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Heredity Quotes

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Heredity Quotes

“The DNA in your body determines your hair, your height, your eye color. It does not decide that you are going to get joy out of causing pain and hurting others like he did. It does not decide that you will break down other people so you can stand taller. You decide that, Blair. You get to choose. You get to be whoever the hell you want to be, and honestly, I think you made that choice a long time ago.”

FamilyTruth Of LifeMothers And DaughtersHeredityStrength Of SpiritBikersBadass WomenAddison JaneExiled EightWisdom Intelligence
Book:Illusive
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“Repensei no corpo em desordem da professora, no corpo desgovernado de Melina. Sem uma razão evidente, comecei a olhar com atenção para as mulheres ao longo da estrada. De repente me veio a impressão de ter vivido com uma espécie de limitação do olhar: como se só fosse capaz de focalizar nosso grupo de meninas, Ada, Gigliola, Carmela, Marisa, Pinuccia, Lila, a mim mesma, minhas colegas de escola, e jamais tivesse realmente notado o corpo de Melina, o de Giuseppina Peluso, o de Nunzia Cerullo, o de Maria Carracci. O único corpo de mulher que eu tinha examinado com crescente preocupação era a figura claudicante de minha mãe, e apenas por aquela imagem me sentira perseguida, ameaçada, temendo até agora que ela se impusesse de chofre à minha própria imagem. Naquela ocasião, ao contrário, vi nitidamente as mães da família do bairro velho. Eram nervosas, eram aquiescentes. Silenciavam de lábios cerrados e ombros curvos ou gritavam insultos terríveis aos filhos que as atormentavam. Arrastavam-se magérrimas, com as faces e os olhos encavados, ou com traseiros largos, tornozelos inchados, as sacolas de compra, os meninos pequenos que se agarravam às suas saias ou queriam ser levados no colo. E, meu Deus, tinham dez, no máximo vinte anos a mais do que eu. No entanto pareciam ter perdido os atributos femininos aos quais nós, jovens, dávamos tanta importância e que púnhamos em evidência com as roupas, com a maquiagem. Tinham sido consumidas pelo corpo dos maridos, dos pais, dos irmãos, aos quais acabavam sempre se assemelhando, ou pelo cansaço ou pela chegada da velhice, pela doença. Quando essa transformação começava? Com o trabalho doméstico? Com as gestações? Com os espancamentos? Lila se deformaria como Nunzia? De seu rosto delicado despontaria Fernando, seu andar elegante se transmutaria nas passadas abertas e braços afastados do tronco, de Rino? E também meu corpo, um dia, cairia em escombros, deixando emergir não só o de minha mãe, mas ainda o do pai? E tudo o que eu estava aprendendo na escola se dissolveria, o bairro tornaria a prevalecer, as cadências, os modos, tudo se confundiria numa lama escura, Anaximandro e meu pai, Fólgore e dom Achille, as valências e os pântanos, os aoristos, Hesíodo e a vulgariadade arrogante dos Solara, como de resto há milênios acontecia na cidade, sempre mais decomposta, sempre mais degradada?”

ViolenceInequalityWomanhoodHeredityGaze
Book:The Story of a New Name
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“Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong 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. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one.”

IndoctrinationHeredity
Author:Richard Dawkins
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“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.”

BiologyExtinctionHeredity
Book:Revolt Against the Modern World
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“And so,' smiled the Witcher, 'I have no choice? I have to enter into a pact with you, a pact which should someday become the subject of a painting, and become a sorcerer? Give me a break. I know a little about the theory of heredity. My father, as I discovered with no little difficulty, was a wanderer, a churl, a troublemaker and a swashbuckler. My genes on the spear side may be dominant over the genes on the distaff side. The fact that I can swash a buckler pretty well seems to confirm that.”

GeneticsHereditySwashbuckling
Book:Czas pogardy
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“First Law In 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 Law All 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.”

ScienceNatureInfluenceEvolutionFunctionBiologyGeneticsNatural SelectionReproductionNaturalismHeredity
Book:Zoological Philosophy
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“Jem made the little Scottish noise again, and Brianna looked sideways at him. "Are you doing that on purpose?" He looked up at her, surprised. "Doing what?" "Never mind. When you are fifteen, I'm locking you in the cellar." "What? Why?" he demanded indignantly. "Because that's when your father and grandfather started getting into real trouble, and evidently you're going to be just like them.”

TroubleHeredityJamie FraserRoger MackenzieJem MackenzieScottish Noises
Book:Written in My Own Heart's Blood
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“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.”

