Heredity Quotes

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee A clover anytime to him Is aristocracy.

Many races as well as cultural influences of men of all kinds have mixed into any man. To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory.

Poverty is hereditary just like power, stupidity, and haemorrhoids.

A genealogist is one who traces your family back as far as your money will go.

The man who has not anything to boast of but his illustrious ancestors is like a potato - the only good belonging to him is underground.

The best blood will sometimes get into a fool or a mosquito.

A man finds room in a few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors for the expression of all his history and his wants.

Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.

Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that "acquired characters" or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can really be transmitted to the offspring. The ocurrence of progressive adaptation by transmission of effects of use had seemed so natural to Darwin and his contemporaries that no proof of the physiological reality of the henomenon was thought necessary. Weismann's challenge revealed the utter inadequacy of the evidence on which the beliefs were based. They are doubtless isolated observations which may be interpreted as favouring the belief in these transmissions, but such meagre indications as exist are by general consent admitted to be too slight to be of much assistance in the attempt to understand how the more complex adaptive mechanisms arose.

Every man is the son of his own works.

What is in your blood matters, but not as much as what is in your heart.

With him for a sire and her for a dam What should I be but just what I am?

Clever father clever daughter clever mother clever son.

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.

It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

Noble fathers have noble children.

A hereditary monarch is as absurd a position as a hereditary doctor or mathematician.

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.

Malcolm Gladwell can’t help being a pinhead. He was probably born that way.

When I want a peerage I shall buy one like an honest man.

Heredity is an omnibus in which all our ancestors ride and every now and then one of them puts his head out and embarrasses us.

There are species that retain their characteristics even in conditions that are relatively different from their natural ones; other species in similar circumstances instead become extinct; otherwise what takes place is racial mixing with other elements in which no assimilation or real evolution occurs. The result of this interbreeding closely resembles Mendel’s laws concerning heredity: once it disappears in the phenotype, the primitive element survives in the form of a separated, latent heredity that is capable of cropping up in sporadic apparitions, even though it is always endowed with a character of heterogeneity in regard to the superior type.

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

The line from psychologists is, if you’ve seen it before, it hasn’t killed you yet.

For it is not cell nuclei, not even individual chromosomes, but certain parts of certain chromosomes from certain cells that must be isolated and collected in enormous quantities for analysis; that would be the precondition for placing the chemist in such a position as would allow him to analyse [the hereditary material] more minutely than [can] the morphologists ... For the morphology of the nucleus has reference at the very least to the gearing of the clock, but at best the chemistry of the nucleus refers only to the metal from which the gears are formed.

The child is father to the man.

Heredity is nothing but stored environment.

Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

A man's rootage is more important than his leafage.

He's a chip o' th' old block.

One of the best things people could do for their descendants would be to sharply limit the number of them.

It runs in the blood like wooden legs.

A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reducing division as indicated above may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity.

First LawIn every animal which has not passed the limit of its development, a more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ, and gives it a power proportional to the length of time it has been so used; while the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively diminishes its functional capacity, until it finally disappears.Second LawAll the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature on individuals, through the influence of the environment in which their race has long been placed, and hence through the influence of the predominant use or permanent disuse of any organ; all these are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which arise, provided that the acquired modifications are common to both sexes, or at least to the individuals which produce the young.