biological clockn.

1878 Geol. Mag. 2nd Decade 5 206 All this points to a long period of evolution, although, as Professor Huxley truly remarks, that period is measured by the geological clock... We may not yet be able to read the time accurately by our geological or biological clock, but that clock for all that is no plaything.

1904 Edinb. Rev. Jan. 220 In a friendly rivalry which has sprung up between the stratigraphical and the zonal geologist, much has been claimed by those who put their faith in the biological clock.

1949 N.Y. Times 3 Apr. iv. e9/6 The horse family has most of its evolutionary life span behind it and will die out soon, meaning within 10,000,000 or 20,000,000 years—a mere tick of the biological clock.

2001 P. Copper in G. D. Stanley Hist. & Sedimentol. Anc. Reef Syst. iii. 99 Biologists have used gene sequence differences to push the molecular biological clock for the origin of major phyla back to between 670–1300 Ma.

1916 N. Smyth Meaning of Personal Life iii. 53 There is no standard biological clock. The time-sense of an amœba..in its intermittent protoplasmic protrusions, or of the May-fly in its swift nuptial flight..—the time-rate throughout the animal world is indeterminate.

1944 Washington Post 2 Apr. b3/1 The hopes of ‘silvertops’ to turn back the biological clock to the time when they were dark and handsome by dosing themselves with pantothenic acid.

1957 N.Y. Times 27 Oct. 87/3 The powerful light of the ‘atomic microscope’, promises to reveal to man for the first time the inner workings of the ‘biological clock’, built into all living things, whose rate of ‘ticking’ determines the biological age of the individual as distinct from his chronological age.

2001 D. H. Kausler & B. C. Kausler Graying of Amer. (ed. 2) 440 Some biological theories of aging are based on the principle of a biological clock that is genetically present in all of us.

1941 Sci. News Let. 26 Apr. 262/2 Even when we are asleep our time sense continues to function... Why then does our personal clock, our biological clock, run at different rates?

1962 E. Bruton Dict. Clocks & Watches (1963) 5 A biological clock inside every one of us controls our living habits.

1967 Canad. Med. Assoc. Jrnl. 15 July 147/2 The pineal gland as a biological clock.

1983 E. T. Hall Dance of Life i. 14 There are also the biological clocks which..get out of phase when people travel by jet.

2006 Science 27 Oct. 599/2 Take some of the genes that drive the biological clock behind circadian rhythms.

1965 A. Q. Maisel Hormone Quest xv. 248 In women this climacteric change often takes place within a year or two, as some still to be understood biological clock ends ovulation, permits the ovaries to shrink, and ultimately manifests itself..under the name of the menopause.

1972 Hearings before Subcomm. on Public Health & Environment (National Inst. of Aging) 43 A unique event, peculiar to female aging, is the menopause. This phenomenon, initiated unfailingly by an unknown biological clock, indicates cessation of ovulation.

1978 Washington Post 16 Mar. b1/1 Isn't it interesting.., this business about the biological clock?.. They say..that it means nothing to them, that if the mood hits them to have a child, they will.

1989 A. Beattie Picturing Will ii. xiii. 129 She was years younger than he, so it was nonsense..to talk about the ticking of the biological clock at twenty-nine.

2003 Gay Times Feb. (Directory section) d69 Tilly plays Tara, a woman in her thirties who feels her biological clock is ticking away and is desperate to have a baby.