Gene Pool Quotes

The only other person attending who was close to her age was Father St. Laurent, a devastatingly good-looking Roman Catholic priest who made the RC's vows of celibacy seem like a crime against the human gene pool. ~ Julia Spencer-Fleming

My father was very bright. My mother had enormous drive. Put that together, and that's my gene pool. ~ Stephen A. Schwarzman

When I asked [my dad why the sky was blue] he said it was because God's a boy. If God were a girl, the sky would be pink.
'What about sunrise and sunset?' I'd asked.
Dad had looked dumbfounded. 'You kids. You think too much.'
It frightened me how shallow the gene pool was that Liam and I were wading in. ~ Julie Anne Peters

What the fuck is this rubbish supposed to be? Special treatment? Ha, it isn't fucking Halloween, you oddball pack of Addams family rejects. I told you Mini-Morticia was a fucking freak and here's the proof. Looks like the whole family spend a little too much time swimming around in the murky end of the gene pool. ~ Jim Goforth

It was about then that the effects of great wealth and a small gene pool started to spell their doom. ~ Jonathan L. Howard

Those men who on the off-chance happened to be taller than her often had some genetic species-survival switch tripped in their brain that made them crave women on the opposite end of the height spectrum, to balance out the gene pool. ~ Sara King

What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens - that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube - formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine - at least not in the physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village - and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life. ~ Dani Shapiro

I don't understand. Who enforces the law?" "The citizens. My people believe that if you can't defend yourself and those who fall under your protection, then we don't need your DNA in our gene pool. We take survival of the fittest to its extreme. But that being said, we mostly leave each other alone because we know how highly trained and armed everyone is ~ Anonymous

The problem with the gene pool is that there's no lifeguard. ~ David Gerrold

A defeatist attitude was not in his gene pool. ~ DiAnn Mills

Mental degeneracy may be caused by lead poisoning. Or by a poor dip in the gene pool. ~ Edward Abbey

The kid scared her sometimes, he was so smart. She wondered where he inherited it. Not from her gene pool, that was for sure. Richard, her first husband and Gabe's father, was smart enough but no genius. She also wondered from time to time whether being so precocious made him an outcast at his private boys' school. It couldn't be easy. ~ Joseph Finder

Let's face it, the gene pool needs a little chlorine. ~ Jimmy Carr

winning or losing an agonist encounter has a dramatic impact on future aggressive behavior. Winners are more likely to initiate attacks against unknown opponents, whereas losers are more circumspect and likely to retreat from unfamiliar conspecifics, adopting an opportunistic strategy, picking and choosing their fights. In the worst case scenario, animals socially subjugated by constant threat and attack from dominant conspecifics develop a submissive phenotype, showing little or no aggressive behavior, essentially eliminating themselves from the gene pool. ~ Randy J. Nelson

Evolution, or its driving engine natural selection, has no foresight. In every generation within every species, the individuals best equipped to survive and reproduce contribute more than their fair share of genes to the next generation. The consequence, blind as it is, is the nearest approach to foresight that nature permits. [...] It is always tinkering: here shrinking a bit, there expanding a bit, constantly adjusting, putting on and taking off, optimising immediate reproductive success. Survival in future centuries doesn't enter into the calculation, for the good reason that it isn't really a calculation at all. It all happens automatically, as some genes survive in the gene pool and others don't. ~ Richard Dawkins

As Lynn Margulis writes: All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years. ~ Steven Johnson

The gene pool could use a deep end ~ Josh Stern

And I tell you one thing, if the primates that we came from, had know that someday politicians would come out of the gene pool, they would have stayed up in the trees and written evolution off as a bad idea. ~ John Sheridan

