Campbell Biology Quotes

Joseph Campbell affirmed life as adventure. “To hell with it,” he said, after his university adviser tried to hold him to a narrow academic curriculum. He gave up on the pursuit of a doctorate and went instead into the woods to read. He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.

So, to recap," Lily said, sounding calm, but not entirely apathetic, "Campbell isn't your half sister. She's mine, because my daddy's mistress, who had Campbell's daddy's baby way back when, is actually my biological mother, and that baby was me. Victoria is my great-aunt, and technically, so is Lillian, because my adoptive mama is actually Lillian's identical twin sister's daughter. The real Liv Taft was killed twenty-five years ago in what might — or might not — have been an accident, involving practically every adult I know." Lily paused. "Does that about sum things up?

Apparently the most permanent of the dispositions of the human psyche are those that derive from the fact that, of all animals, we remain the longest at the mother breast.

Human beings are born too soon; they are unfinished, unready as yet to meet the world. Consequently their whole defense from a universe of dangers is the mother, under whose protection the intra-uterine period is prolonged.

Focusing on individual nutrients, their identities, their contents in food, their tissue concentrations, and their biological mechanisms, is like using math and physics to catch balls. It’s not the way nature evolved, and it makes proper nutrition far more difficult than it needs to be. Our bodies use countless mechanisms, strategically placed throughout our digestion, absorption, and transport and metabolic pathways, to effortlessly ensure tissue concentrations consistent with good health—no database consultation required. But as long as we let reductionism guide our research and our understanding of nutrition, good health will remain unattainable.

time, cost, or safety concerns. • MasteringBiology: Virtual Biology Labs offer unique learning experiences in microscopy, molecular biology, genetics, ecology, and systematics. • Choose from 20–30 automatically graded, “pre-set” lab activities that are ready to assign to students, or create your own from scratch. • Each “pre-set” lab provides an assignable

Conner nodded as he got to his feet, and continued nodding all the way back to his Biology class. He didn’t understand why the room always seemed to get warmer every time he saw or heard someone mention Bree Campbell. He wasn’t even sure how he felt about her—but for whatever reason, Conner always looked forward to seeing her around and really wanted her to like him.

Eating should be an enjoyable and worry-free experience, and shouldn’t rely on deprivation. Keeping it simple is essential if we are to enjoy our food. One of the most fortunate findings from the mountain of nutritional research we’ve encountered is that good food and good health is simple. The biology of the relationship of food and health is exceptionally complex, but the message is still simple. The recommendations coming from the published literature are so simple that we can state them in one sentence: eat a whole foods, plant-based diet, while minimizing the consumption of refined foods, added salt, and added fats. (See table on the next page.)

