Genes Quotes

“I have all these great genes, but they're recessive. That's the problem here.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“When you have only ever experienced privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“I think there was always some scrawny dreamer sitting at the edge of the firelight, who had the ability to imagine dangers, to look into the future in his imagination and see possibilities, and therefore survived to pass his genes on to the next generation.”
― Christopher Moore, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

“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

“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, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

“Those Genes Could Have Been Mine”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography

“Illness might progressively vanish so might identity. Grief might be diminished, but so might tenderness. Traumas might be erased but so might history. Infirmities might disappear, but so might vulnerability. Chance would become mitigated, but so, inevitably, would choice.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“People don’t adopt their ideologies at random, or by soaking up whatever ideas are around them. People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously being less sensitive to signs of threat, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals. They tend to develop certain “characteristic adaptations” and “life narratives” that make them resonate—unconsciously and intuitively—with the grand narratives told by political movements on the left (such as the liberal progress narrative). People whose genes give them brains with the opposite settings are predisposed, for the same reasons, to resonate with the grand narratives of the right (such as the Reagan narrative).
Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it’s difficult—perhaps impossible—to convince them that they are wrong if you argue with them from outside of their matrix. I suggested that liberals might have even more difficulty understanding conservatives than the other way around, because liberals often have difficulty understanding how the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations have anything to do with morality. In particular, liberals often have difficulty seeing moral capital, which I defined as the resources that sustain a moral community.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cofactors can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes. In a word the cytoplasm may be ignored genetically.”
― Thomas Hunt Morgan

“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, Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection

“In middle age you no longer thought such thoughts about free choice. Then it came over you that from one grandfather you had inherited such and such a head of hair which looked like honey when it whitens or sugars in the jar; from another, broad thick shoulders; an oddity of speech from one uncle, and small teeth from another, and the gray eyes with darkness diffused even into the whites, and a wide-lipped mouth like a statue from Peru. Wandering races have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another. From his mother he had gotten sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature, a tendency to be confused under pressure.”
― Saul Bellow, Seize the Day

“We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant forces we don’t know a thing about.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Our worst behaviors, ones we condemn and punish, are the products of our biology. But don’t forget that the same applies to our best behaviors.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Many of our best moments of morality and compassion have roots far deeper and older than being mere products of human civilization.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Be dubious about someone who suggests that other types of people are like little crawly, infectious things.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“When humans invented socioeconomic status, they invented a way to subordinate like nothing hierarchical primates had ever seen before.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Often we’re more about the anticipation and pursuit of pleasure than about the experience of it.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience; that’s how we learn –context, context, context.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Rationality may be key to establishing peace, but the irrational importance of sacred values is key to establishing lasting peace.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“We’re the only species that institutionalizes reconciliation and that grapples with –truth-, -apology-, -forgiveness-, -reparations-, -amnesty-, and –forgetting-.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Be careful when our enemies are made to remind us of maggots and cancer and shit. But also beware when it is our empathic intuitions, rather than our hateful ones, that are manipulated by those who use us for their own goals.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Anyone who says that our worst behaviors are inevitable knows too little about primates, including us.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“We are a product of genes and the influence of life.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Take a journey to discover your own inner nature”
― Leo Lourdes, A World of Yoga: 700 Asanas for Mindfulness and Well-Being

“And he said...

...what you consume determines the DNA inside of you.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“The fact that the body ages and dies is not
a mistake. It is part of the genes’ strategy to copy themselves from
one generation of organisms to the next.”
― Jarle Breivik, Making Sense of Cancer: From Its Evolutionary Origin to Its Societal Impact and the Ultimate Solution

“We are temporary cell colonies made by our genes to pass them on to the next generation.”
― Jarle Breivik

“Rainbows mark the people that have not developed correctly.”
― Steven Magee

“You need to undergo a million surgeries so that they cut it out of your genes!”
― Lana M. Rochel, Kill Your Darlings: Long Poem

“We know the genes that allowed us to leave the bush and stand up. I want to find the ones that compel us to look up, the genes that code for religious behavior, that drive us to search for and connect with God.”
― Brian Spector, The Genesis Genes