{"quotes":[{"text":"It was easier to ignore the consideration of paternal genes then than it would be now. We did not then consider ourselves held in the genetic trap. We thought each infant was born pure and new and holy: a gold baby, a luminous lamb. We did not know that certain forms of breast cancer were programmed and almost ineluctable, and we would not have believed you if you had told us that in our lifetime young women would be subjecting themselves to preventative mastectomies.","author":"Margaret Drabble","tags":["baby","cancer","genes","genetic","women"],"id":18846,"author_id":"Margaret+Drabble"},{"text":"TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves only when it detects evidence that he is about to mutiny.","author":"Matt Ridley","tags":["biology","cells","genes","genetics","genome"],"id":36579,"author_id":"Matt+Ridley"},{"text":"GENESG raft of yourselfE endowmentN ew generationE volutionS urvival Kamil Ali.","author":"Kamil Ali","tags":["ali","dawn","endowment","evolution","generation","genes","graft","kamil","kamilthe","profound","spawn","survival","vers"],"id":38335,"author_id":"Kamil+Ali"},{"text":"The pleasure or the benefit that the object of our deed derives from it is every now and then greater or even more important than the one we derive from the deed.","author":"Mokokoma Mokhonoana","tags":["advantage","altruism","benefit","charity","compassion","empathy","gene","genes","genie","ghandi","humanity","humor","humour","mahatma-ghandi","mandela","mercy","mother-teresa","nelson-mandela","object","philosopher","philosophy","pleasure","satire","satirist","selfish","selfishness","selfless","selflessness","social-criticism","sympathy","teresa","unselfish","unselfishness"],"id":41834,"author_id":"Mokokoma+Mokhonoana"},{"text":"The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortext from genes.","author":"Robert M. Sapolsky","tags":["brain","frontal-cortex","genes"],"id":57461,"author_id":"Robert+M.+Sapolsky"},{"text":"Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cofactors can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes. In a word the cytoplasm may be ignored genetically.","author":"Thomas Hunt Morgan","tags":["biology","chromosomes","genes","genetics","inheritance","neo-darwinism","nobel-laureate","science"],"id":76278,"author_id":"Thomas+Hunt+Morgan"},{"text":"In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.","author":"Matt Ridley","tags":["amazing-facts","genes","health","status"],"id":77112,"author_id":"Matt+Ridley"},{"text":"Every single good person is a good person for their own sake, not for the sake of humanity, not even for the sake of another human being.","author":"Mokokoma Mokhonoana","tags":["altruism","charity","compassion","empathy","gene","genes","genie","ghandi","good","humanity","humor","humour","mahatma-ghandi","mandela","mercy","mother-teresa","nelson-mandela","philosopher","philosophy","satire","selfishness","selflessness","social-criticism","sympathy","teresa","unselfishness"],"id":86433,"author_id":"Mokokoma+Mokhonoana"},{"text":"We are, or rather our natural desire to evade pain and to attain pleasure is, the primary reason we do or say every single thing we do or say.","author":"Mokokoma Mokhonoana","tags":["altruism","charity","compassion","empathy","gene","genes","genie","ghandi","humanity","humor","humour","mahatma-ghandi","mandela","mercy","mother-teresa","motivation","motive","motives","nelson-mandela","pain","philosopher","philosophy","pleasure","satire","satirist","selfish","selfishness","selfless","selflessness","social-criticism","sympathy","teresa","unselfish","unselfishness"],"id":93420,"author_id":"Mokokoma+Mokhonoana"},{"text":"The problem with racial discrimination, though, is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristics from their race. The question is not, can you, given an individual's skin color, hair texture, or language, infer something about their ancestry or origin. That is a question of biological systematics -- of lineage, taxonomy, of racial geography, of biological discrimination. Of course you can -- and genomics as vastly refined that inference. You can scan any individual genome and infer rather deep insights about a person's ancestry, or place of origin. But the vastly more controversial question is the converse: Given a racial identity -- African or Asian, say -- can you infer anything about an individual's characteristics: not just skin or hair color, but more complex features, such as intelligence, habits, personality, and aptitude? /I/ Genes can certainly tell us about race, but can race tell us anything about genes? /I/To answer this question, we need to measure how genetic variation is distributed across various racial categories. Is there more diversity _within_ races or _between_ races? Does knowing that someone is of African versus European descent, say, allow us to refine our understanding of their genetic traits, or their personal, physical, or intellectual attributes in a meaningful manner? Or is there so much variation within Africans and Europeans that _intraracial_ diversity dominates the comparison, thereby making the category 'African' or 'European' moot?We now know precise and quantitative answers to these questions. A number of studies have tried to quantify the level of genetic diversity of the human genome. The most recent estimates suggest that the vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs _within_ so-called races (I.E., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) within racial groups (the geneticist Richard Lewontin had estimated a similar distribution as early as 1972). Some genes certainly vary sharply between racial or ethnic groups -- sickle-cell anemia is an Afro-Caribbean and Indian disease, and Tay-Sachs disease has a much higher frequency in Ashkenazi Jews -- but for the most part, the genetic diversity within any racial group dominates the diversity between racial groups -- not marginally, but by an enormous amount. The degree of interracial variability makes 'race' a poor surrogate for nearly any feature: in a genetic sense, an African man from Nigria is so 'different' from another man from Namibia that it makes little sense to lump them into the same category.","author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","tags":["anthropology","diversity","evolution","genes","genetics","race","racism"],"id":95869,"author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":46,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}