Patriotism comes from the same Latin word as father. Blind patriotism is collective transference. In it the state becomes a parent and we citizens submit our loyalty to ensure its protection. We may have been encouraged to make that bargain from our public school education, our family home, religion, or culture in general. We associate safety with obedience to authority, for example, going along with government policies. We then make duty, as it is defined by the nation, our unquestioned course. Our motivation is usually not love of country but fear of being without a country that will defend us and our property. Connection is all-important to us; excommunication is the equivalent of death, the finality we can’t dispute. Healthy adult loyalty is a virtue that does not become blind obedience for fear of losing connection, nor total devotion so that we lose our boundaries. Our civil obedience can be so firm that it may take precedence over our concern for those we love, even our children. Here is an example: A young mother is told by the doctor that her toddler is allergic to peanuts and peanut oil. She lets the school know of her son’s allergy when he goes to kindergarten. Throughout his childhood, she is vigilant and makes sure he is safe from peanuts in any form. Eighteen years later, there is a war and he is drafted. The same mother, who was so scrupulously careful about her child’s safety, now waves goodbye to him with a tear but without protest. Mother’s own training in public school and throughout her life has made her believe that her son’s life is expendable whether or not the war in question is just. “Patriotism” is so deeply ingrained in her that she does not even imagine an alternative, even when her son’s life is at stake. It is of course also true that, biologically, parents are ready to let children go just as the state is ready to draft them. What a cunning synchronic-ity. In addition, old men who decide on war take advantage of the timing too. The warrior archetype is lively in eighteen-year-olds, who are willing to fight. Those in their mid-thirties, whose archetype is being a householder and making a mark in their chosen field, will not show an interest in battlefields of blood. The chiefs count on the fact that young braves will take the warrior myth literally rather than as a metaphor for interior battles. They will be willing to put their lives on the line to live out the collective myth of societies that have not found the path of nonviolence. Our collective nature thus seems geared to making war a workable enterprise. In some people, peacemaking is the archetype most in evidence. Nature seems to have made that population smaller, unfortunately. Our culture has trained us to endure and tolerate, not to protest and rebel. Every cell of our bodies learned that lesson. It may not be virtue; it may be fear. We may believe that showing anger is dangerous, because it opposes the authority we are obliged to appease and placate if we are to survive. This explains why we so admire someone who dares to say no and to stand up or even to die for what he believes. That person did not fall prey to the collective seduction. Watching Jeopardy on television, I notice that the audience applauds with special force when a contestant risks everything on a double-jeopardy question. The healthy part of us ardently admires daring. In our positive shadow, our admiration reflects our own disavowed or hidden potential. We, too, have it in us to dare. We can stand up for our truth, putting every comfort on the line, if only we can calm our long-scared ego and open to the part of us that wants to live free. Joseph Campbell says encouragingly, “The part of us that wants to become is fearless.” Religion and Transference Transference is not simply horizontal, from person to person, but vertical from person to a higher power, usually personified as God. When

People who can see well often take vision for granted. We treat our eyes more as little bits of technology than as living parts of the body, and are all too willing to believe that lasers are the best course of action for maintaining healthy eyes. During the past couple of decades research has shown that these bits of technology are actually greatly affected by the foods we eat. Among the hundreds (maybe thousands) of antioxidant carotenoids in these foods, only a dozen or so have been studied in relation to their biological effects. The abilities of these chemicals to scavenge and reduce free radical damage are well established, but the activities of the individual carotenoids vary enormously depending on dietary and lifestyle conditions. It's much safer to consume these carotenoids in their natural context, in highly colored fruits and vegetables.

I can safely say that the origin of every single disease is genetic. Our genes are the code to everything in our bodies, good and bad. Without genes, there would be no cancer. Without genes, there would be no obesity, diabetes or heart disease. And without genes, there would be no life. This might explain why we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figure out which gene causes which disease and how we can silence the dangerous genes. This also explains why some perfectly healthy young women have had their breasts removed simply because they were found to carry genes that are linked to breast cancer. Much of this focus on genes, however, misses a simple but crucial point: not all genes are fully expressed all the time. If they aren't activated, or expressed, they remain biochemically dormant. Dormant genes do not have any effect on our health. This is obvious to most scientists, and many laypeople, but the significance of this idea is seldom understood. What happens to cause some genes to remain dormant, and others to express themselves? The answer: environment, especially diet. As we saw in chapter three, the genes that cause cancer were profoundly impacted by the consumption of protein. So while we can say that genes are crucial to every biological process, we have some very convincing evidence that gene expression is far more important, and gene expression is controlled by environment, especially nutrition.

Perceptions–such as colors, smells, sounds, and tastes–are constructions formed in the brain and do not exist outside of it. So, if a tree falls and no animal is present to hear it, is there a sound? The falling tree certainly produces pressure waves in the air, but if sound is defined as a perception, then there is none unless and animal senses the waves and its brain perceives them.

Where we can open up new opportunities for women’s self-expression, enjoyment, and achievement we should do it because it is morally right. But that is very different from saying that gender has no biological basis and that the nature of men and women is wholly constructed by society. The problem with such a position is that it fails to address the issue of why sex differences take the particular form that they do.

