Biology
- Paradox of enrichment: Increasing the food available to an ecosystem may lead to instability, and even to extinction.
- French paradox: the observation that the French suffer a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease, despite having a diet relatively rich in saturated fats.
- Glucose paradox: The large amount of glycogen in the liver cannot be explained by its small glucose absorption.
- Gray's paradox: Despite their relatively small muscle mass, dolphins can swim at high speeds and obtain large accelerations.
- Hispanic paradox: The finding that Hispanics in the U.S. tend to have substantially better health than the average population in spite of what their aggregate socio-economic indicators predict.
- Lombard's paradox: When rising to stand from a sitting or squatting position, both the hamstrings and quadriceps contract at the same time, despite their being antagonists to each other.
- Mexican paradox: Mexican children tend to have higher birth weights than can be expected from their socio-economic status.
- Meditation paradox: The amplitude of heart rate oscillations during meditation was significantly greater than in the pre-meditation control state and also in three non-meditation control groups
- Paradox of the pesticides: Applying pesticide to a pest may increase the pest's abundance.
- Paradox of the plankton: Why are there so many different species of phytoplankton, even though competition for the same resources tends to reduce the number of species?
- Peto's paradox: Humans get cancer with high frequency, while larger mammals, like whales, do not. If cancer is essentially a negative outcome lottery at the cell level, and larger organisms have more cells, and thus more potentially cancerous cell divisions, one would expect larger organisms to be more predisposed to cancer.
- Pulsus paradoxus: Sometimes it is possible to hear, with a stethoscope, heartbeats that cannot be felt at the wrist. Also known as the Pulse Paradox.
- Sherman paradox: An anomalous pattern of inheritance in the fragile X syndrome.
- Temporal paradox (paleontology): When did the ancestors of birds live?
Read more about this topic: List Of Paradoxes
Famous quotes containing the word biology:
“Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.”
—Rachel Carson (1907–1964)