A Quote by Sam Kean
It's often meaningless to talk about a genetic trait without also discussing the environment in which that trait appears. Sometimes, genes don't work at all until the environment awakens them.
Related Quotes
Trait X is fitter than trait Y in a population of organisms if those organisms have other biological traits T and live in an environment that has properties E. The theory of natural selection is filled with statements of this form.
Genes do make a contribution to the IQ score - but a flower needs soil. The environment for poor people is so overwhelmingly powerful, it washes out the genetic effect. There is a genetic contribution to IQ, but you can't detect it when you're living in a deprived environment.
When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success.
The regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
All the work on heritability was never based on looking at genes; it was based on the similarity between identical twins or between parents and children. Now that geneticists can look at genes, they can't find genes that account for more than 10 percent of the variation in any human trait.
Epigenetics doesn't change the genetic code, it changes how that's read. Perfectly normal genes can result in cancer or death. Vice-versa, in the right environment, mutant genes won't be expressed. Genes are equivalent to blueprints; epigenetics is the contractor. They change the assembly, the structure.
The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.
The major problem with most attempts to predict a specific outcome, such as interviews, is decontextualization: the attempt takes place in a generalized environment, as opposed to the context in which a behavior or trait naturally occurs.
Every politician, clergyman, educator, or physician, in short, anyone dealing with human individuals, is bound to make grave mistakes if he ignores these two great truths of population zoology: (1) no two individuals are alike, and (2) both environment and genetic endowment make a contribution to nearly every trait.
My experiments with single traits all lead to the same result: that from the seeds of hybrids, plants are obtained half of which in turn carry the hybrid trait (Aa), the other half, however, receive the parental traits A and a in equal amounts. Thus, on the average, among four plants two have the hybrid trait Aa, one the parental trait A, and the other the parental trait a. Therefore, 2Aa+ A +a or A + 2Aa + a is the empirical simple series for two differing traits.
Since the individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming.
Yes, genes are important for understanding our behavior. Incredibly important - after all, they code for every protein pertinent to brain function, endocrinology, etc., etc. But the regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
My experience is that aggression is a universal trait in human beings - girls feel it in any sort of environment, same-sex or co-ed.
If the organisms in a species now have trait T, and this trait now helps those organisms to survive and reproduce because the trait has effect E, a natural hypothesis to consider is that T evolved in the lineage leading to those current organisms because T had effect E. This hypothesis is "natural," but it often isn't true!
No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.
Most great figures in world history are remembered for their compassion. [Martin Luther] King shared this trait with the Ghandis, Mother Teresas, and Mandelas of the world. He also shared this trait with the late Stanley Tookie Williams.
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