THE PRIVILEGE OF A LIFETIME IS BEING WHO YOU ARE. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL

I am very fortunate to know T. Colin Campbell, PhD, professor emeritus of Cornell University and coauthor of the ground-breaking The China Study. I strongly recommend this book; it’s an expansive and hugely informative work on the effects of food on health. Campbell’s work is regarded by many as the definitive epidemiological examination of the relationship between diet and disease. He has received more than seventy grant years of peer-reviewed research funding (the gold standard of research), much of it from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and he has authored more than 300 research papers. Dr. Campbell grew up on a dairy farm and believed wholeheartedly in the health value of eating animal protein. Indeed, he set out in his career to investigate how to produce more and better animal protein. Troublesome to his preconceived opinion about the goodness of dairy, Campbell kept running up against results that pointed to a different truth: that animal protein is disastrous to human health. Through a variety of experimental study designs, epidemiological evidence (studies of what affects the illness and health of populations), and observation of real-life conditions that had rational, biological explanations, Dr. Campbell has made a direct and powerful correlation between cancer and animal protein. For this book I asked Dr. Campbell to explain a little about how and why nutrition (both good and bad) affects cancer in our bodies.

Reprogramming is what John Gurdon demonstrated in his ground-breaking work when he transferred the nuclei from adult toads into toad eggs. It’s what happened when Keith Campbell and Ian Wilmut cloned Dolly the Sheep by putting the nucleus from a mammary gland cell into an egg. It’s what Yamanaka achieved when he treated somatic cells with four key genes, all of which code for proteins highly expressed naturally during this reprogramming phase. The egg is a wonderful thing, honed through hundreds of millions of years of evolution to be extraordinarily effective at generating vast quantities of epigenetic change, across billions of base-pairs. None of the artificial means of reprogramming cells comes close to the natural process in terms of speed or efficiency. But the egg probably doesn’t quite do everything unaided. At the very least, the pattern of epigenetic modifications in sperm is one that allows the male pronucleus to be reprogrammed relatively easily. The sperm epigenome is primed to be reprogrammed6. Unfortunately, these priming chromatin modifications (and many other features of the sperm nucleus), are missing if an adult nucleus is reprogrammed by transferring it into a fertilised egg. That’s also true when an adult nucleus is reprogrammed by treating it with the four Yamanaka factors to create iPS cells. In both these circumstances, it’s a real challenge to completely reset the epigenome of the adult nucleus. It’s just too big a task. This is probably why so many cloned animals have abnormalities and shortened lifespans. The defects that are seen in these cloned animals are another demonstration that if early epigenetic modifications go wrong, they may stay wrong for life. The abnormal epigenetic modification patterns result in permanently inappropriate gene expression, and long-term ill-health.

consumption. Fungi are used to ripen Roquefort and other blue cheeses. A species of Aspergillus produces citric acid used in colas. Morels and truffles, the edible fruiting bodies of various ascomycetes, are highly prized for their complex flavors (see Figure 31.16). These fungi can sell

In general, organisms that share very similar morphologies or similar DNA sequences are likely to be more closely related than organisms with vastly different structures or sequences. In some cases, however, the morphological divergence between related species can be great and their genetic divergence small (or vice versa). Consider the Hawaiian silversword plants discussed in Chapter 25. These species vary dramatically in appearance throughout the islands. Some are tall, twiggy trees, and others are dense, ground-hugging shrubs (see Figure 25.20). But despite these striking phenotypic differences, the silverswords’ genes are very similar. Based on these small molecular divergences, scientists estimate that the silversword group began to diverge 5 million years ago, which is also about the time when the oldest of the current islands formed. We’ll discuss how scientists use molecular data to estimate such divergence times later in this chapter.

