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“She cried until the sun started to set, until the birds settled into their trees. She’d have to tell her siblings he was gone. She felt embarrassed, thinking of how excited she’d been to take them to Bora-Bora. She grew cold, sitting outside in Brandon’s underwear.
And then she stood up and dried her eyes. And she thought of June. She’d lived this all before, of course. Watching her mother go through it.
Family histories repeat, Nina thought. For a moment, she wondered if it was pointless to try to escape it.
Maybe our parents�� lives are imprinted within us, maybe the only fate there is is the temptation of reliving their mistakes. Maybe, try as we might, we will never be able to outrun the blood that runs through our veins.
Or.
Or maybe we are free the moment we’re born. Maybe everything we’ve ever done is by our own hands.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising

“Not easy having her for a mom.
When did her ambitions die? If I had to guess, the day she graduated from Martha Stewart’s School for Stepford Housewives. Never inspirational, she’s more of an embarrassment for an already unpopular kid like me. What can I say? I’ve got plain-and-ordinary running through my veins. Maybe that’s why I can’t shake this stench of unremarkable. It goes back generations.”
― Michael Benzehabe, Zonked Out: The Teen Psychologist of San Marcos Who Killed Her Santa Claus and Found the Blue-Black Edge of the Love Universe

“If we are all streams of consciousness, then apart from genetic similarities, and conditioning, we are all strangers to our siblings.”
― Jack Freestone

“Individuals are temporary meeting points on the crisscrossing routes that genes take through history.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

“But what *is* "natural"? I wonder. On one hand: variation, mutation, change, inconstancy, divisibility, flux. And on the other: constancy, permanence, indivisibility, fidelity. Bhed. Abhed. It should hardly surprise us that DNA, the molecule of contradictions, encodes an organism of contradictions. We seek constancy in heredity—and find its opposite: variation. Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our genome has negotiated a fragile balance between counterpoised forces, pairing strand with opposing strand, mixing past and future, pitting memory against desire. It is the most human of all things that we possess. Its stewardship may be the ultimate test of knowledge and discernment for our species. ”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“An itinerant selfish gene
Said ‘Bodies a-plenty I’ve seen.
You think you’re so clever
But I’ll live for ever.
You’re just a survival machine.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

“We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism--something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“We will surely come to the time when man will have the power to alter--specifically and consciously--his very genes. This will be a new event in the universe. The prospect is to me awesome in its potential for deliverance or equally, for disaster.”
― Robert Sinsheimer (1966)

“Change the clouds and you will change the world.”
― Steven Magee

“India is going to face the biggest genital crisis, the only reason for which is not to have interracial marriages. At that time you will remember this sentence very much.”
― Pradip Bendkule

“Certain positive words—like “peace�� or “love”—may actually have the power to alter the expression of genes throughout the brain and body, turning them on and off in ways that lower the amount of physical and emotional stress we normally experience throughout the day.”
― Andrew B. Newberg, Words Can Change Your Brain: 12 Conversation Strategies to Build Trust, Resolve Conflict, and Increase Intimacy

“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?”
― Ezra Claytan Daniels, Upgrade Soul

“When we talk about bio-individuality, we are saying that each of us is an individual combination of genetics, epigenetics, body sizes, genders, environmental consequences and biological profiles.”
― Shawn Wells, The Energy Formula: Six life changing ingredients to unleash your limitless potential

“a history measured in centuries is the tiniest drop in the proverbial bucket of evolutionary time.”
― Douglas Tallamy

“Every living thing is spoiled beyond our ability to imagine.

Some children are spoiled materially, but every one alive today was born into inherited wealth.

We inherited thousand of words, facial ex, handgestures and other creative abilities to express ourselves, to transfer the contents of our minds through music, art and science. The structures which enables us (with otherwise quite primitive tendencies) to coexist peacefully, in productive ways. All the progress, all the grease, all of it.

We inherited the lives and tales of our ancestors as written in our DNA, every difficulty and every pleasure, their biological ADAPTIONS for the assistance of survival in our local enviroments, and the ability to dynamically develop our own. Every fiber in our bodies, every connection, all of it.

We inherited our birthplace, our neighbours, our country, our Earth, our Moon, our orbit, our Sun, our Milkyway, �� (and all the contents within each).

