Quotes & Sayings About Environmental Factors

DNA is not an autocrat. Animal behaviour is also influenced by environmental factors and individual quirks. — Yuval Noah Harari

I credit the motion picture industry as the strongest environmental factor in molding the children of my day. — Lenny Bruce

the fundamental attribution error is the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their intentions and personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors. — Patrick Lencioni

Toxic pheromone pollution. How can we combat that?" Charles Groh and I looked at each other. This was it. We'd finally arrived at the hard part. What had to be done. "The first step," I said, "would be removing the factors that are causing the environmental disturbance." "Remove petroleum products?" said the president. "And cell phones?" said the secretary of state. I nodded at both of them, then looked out at the faces around the table and on the screens. — James Patterson

DURING THE PAST TWO TO THREE DECADES, we have acquired substantial evidence that most chronic diseases in America can be partially attributed to bad nutrition. Expert government panels have said it, the surgeon general has said it and academic scientists have said it. More people die because of the way they eat than by tobacco use, accidents or any other lifestyle or environmental factor. — T. Colin Campbell

According to leading researchers, however, only about 10 to 15 percent of cancers are genetic in origin; the rest are caused by a combination of environmental and lifestyle factors. — Dharma Singh Khalsa

This exciting new field of epigenetics
meaning literally "around" the gene
allows us to see how environmental factors alter our gene expression in a specific place within each cell. As a result, we now know that when we take active control of these factors, we can literally help control our health and genetic destiny. — Woodson Merrell

It's worth knowing more about the complicated environmental and genetic factors that could explain why traumatic brain injuries lead to long-term disabilities in some people and not in others. — Anne Wojcicki

I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no. — Jeff VanderMeer

PSYCHOSIS: A severe mental disorder, a derangement of personality. Some individuals experience mood swings and agitation, but emotional dampening and social withdrawal are the most common symptoms. Despite society's beliefs, psychotic individuals rarely become violent and are often at a much greater risk of causing harm to themselves than to others.8 There are many theories as to what causes psychosis. Many current theories agree that it is caused by a combination of inherited genetic factors and external environmental factors. — Alessandra Torre

This part concerns the unshakable feeling one gets, one thinks, after the unthinkable and unexplainable happens
the feeling that, if this person can die, and that person can die, and this can happen and that can happen ... well, then what exactly is preventing everything from happening to this person, he around whom everything else happened?
Just as some police
particularly those they dramatize on television
might be familiar with death, and might expect it an any instant
so does the author, possessing a naturally paranoid disposition, compounded by environmental factors that make it seem not only possible but probable that whatever there might be out there that snuffs out life is probably sniffing around for him, that his number is perennially, eternally up, that his draft number is low, that his bingo card is hot, that he has a bull's-eye on his chest and target on his back. It's fun. You'll see. — Dave Eggers

A variety of factors contribute to the price of gasoline in the United States. These factors include worldwide supply, demand and competition for crude oil, taxes, regional differences in access to gasoline supplies and environmental regulations. — Gary Miller

There are clearly environmental factors that can decrease the incidence and death from cancer. I would still say though that the majority of cancers cannot be prevented at this point, but they can be treated and they can be treated two major ways. — Laurie Glimcher

Every textbook description of a disease should have, in our opinion, a section devoted to its evolutionary aspects. This section should address the following questions: 1. Which aspects of the syndrome are direct manifestations of the disease, and which are actually defenses? 2. If the disease has a genetic component, why do the responsible genes persist? 3. Do novel environmental factors contribute to the disease? 4. If the disease is related — Randolph M. Nesse

Success is not a function of individual talent. It's the steady accumulation of advantages. It's bound up in so many other broader circumstantial, environmental, historical, and cultural factors. — Malcolm Gladwell

Which grave are we in?" she said.
"The oldest." She felt Eddie's puzzlement.
"That can't be possible. He looks like he was just buried."
"There must be something at work in the chemistry of the island that's preserving his body. It's like the incorruptibles, bodies that weren't preserved in any special way that don't decay. Catholic saints like Bernadette and Padre Pio are said not to have decomposed even though they died a long, long time ago. Environmental factors can cause a kind of mummification."
Jessica said, or thought, "This is bizarre. I'm getting a lesson on mummification while in the coffin of a dead man. — Hunter Shea