For groups that made this political transition to egalitarianism, there was a quantum leap in the development of moral matrices. People now lived in much denser webs of norms, informal sanctions, and occasionally violent punishments. Those who could navigate this new world skillfully and maintain good reputations were rewarded by gaining the trust, cooperation, and political support of others. Those who could not respect group norms, or who acted like bullies, were removed from the gene pool by being shunned, expelled, or killed. Genes and cultural practices (such as the collective killing of deviants) coevolved. The end result, says Boehm, was a process sometimes called "self-domestication." Just as animal breeders can create tamer, gentler creatures by selectively breeding for those traits, our ancestors began to selectively breed themselves (unintentionally) for the ability to construct shared moral matrices and then live cooperatively within them. ~ Jonathan Haidt

You want to stay alive in a zombie swarm? You go alone or in a small group, where everyone is of similar physical condition and weapons training. You never stop, you never hesitate, and you never show any mercy for the people that would slow you down.
That is what the military says we should do, and if I ever meet anybody who listens to that particular set of commands, I may shoot them myself just to improve the gene pool. When you can help people stay alive, you help them. We're all we've got. ~ Mira Grant

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin's theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We've repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, liquid helium can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums mentioned above. On astronomically large scales… weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes [then you] should immediately put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for wha ~ Max Tegmark

Democracy and 'progressive democracy' are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state, Since winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society's informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool. ~ Nick Land

The theory of eugenics postulated a crisis of the gene pool leading to the deterioration of the human race. The ~ Michael Crichton

The theory I'm putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren't - and this success translated directly into reproductive success. In other words, hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren't, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact that storytelling isn't just found here and there among human cultures, it's found universally. ~ Daniel Quinn

There was a misconception about me when I started off because I had my hair greased up and I have some vague resemblance to the hillbilly gene pool that Elvis came from. People would say, 'You want to be Elvis' and I would say, 'No'. ~ Chris Isaak

I mean people up here aren't stupid, I'm lower gene pool and I kind of sit in amazement at watching some of them because they are pretty damn smart. ~ Doug Ose

A lot of boys in my poker circle are mathematicians who play on probability. I don't have that kind of brain, so I rely on instinct. But I recently found out that poker and cards in general go way back in my family gene pool. ~ Natalie Dormer

Her train came, and she wrestled her burden through the doors, trying not to think too much about what was in it, or the magnificent life that had been ended somewhere in Africa, though probably not recently. These tusks were massive, and Karou happened to know that elephant tusks rarely grew so big anymore - poachers had seen to that. By killing all the biggest bulls, they'd altered the elephant gene pool. ~ Laini Taylor

Well, we're all victims of our own gene pool. Unfortunately, someone must have peed in yours. - Walter Bishop, "Fringe" (TV) ~ J.J. Abrams

The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior-like the deepest capacities for emotional respone which drive and guide it-is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. ~ E. O. Wilson

What really happens is that the gene pool becomes filled with genes that influence bodies in such a way that they behave 'as if' they made complex, if unconscious, cost/benefit calculations ~ Richard Dawkins

Running around in the grass near an unsecured structure and a bunch of trees is a good way of taking yourself out of the gene pool. ~ Mira Grant

Eugenics was central to the entire Nazi enterprise, joined with romantic nativist and racist myths of the pure-bred Nordic. The emphasis on 'blood' called for a purifying of the nation's gene pool, so that Germans could regain the nobility and greatness of their genetically pure forebears. ~ Alison Thompson

Most accidents, I'm convinced, are God's way of getting rid of stupid people. Or if you believe in Darwinism, you wonder why there are any stupid people left in the world. Well, I guess they can reproduce before they remove themselves from the gene pool. ~ Nelson DeMille

I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result. ~ Temple Grandin

What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool?
You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done. ~ Temple Grandin

People of very different opinions
friends who can discuss politics, religion, and sex with perfect civility
are often reduced to red-faced rage when the topic of conversation is the serial comma or an expression like more unique. People who merely roll their eyes at hate crimes feel compelled to write jeremiads on declining standards when a newspaper uses the wrong form of its. Challenge my most cherished beliefs about the place of humankind in God's creation, and while I may not agree with you, I'll fight to the death for your right to say it. But dangle a participle in my presence, and I'll consider you a subliterate cretin no longer worth listening to, a menace to decent society who should be removed from the gene pool before you do any more damage. ~ Jack Lynch