Tabula rasa is therefor a flawed concept, nothing is truly blank, but how could it ever be easy for those with such short lives to truly grasp or summarize their long journey within an everliving species?”
― Monariatw

“For double X humans, our motley nature is usually less obvious, but we are genetic calicos. Every cell hosting a dormant sister. Every cell with the echo of what it could've been.

Inside each of us, another animal, sleeping.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“A 2014 study by the University of Colorado found we select our partners with very similar DNA to our own, which is called “genetic assertive mating.�� According to the study, married couples share far similar DNA than two random strangers on the street.”
― Cary G. Weldy, The Power of Tattoos: Twelve Hidden Energy Secrets of Body Art Every Tattoo Enthusiast Should Know

“We have the technology right now to effectively eradicate Huntington's disease from the planet, along with many other genetic disorders. But the messy realities of human existence--of economics, emotions, politics, and the rest--override the technological possibilities.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

“The future is change.”
― Steven Magee

“Life, by definition, is change.”
― Steven Magee

“Although the nucleus might have been recognized by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the late 17th century, it was not until 1831 that it was reported as a specific structure in orchid epidermal cells by a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown (better known for recognizing ‘Brownian movement�� of pollen grains in water). In 1879, Walther Flemming observed that the nucleus broke down into small fragments at cell division, followed by re-formation of the fragments called chromosomes to make new nuclei in the daughter cells. It was not until 1902 that Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri independently linked chromosomes directly to mammalian inheritance. Thomas Morgan’s work with fruit flies (Drosophila) at the start of the 20th century showed specific characters positioned along the length of the chromosomes, followed by the realization by Oswald Avery in 1944 that the genetic material was DNA. Some nine years later, James Watson and Francis Crick showed the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins, whose laboratory had provided the evidence that led to the discovery. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA from the Wilkins lab had been the key to DNA structure, died of cancer aged 37 in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Watson and Crick published the classic double helix model in 1953. The final piece in the jigsaw of DNA structure was produced by Watson with the realization that the pairing of the nucleotide bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine, not only provided the rungs holding the twisting ladder of DNA together, but also provided a code for accurate replication and a template for protein assembly. Crick continued to study and elucidate the base pairing required for coding proteins, and this led to the fundamental ‘dogma�� that ‘DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein��. The discovery of DNA structure marked an enormous advance in biology, probably the most significant since Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species .”
― Terence Allen, The Cell: A Very Short Introduction

“I clicked the obituary, my heart pounding.
" 'Alice Roussard passed away on February 8, 2008. She was 87,' " I read.
Caterina tapped her fingers against the desk. "Bingo."
" 'Alice is survived by her husband Benjamin and three daughters,' " I continued. " 'Lisette Greenfeld of Kansas City, KS; Vi Lipniki of Poughkeepsie, NY; and Rosaline Warner of Saint Louis, MO.' "
"Ha! No wonder you were having trouble getting anywhere with Roussard. Benjamin had three daughters, all of whom changed their names."
"Well, now we've got them."
"Saint Louis is within driving distance, Etta. If we found a number or e-mail for Rosaline..."
"It's certainly worth a try," I said, clicking to a new browser window. I typed in Rosaline Warner's name and hit Enter.
"Would you look at that," Cat said when we reviewed the results.
I couldn't help but chuckle as well. Link after link featured Rosaline Warner, the James Beard Award-winning pastry chef and proprietress of the Feisty Baguette. "Genetics," I said. "They'll getcha every time.”
― Hillary Manton Lodge, Together at the Table

“Faith is a higher faculty than reason. Keep the faith.”
― Glenn Parris, Dragon's Heir

“Change is to evolve.”
― Steven Magee

“Change is natural and we call it ‘Evolution��.”
― Steven Magee

“The aging process can be cruel to some people.”
― Steven Magee

“If you have sea level adapted genetics, then it is in your best interest to live and work near sea level.”
― Steven Magee, Hypoxia, Mental Illness & Chronic Fatigue

“Man and woman are meant to be together.”
― Steven Magee

“But I'll tell you right now, when the blood inside a stranger is inside you, you want to know who he is.”
― Danna Smith, The Complete Book of Aspen

“Great attitudes are not easy to come by. What’s even more annoying is the simple fact that we can’t blame a bad attitude on genetics.”
― Cathy Burnham Martin, Healthy Thinking Habits: Seven Attitude Skills Simplified