The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.
Apollo has something to teach us as we enter a new century of genetic modification, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology. It's a cautionary tale about that most fundamentally human of human tragedies .. wanting something so badly that you end up d...
Humans have long since possessed the tools for crafting a better world. Where love, compassion, altruism and justice have failed, genetic manipulation will not succeed.
The whole world is dying. Just too slowly and naturally for my liking. Somebody should poison the food by genetically modifying it somehow. But even if that happened, nobody would be stupid enough to buy it—let alone eat it—would they?
If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a "genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.
Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genet...
Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern t...
Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the ...
You know, there's a tremendous amount of genetic propensity not necessarily for what TV shows you like but for literally how you view the world, how you react to things, how things touch you and how things move you.
Aging is basically the build-up of error: error at the genetic level, error at the cellular level. Cells normally repair themselves; that's why you heal when you get a cut. But even the mechanism of repair eventually falls apart.
Now we have technology where we can modify the genomics of individuals by gene transfer and genetic meddling, we may find that people will want to modify their children, enhance their intelligence, their strength and their beauty and all the other so...
What do women do when they get together? We sit around and talk! Men, not so much. My theory is that this difference is genetic and dates back to the hunter-gatherer societies, when the men had to be quiet as they hunted, lest they scare away the bis...
The families in positions of great financial power obsessively interbreed with each other. But I'm not talking about one Earth race, Jewish or non-Jewish. I'm talking about a genetic network that operates through all races, this bloodline being a fus...
Genetically, I have tons of musical background in my life. My mother's father was a famous Weimar-era composer, Ernst Toch. My father's mother was the head of the Vienna Conservatory's piano department. It all canceled out in my case. I'm completely ...
A big tree seemed even more beautiful to me when I imagined thousands of tiny photosynthesis machines inside every leaf. So I went to MIT and worked on bacteria because that's where people knew the most about these switches, how to control the geneti...
Christians need to take the lead in educating people that children are gifts, as my autistic grandson most surely is. By going down the path we're currently on, we might one day get rid of genetic diseases, but only at the cost of our own humanity.
Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the ...
Today, you have neuroscientists working on a genetic, behavioural or cognitive level, and then you have informaticians, chemists and mathematicians. They all have their own understanding of how the brain functions and is structured. How do you get th...
My only wish would be to have 10 more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I'd spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology. The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoodsman, tennis player, or...
I can't cook! It's genetic. My grandmother can't cook, my mother can't cook. I was raised to believe you eat because your body needs fuel for energy, so I eat super foods.
Information is crucial to our biological substance - our genetic code is information. But before 1950, it was not obvious that inheritance had anything to do with code. And it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our ...