The gene pool ran pretty small on the Arizona Strip. ~ Betty Webb

I must confess, when I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool. ~ Allen West

Someone once referred to modeling as being like winning the lottery gene pool. It's such an odd way to put things, but what is different about modelling is that the industry often picks you. ~ Erin O'Connor

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worse had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Stupidity is the chlorine that cleans out the gene pool. ~ Scott M. Baker

Yet the ailment is virtually nonexistent in Iceland. There is a higher prevalence of the disorder in the northeastern United States than in Iceland. Perplexed by the results, psychologists theorize that over the centuries Icelanders developed a genetic immunity to the disease. Those who got SAD died out, taking their gene pool with them. Survival of the felicitous. ~ Eric Weiner

There is no intrinsic tendency in gene pools for particular genes to increase or decrease in frequency. But when there is a systematic increase or decrease in the frequency with which we see a particular gene in a gene pool, that is precisely and exactly what we mean by evolution. ~ Richard Dawkins

Likewise, everyone at the Circle there had been chosen, and thus the gene pool was extraordinary, the brainpower phenomenal. It was a place where everyone endeavored, constantly and passionately, to improve themselves, each other, share their knowledge, disseminate it to the world. ~ Dave Eggers

You get diarrhea out here, you dehydrate from the inside out - you leave the gene pool. ~ Cody Lundin

I learned that predators don't intentionally choose the weak or old or sick. they kill what they can, which means the slow members of the pack. thus, they strengthen the very gene pool they're feeding from. the threshold for what is weak, old or sick gets raised, and the strength, speed and instincts of new generations of hunters grow. a beautiful, self-perpetuating system where evolution is the antithesis of entropy. ~ Craig Clevenger

Nesse's research focuses on the evolutionary origins of depression. Why does depression exist at all? If it's stayed in our gene pool for so long, he argues, there must be some evolutionary benefit. Nesse believes that depression may be an adaptive mechanism meant to prevent us from falling victim to blind optimism - and squandering resources on the wrong goals.11 It's to our evolutionary advantage not to waste time and energy on goals we can't realistically achieve. And so when we have no clear way to make productive progress, our neurological systems default to a state of low energy ... ~ Jane McGonigal

Nuclear didn't describe families. How could it? Dry physics was not equal to that task. In the twentieth century we needed a biological metaphor, Darwinian in scope, to suggest the gnash and crash of carnivorous life in the family gene pool. But for the 21st century, the new century, I think the metaphors must be chemical. Molecular. In the molecular family people are connected without being bound. They spindle themselves around shared experiences and affections rather than splashing in the shared gene pool. ~ Laura Kalpakian

I'm no ethnomusicologist. There is a connection between the five-note scale used both in traditional Chinese music and the blues, but I don't really understand it. All I know is, whenever I play with Chinese musicians, we seem to belong to the same musical gene pool. ~ Abigail Washburn

Living in a small Italian hilltown, and having lived in a small town in south Georgia, I understand that you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. ~ Frances Mayes

Are the people who run for president really the best in a country of 240 million? If so, something has happened to the gene pool. ~ Bob McKenzie

Okay, calm down, we'll pay,"said Vee, reaching into her back pocket. She stuffed a wad of cash into the bowl, but it was dark and I couldn´t tell how much. "You owe me big-time," she told me.

"You're supposed to let me count the money first," Marcie said, digging through the bowl, trying to recapture Vee´s donation.

"I just assumed twenty was too high for you to count," Vee said. "My apologies." Marcie's eyes went slitty again, then she turned on her heel and carted the bowl back into the house.

"How much did you give her?" I asked Vee.

"I didn't. I tossed in a condom."

I lifted my eyebrows."Since when do you carry condoms?"