cell, for example, has about 2 m of DNA—a length about 250,000 times greater than the cell’s diameter. Yet before the cell can divide to form genetically identical daughter cells, all of this DNA must be copied, or replicated, and then the two copies must be separated so that each daughter cell ends up with a complete genome. The replication and distribution of so much DNA is manageable because the DNA molecules are packaged into structures called chromosomes, so named because they take up certain dyes used in microscopy (from the Greek chroma, color, and soma, body) (Figure 12.3). Each eukaryotic chromosome consists of one very long, linear DNA molecule associated with many proteins (see Figure 6.9). The DNA molecule carries several hundred to a few thousand genes, the units of information that specify an organism’s inherited traits. The associated proteins maintain the structure of the chromosome and help control the activity of the genes. Together, the entire complex of DNA and proteins that is the building material of chromosomes is referred to as chromatin. As you will soon see, the chromatin of a chromosome varies in its degree of condensation during the process of cell division. Every eukaryotic species has a characteristic number of chromosomes in each cell nucleus. For example, the nuclei of human somatic cells (all body cells except the reproductive cells) each contain 46 chromosomes, made up of two sets of 23, one set inherited from each parent. Reproductive cells, or gametes—sperm and eggs—have half as many chromosomes as somatic cells, or one set of 23 chromosomes in humans. The Figure 12.4 A highly condensed, duplicated human chromosome (SEM). Circle one sister chromatid of the chromosome in this micrograph. DRAW IT Sister chromatids Centromere 0.5μm number of chromosomes in somatic cells varies widely among species: 18 in cabbage plants, 48 in chimpanzees, 56 in elephants, 90 in hedgehogs, and 148 in one species of alga. We’ll now consider how these chromosomes behave during cell division. Distribution of Chromosomes During Eukaryotic Cell Division When a cell is not dividing, and even as it replicates its DNA in preparation for cell division, each chromosome is in the form of a long, thin chromatin fiber. After DNA replication, however, the chromosomes condense as a part of cell division: Each chromatin fiber becomes densely coiled and folded, making the chromosomes much shorter and so thick that we can see them with a light microscope. Each duplicated chromosome has two sister chromatids, which are joined copies of the original chromosome (Figure 12.4). The two chromatids, each containing an identical DNA molecule, are initially attached all along their lengths by protein complexes called cohesins; this attachment is known as sister chromatid cohesion. Each sister chromatid has a centromere, a region containing

If there is truth in science, it is, at best, conditional.

Our modern lives are very different from those of early humans, who hunted and gathered to survive. Their reverence for the natural world is evident in the early murals of wildlife they painted on cave walls and in the stylized visions of life they sculpted from bone and ivory. Our lives reflect remnants of our ancestral attachment to nature and the diversity of life - the concept of biophilia that was introduced early in this chapter. We evolved in natural environments rich in biodiversity, and we still have a biophilia for such settings. Indeed, our biophilia may be innate, an evolutionary product of natural selection acting on a brainy species who survival depended on a close connection to the environment and a practical appreciation of plants and animals. Our appreciation of life guides the field of biology today. We celebrate life by deciphering he genetic code that makes each species unique. We embrace life by using fossils and DNA to chronicle evolution through time. We preserve life through our efforts to classify and protect the millions of species on Earth. We respect life by using nature responsibly and reverently to improve human welfare. Biology is the scientific expression of our desire to know nature. We are most likely to protect what we appreciate, and we are mostly likely to appreciate what we understand. By learning about the processes and diversity of life, we also become more aware of ourselves and our place in the biosphere. We hope this text has served you well in this lifelong adventure.

We are trapped by our biology, stunted by our psychology, and, as a result, must wrap ourselves in mythology (the formulaic, fictional stories of our time) in order to squelch the thoughts concerning our impending mortality.

In the case of the Great Transition, the lead-up to and fallout from the tipping point of the mid-fourteenth century extended over almost 200 years, over which time climate and society, ecology and biology, and microbes and humans were progressively transformed (Figure 1.2). On all six counts the conditions that prevailed by the 1450s were entirely different from those that had characterized the 1250s.