Engel's biopsychosocial model proposed that psychological and social factors could either protect a person from illness or increase his or her susceptibility to it. Such factors include a person's beliefs and attitudes, how supported and loved a person feels by family and friends, the psychological and environmental stresses to which one is exposed, and personal health behaviors. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

You must realize, Mr. Blaine, that a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him. — Robert Sheckley

Traffic will not yield to our will, neither will global finances, the environment, political rhetoric, nor people in general. There is no way to solve the problem of stress through blaming environmental factors. — Gudjon Bergmann

Up to two hundred genes can be implicated in autism, and some evidence suggests that you need several to manifest the syndrome. Sometimes, epistatic, or modifier, genes influence the expression of primary genes; sometimes environmental factors influence the expression of these genes. The closer the relationship between genotype and phenotype, the easier it is to discern. In autism, some people with a share genotype don't share a phenotype, and some with a shared phenotype don't share a genotype. — Andrew Solomon

Animals engage in a struggle for existence; for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed. Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to offspring. — Al-Jahiz

Heritability in psychiatric disorders typically involves complex inheritance patterns controlled by multiple genes that interact with environmental factors to produce their results. — Joseph E. Ledoux

That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine-tuning. It is a consequence of the no-boundary condition as well as many other theories of modern cosmology. But if it is true, then the strong anthropic principle can be considered effectively equivalent to the weak one, putting the fine-tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat - now the entire observable universe - is only one of many, just as our solar system is one of many. That means that in the same way that the environmental coincidences of our solar system were rendered unremarkable by the realization that billions of such systems exist, the fine-tunings in the laws of nature can be explained by the existence of multiple universes. — Stephen Hawking

I think that people do things for a reason - that we have mental illness, that we have genetic wiring that can get triggered by certain environmental factors. — Karin Slaughter

When we think about lung cancer, the biggest environmental factor is without doubt smoking. Um, that would make a huge impact and has made a huge impact on the incidence of lung cancer. We have to keep pushing that and making it clear to everybody why smoking is so dangerous. — Laurie Glimcher

Errors of reductionism and biodeterminism take over in such silly statements as "Intelligence is 60 percent genetic and 40 percent environmental." A 60 percent (or whatever) "heritability" for intelligence means no such thing. We shall not get this issue straight until we realize that the "interactionism" we all accept does not permit such statements as "Trait x is 29 percent environmental and 71 percent genetic." When causative factors (more than two, by the way) interact so complexly, and throughout growth, to produce an intricate adult being, we cannot, in principle, parse that being's behavior into quantitative percentages of remote root causes. The adult being is an emergent entity who must be understood at his own level and in his own totality. The truly salient issues are malleability and flexibility, not fallacious parsing by percentages. A trait may be 90 percent heritable, yet entirely malleable. — Stephen Jay Gould

I think it makes people in the Pentagon kind of nervous to know that chemical agents and environmental factors could cause so much damage in terms of what may happen in the future. — Bernie Sanders

Promotion of health generally by improving the standard of living. From the health point of view we are in this connexion first and foremost interested in the three fundamental environmental factors: housing (including family life), nutrition, and working conditions (including human relations as well as material conditions). — Karl Evang

Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes "for" particular items of anatomy or behavior. — Stephen Jay Gould

Poverty is a state of the mind that was created as a result of unhealthy environmental factors. When you are surrounded with unhealthy environmental factors, you will think poorly, speak poorly, act and behave poorly. — Uzoma Nnadi

A man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him. A man contains all these things, but he is greater than their total. — Robert Sheckley

Fast food may appear to be cheap food and, in the literal sense it often is, but that is because huge social and environmental costs are being excluded from the calculations. Any analysis of the real cost would have to look at such things as the rise in food-borne illnesses, the advent of new pathogens, antibiotic resistance from the overuse of drugs in animal feed, extensive water pollution from intensive agricultural systems and many other factors. These costs are not reflected in the price of fast food. — Prince Charles

Heart disease is not a Lipitor, Crestor or even an "anacetrapib" deficiency. It is a complex end result of multiple factors driven by our diet, fitness level, stress, and other lifestyle factors such as smoking, social connections, and, increasingly, environmental toxins. — Mark Hyman, M.D.

Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors - — Viktor E. Frankl

No conscious person can read Peter D'Adamo's works without considering much more thoughtfully how their genetic inheritance relates to their needs for specific food, lifestyle and environmental factors to improve their health. — Jeffrey Bland