"I picked one up off the lawn on our way up the walk. Who knows, maybe Marcie'll use it. Then I'll have done my part to keep her genetic material out of the gene pool. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick

Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote-back behind nowhere-when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? "We're south of everywhere," my mother used to lament. ~ Frances Mayes

The E.U. has moved to combat global terrorism by instituting common European arrest and evidence warrants and creating a joint situation center to pool and analyze intelligence. ~ John Bruton

Religious fanatics are the worst. They're basically impossible to bargain with, they accept no outside opinion about anything, and they departed from reality well before you met them. ~ Gene Doucette

There is joy in feeling the bristles of a quality brush, seeing the richness and lush color of truly good pigment flowing onto the paper or canvas. The cheap stuff just makes for harder work and lesser results. ~ Gene Black

You have to understand that nothing appeals to everybody. ~ Gene Simmons

Love comes into your being like a tidal wave ... sometimes it withdraws like a wave, till there isn't such a thing as a pool left, and every bit of your heart is as dry as seaweed beyond the wave's reach. ~ Phyllis Bottome

Any man who looks like a sissy while dancing is just a lousy dancer. ~ Gene Kelly

That's it!" Victoria dramatically threw her hands up, disrupting people around them. "It's official. You inherited it."
"What?"
"The idiot gene. ~ J.M. Darhower

The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway. You're in eighth grade. You know these things. You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn't do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore. ~ Richard Siken

Open to them your hand to the shore, watch them walk into the sea.
Press upon them all they need, see them yearn for all they want.
Gift to them the calm pool of words, watch them draw the sword.
Bless upon them the satiation of peace, see them starve for war.
Grant them darkness and they will lust for light.
Deliver to them death and hear them beg for life.
Beget life and they will murder your kin.
Be as they are and they will see you different.
Show wisdom and you are a fool.
The shore gives way to the sea.
And the sea, my friends,
Does not dream of you. ~ Steven Erikson

Reason shows reason can only bring pain - how wise to forget and be happy again! ~ Gene Wolfe

Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know. ~ Thornton Wilder

I consider myself normal. I've spent 20 years in the pool. I consider that something that's normal. ~ Michael Phelps

Dwayne McDuffie was one of my favorite writers. When I was growing up, he was one of the few African Americans working in American comics. ~ Gene Luen Yang

I feel it's important to be active. People who retire, sit by their swimming pool and golf course and plan to relax have a very empty life. ~ Betty Ford

The new Squarepusher album as well, although it is proper headf*** industrial. Not one for a pool party in Ibiza! ~ Ralph Lawson

Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene. ~ Steven Pinker

[T]he very existence of such powers argues a counterforce. We call powers of the first kind dark, though they may use a species of deadly light... and we call those of the second kind bright, though I think that they may at times employ darkness, as a good man nevertheless draws the curtains of his bed to sleep. Yet there is truth to the talk of darkness and light, because it shows plainly that one implies the other. The tale I read to little Severian said that the universe was but a long word of the Increate's. We, then, are syllables of that word. But the speaking of any word is futile unless there are other words, words that are not spoken. If a beast has but one cry, the cry tells nothing; and even the wind has a multitude of voices, so that those who sit indoors may hear it and know if the weather is tumultuous or mild. The powers we call dark seem to me to be the words the Increate did not speak... and these words must be maintained in a quasi-existence, if the other word, the word spoken is to be distinguished. What is not said can be important - but what is said is more important... And if the seekers after dark things find them, may not the seekers after bright find them as well? And are they not more apt to hand their wisdom on? ~ Gene Wolfe

From that first moment of doubt, there was no peace for her; from the time she first imagined leaving her forest, she could not stand in one place without wanting to be somewhere else. She trotted up and down beside her pool, restless and unhappy. Unicorns are not meant to make choices. She said no, and yes, and no again, day and night, and for the first time she began to feel the minutes crawling over her like worms. ~ Peter S. Beagle

You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up. ~ Gene Wolfe

If a conservationist has more stathmin, less risk-taking gene, and the pro-drilling advocate has less stathmin, more risk-taking gene, how can the two have a reasonable dialogue? ~ Robert A. Burton

