Quotes & Sayings About Meiosis

The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. It must have an impartial exit channel into the future, for all the genes inside it. This is true of an individual wolf. The channel is the thin stream of sperms, or eggs, which it manufactures by meiosis. It is not true of the pack of wolves. Genes have something to gain from selfishly promoting the welfare of their own individual bodies, at the expense of other genes in the wolf pack. A bee-hive, when it swarms, appears to reproduce by broad-fronted budding, like a wolf pack. But if we look more carefully we find that, as far as the genes are concerned, their destiny is largely shared. The future of the genes in the swarm is, at least to a large extent, lodged in the ovaries of one queen. This is why - it is just another way of expressing the message of earlier chapters - the bee colony looks and behaves like a truly integrated single vehicle. — Richard Dawkins

Pity the poor screenwriter, for he cannot be a poet. He cannot use metaphor and simile, assonance and alliteration, rhythm and rhyme, synecdoche and metonymy, hyperbole and meiosis, the grand tropes. Instead, his work must contain all the substance of literature but not be literary. A literary work is finished and complete within itself. A screenplay waits for the camera. If not literature, what then is the screenwriter's ambition? To describe in such a way that as a reader turns pages, a film flows through the imagination. — Robert McKee