting new field of epigenetics--meaning literally around the gene--allows us to see how environmental factors alter our gene expression in a specific place within each cell. As a result, we now know that when we take active control of these factors, we can literally help control our health and genetic destiny.

~ Woodson Merrell

Genes do not make an individual homosexual. They play their part, but so does the rest of the universe.

~ Johnny Rich

Skinny jeans were only good if you had skinny genes.

~ Matt Dunn

I have all these great genes, but they're recessive. That's the problem here.

~ Bill Watterson

If you want to know if your kid is going to be fast, the best genetic test right now is a stopwatch. Take him to the playground and have him face the other kids.' Foster's point is that, despite the avant-garde allure of genetic testing, gauging speed indirectly is foolish and inaccurate compared with testing it directly - like measuring a man's height by dropping a ball from a roof and using the time it takes to hit him in the head to determine how tall he is. Why not just use a tape measure?

~ David Epstein