A Quote by Peter Medawar

I shall borrow two words used for a slightly different purpose by the great demographer Alfred Lotka to distinguish between the two systems of heredity enjoyed by man: endosomatic or internal heredity for the ordinary or genetical heredity we have in common with animals; and exosomatic or external heredity for the non-genetic heredity that is peculiarly our own - the heredity that is mediated through tradition, by which I mean the transfer of information through non-genetic channels from one generation to the next.

Peter Medawar

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Animals Between Borrow Channels Common Different Distinguish Enjoyed External Generation Genetic Great Heredity Information Internal Man Mean Next Ordinary Our Own Purpose Shall Slightly Systems Through Tradition Transfer Two Used Which Words

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Peter Medawar
Brazilian - Scientist
February 28, 1915 - October 2, 1987

Religion shows a pattern of heredity which I think is similar to genetic heredity. ... There are hundreds of different religious sects, and every religious person is loyal to just one of these. ... The overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one their parents belonged to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained-glass, the best music when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing compared to the matter of heredity.

Richard Dawkins

Heredity, to our understanding is not capable of giving to this illness (paraphilia) its characteristic form ... Heredity invents nothing, creates nothing anew; it has no imagination.

Alfred Binet

Heredity is to-day the central problem of biology. This problem may be approached from many sides - that of the breeder, the experimenter, the statistician, the physiologist, the embryologist, the cytologist - but the mechanism of heredity can be studied best by the investigation of the germ cells and their development.

Edwin Conklin

Man is the control experiment of heredity and environment; and since his heredity controls him, he tries to control his environment.

Evan Esar

From the point of view of the pure morphologist the recapitulation theory is an instrument of research enabling him to reconstruct probable lines of descent; from the standpoint of the student of development and heredity the fact of recapitulation is a difficult problem whose solution would perhaps give the key to a true understanding of the real nature of heredity.

E.S. Russell

I established the opposite view, that this history of the embryo (ontogeny) must be completed by a second, equally valuable, and closely connected branch of thought - the history of race (phylogeny). Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation... 'ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis, determined by the physiological functions of heredity (generation) and adaptation (maintenance).

Ernst Haeckel

The relationship between heredity and IQ in human beings is well established. But that does not mean that if you have a group difference, an ethnic difference, that difference must also be genetic.

Charles Murray

Heredity provides for the modification of its own machinery.

James Mark Baldwin

Freedom was conditioned by man's physical body, heredity, and environment.

Kenneth Scott Latourette

Heredity is a splendid phenomenon that relieves us of responsibility for our shortcomings.

Doug Larson

Heredity is nothing but stored environment.

Luther Burbank

Heredity proposes and development disposes.

Peter Medawar

Your place in life is not fixed by heredity.

Wallace D. Wattles

For the fundamental fact of human psychology is that society, instead of remaining almost entirely inside the individual organism as in the case of animals prompted by their instincts, becomes crystallized almost entirely outside the individuals. In other words, social rules, as Durkheim has so powerfully shown, whether they be linguistic, moral, religious, or legal, etc., cannot be constituted, transmitted or preserved by means of an internal biological heredity, but only through the external pressure exercised by individuals upon each other.

Jean Piaget

Help! I'm being held prisoner by my heredity and environment.

Dennis Allen

The purpose of feminism is to free the uniqueness of the individual and to understand that inside each of us is a unique human being who is a combination of heredity and environment.

Gloria Steinem

A Quote by Peter Medawar

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