People have been trying for centuries to manipulate genes, enhance certain traits, and achieve racial purity, even in humans. And of course I thought of the Nazis and their efforts toward Aryan magnificence.
Border collies were trained in Scotland. They have the Scots' commands in their genes. At the dog trials, the owners wear those three-piece western suits, cowboy boots and 10-gallon hats, but they carry Scots shepherd's crooks over their arms and talk to their dogs in Scots accents.
But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.
Somehow I have managed to delay looking old. In reality I have good genes.
It's politely assumed that democracy is a means of containing and restraining violence. But violence comes not from genes but from ideas.
Fighting hard to protect yourself and your relatives is good for your genes, but when captured and escape is not possible, giving up short of dying and making the best you can of the new situation is also good for your genes.
Genes are effectively one-dimensional. If you write down the sequence of A, C, G and T, that's kind of what you need to know about that gene. But proteins are three-dimensional. They have to be because we are three-dimensional, and we're made of those proteins. Otherwise we'd all sort of be linear, unimaginably weird creatures.
If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.
Part of the problem with the discovery of the so-called breast-cancer genes was that physicians wrongly told women that had the genetic changes associated with the genes that they had a 99% chance of getting breast cancer. Turns out all women that have these genetic changes don't get breast cancer.
But I'll tell you something: We had a big family discussion about it recently, my two sisters and I, and I pointed out that we all have the same genes as our mother and we're all susceptible to becoming alcoholics.
My dad was a good athlete. My mom had longevity. There were some athletic genes that certainly got passed down.
In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.
Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more important influence by far.
Before the scene, before the paragraph, even before the sentence, comes the word. Individual words and phrases are the building blocks of fiction, the genes that generate everything else. Use the right words, and your fiction can blossom. The French have a phrase for it - le mot juste - the exact right word in the exact right position.
Jumping genes are fundamental because they're agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn - called Indian corn - that you buy in the fall.
With our knowledge of modern-day genetics, we realize that it was possible for God to place the potential for all people throughout history into the genes of Adam and Eve when He created them.
Man is a competitive creature, and the seeds of conflict are built deep into our genes. We fought each other on the savannah and only survived against great odds by organising ourselves into groups which would have had a common purpose, giving morale and fortitude.
We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don't know to what extent this happens.
One of the most important aspects of what makes us who we are is neither straight genes or straight environment but actually what happens to us during development.
There may be an evolutionary advantage for schizophrenia genes during famine.
I'm blessed with good genes, but I also love to look my best self.
Knowing that changing lifestyle changes our genes is often very motivating - not to blame, but to empower.
A long healthy life is no accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits.
We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.
Genes don't mean necessarily that you have got a certain strand of gene that makes you particularly acceptable as a public official.
Sometimes it is claimed by those who argue that race is just a social construct that the human genome project shows that because people share roughly 99% of their genes in common, that there are no races. This is silly.
I would ask my dad what he did, and he'd say, 'I listen to people's problems.' In some way what he did for a living is in my genes.
After I arrived in Basel, I initially attempted to continue the project of my days in Dulbecco's laboratory, namely, the transcriptional control of the simian virus 40 genes.
I talk to my mom about six times a day, and we constantly email in between that. People say that I'm her twin. I guess it would be the Kennedy genes; my cheekbones are coming out.
I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.
In any complex organism, brain formation and function must be controlled in part by genes.
Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating.
An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.
I haven't actually checked my family tree, but Rutherford is a very old Scottish name, so I've probably got Scottish genes a few generations back.
If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white - which his genes certainly entitled him to do - his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis.
According to materialistic science, any memory requires a material substrate, such as the neuronal network in the brain or the DNA molecules of the genes.