ScienceNaturalBiologyHeredityDarwinCharles DarwinAugust WeismannWeismann
Book:Mendel's Principles of Heredity
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“The things you experience," she continued, "are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation. And even if you never lift a shovel or plant a cabbage, every day of your life something is written upon you. And when you die, the entirety of that written record returns to the earth. All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. Maybe the only things that persist are----copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy. I have devoted my miniscule life to the act of copying.”

RecordsHeredity
Author:Madeleine Thien
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“...imitation supplements inadequate congenital variations in the direction of an instinct, and so, by keeping the creature alive, sets the trend of further variations in the same direction until the instinct is fully organized and congenital. If both of these views be true, as there seems reason to believe, then imitation holds a remarkable position in relation to intelligence and instinct. It stands midway between them and aids them both. In some functions it keeps the performance going, and so allows of its perfection as an instinct; in others it puts a stress on intelligence, and so allows the instinct to fall away, if it have no independent utility in addition to that served by the intelligence. In other words, it is through imitation that instincts both arise and decay; that is, some instincts are furthered, and some suppressed, by imitation.”

InstinctIntelligenceImitationHeredity
Book:The Play of Animals
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“Eugenics is not just a tool of totalitarianism. Eugenics, as it was conceived, could not be anything but totalitarian as it desired to control all aspects of society. Hitler’s “National Socialist” (Nationalsozialist) form of government was amongst the first to put the full force of its government to conduct compulsory health initiatives. It is by no coincidence that the Dachau concentration camp used its slave-labor to run the largest organic produce farm of the era.”

RacistNaziSegregationTotalitarianismWwiiBreedingEugenicsNazismHitlerHeredityHolocaust HistoryAdolf HitlerTotalitarianWwii HistoryNational SocialismSterilizationScientific RacismPseudo ScienceRace HygieneEugenicistHarry H LaughlinGovernment Regulations
Book:H.H. Laughlin: American Scientist, American Progressive, Nazi Collaborator
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“It is true that humans have physical differences, and some of those differences are spread geographically across the plant. But clinging to old notions about race won't help us understand the nature of those differences—both the ones we can see and the ones we can't.”

RaceGeneticsHeredityWestern Society
Book:She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
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“In addition to the often unsatisfactory cards dealt to us by heredity...each of us will, throughout our lives, suffer innumerable encounters with disease, injury, emotional trauma, and personal defeat. These stochastic encounters are cumulative, and many of them will even come to shape core parts of our beings. But are our identities inextricably linked to our imperfections, struggles and genetic blemishes?”

IdentityGeneticsHeredityImperfectionsPersonal IdentityCore Identity
Book:Upgrade Soul
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“One of them was directly descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote 'The Scarlet letter'. Mom says everybody immediately began to feel oppressed by their humble backgrounds because they'd forgotten (or didn't know) that anyone who's descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne is also a descendant of John Hathorne, the Salem judge who put just about as many innocent people to death as he could, so was it any wonder that Hawthorne was so good at describing what it felt like to be racked with guilt day and night.”

Heredity
Book:Boy, Snow, Bird
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“Many writers claim that nearly all crime is caused by economic conditions, or in other words that poverty is practically the whole cause of crime. Endless statistics have been gathered on this subject which seem to show conclusively that property crimes are largely the result of the unequal distribution of wealth. But crime of any class cannot be safely ascribed to a single cause. Life is too complex, heredity is too variant and imperfect, too many separate things contribute to human behavior, to make it possible to trace all actions to a single cause.”

HumansHas BeensWholeShowsSeemsActionLife IsCausesWealthResultsClassPovertyEconomicConditionsSubjectsCrimeBehaviorClaimsPropertyComplexesEndlessStatisticsImperfectHuman BehaviorDistributionHeredityDistribution Of Wealth
Author:Clarence Darrow
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“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.”

HumansMeanFactsIndividualSocialReligiousAnimalMoralCasesPsychologyPressureFundamentalsInstinctEtcInternalsOrganismsHeredity
Book:The Moral Judgement of the Child
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“I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.”

PeopleWayNeedsWritingBelieveHumansChildrenSelfHappensI BelieveBornHuman BeingsResultsFamilyEnvironmentCreaturesMessagesUniqueConservativePainfulContrarySelfishCoreDestructiveBlankUnpredictableHierarchySlateHeredityBlank Slates
Author:Gloria Steinem
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“Those social behaviors which automatically preclude the building of a democratic world must go - every social limitation of human beings in terms of heredity, whether it be of race, or sex, or class. Every social institution which teaches human beings to cringe to those above and step on those below must be replaced by institutions which teach people to look each other straight in the face.”

PeopleWorldHumansLooksFacesSocialSexTermHuman BeingsRaceStepsClassTeachBuildingBehaviorInstitutionsDemocraticEqualityLimitationReplacedCringeHereditySocial InstitutionsSocial Behavior
Book:And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America
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