Someone stumbled into him, cursed and walked away. Richard was lying prone on the platform, in the rush-hour glare. The side of his face was sticky and cold. He pulled his head up off the ground. He had been lying in a pool of his own vomit. At least, he hoped it was his own. ~ Neil Gaiman

A good GI bill would increase the recruit pool. ~ Barack Obama

I admit I get the occasional headache," I said. "I admit some of my hangovers are epic. But usually all it takes for me to bounce back is a sauna, cold-plunge pool, steam bath, massage, and wasabi to clear the sinuses". ~ George Gurley

Last night I had a nightmare. That me and someone I cared a lot about were playing a game in a pool. We'd take turns submerging ourselves under the water while the other person kept time.
At one point it felt like the other person might be drowning, so I jumped in to pull her up. She smiled and laughed and pushed me away. Then she turned blue and died. I could not resuciate her.
I woke up at 3, sweating, in shock and pain. Frightened. But then I realized it was only a dream. But then I realized it was just like real life ...
Sometimes people we care about play risky games and then don't want our help. There is nothing we can do for them, no matter how much we care ... ~ Jose N Harris

The wise man believes profoundly in silence, the sign of a perfect equilibrium. Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind, and spirit. The man who preserves his selfhood ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence - not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree, not a ripple upon the surface of the shinning pool - his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life. Silence is the cornerstone of character. ~ Charles Alexander Eastman

The campus, an academy of trees,
under which some hand, the wind's I guess,
had scattered the pale light
of thousands of spring beauties,
petals stained with pink veins;
secret, blooming for themselves.
We sat among them.
Your long fingers, thin body,
and long bones of improbable genius;
some scattered gene as Kafka must have had.
Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles.
That simple that was myself, half conscious,
as though each moment was a page
where words appeared; the bent hammer of the type
struck against the moving ribbon.
The light air, the restless leaves;
the ripple of time warped by our longing.
There, as if we were painted
by some unknown impressionist. ~ Ruth Stone

What propels an embryo from one stage to the next-and makes one species different from another-is not a blueprint but rather an enormous autonomous library of the instructions contained within its genome. Each gene does double duty, specifying both a recipe for a protein and a set of regulatory conditions for when and where it should be built. Taken together suites of these IF-THEN genes give cells the power to act as parts of complicated improvisational orchestras. Like real musicians, what they play depends on both their own artistic impulses and what the other members of the orchestra are playing. As we will see in the next chapter, every bit of this process-from the Cellular Big 4 to the combination of regulatory cues-holds as much for development of the brain as it does for the body. ~ Gary F. Marcus

I'll be at Lambeth telling my story ~ Gene Robinson

We went into a small, windowless office crowded between two others that appeared empty. A middle-aged American woman was seated behind a metal desk. She appeared normal and reasonably attractive until she spoke; then her scarred gums showed that she had once had two or three times the proper number of teeth - forty or fifty, I suppose, in each jaw - and that the dental surgeon who had extracted the supernumerary ones had not always, perhaps, selected those he suffered to remain as wisely as he might. ~ Gene Wolfe

Creosote made Mandy think of the thrill of rushing through a garden sprinkler as a kid, of playing washer toss in the backyard, of spending nights in the neighbors' huge in-ground swimming pool when she was twelve, throwing glow sticks in the turquoise water during Canada Day block parties. She thought of Jud for a moment, how he'd loved doing all those things when he was a kid, but how, as he got older, it was all about popularity, sports, a life of illusion… and without warning, a totally different kind of memory filled her mind – the dull feeling of her head hitting the concrete walls near the wood shop at her old high school, the sounds of kids laughing, the sharp smell of sawdust, the buzzing of electric sanders nearby, the sound of Jud laughing while he beat her up… without realizing it, she'd started crying noiselessly. ~ Rebecca McNutt

No one can fully understand the meaning of love unless he's owned a dog. A dog can show you more honest affection with a flick of his tail than a man can gather through a lifetime of handshakes. ~ Gene Hill