Quotes from Andrew H. Knoll

Talk is cheap, exploration and discovery is hard

Earth writes its history with one hand and erases it with the other, and as we go further back in time, erasure gains the upper hand.

can only conclude that the appearance of age and order in stratigraphic successions is an elaborate ruse, part of a great cosmic charade set up to trap the unfaithful. What sort of God would do that? One who can be petty and vengeful, who may love His creation but doesn't trust it. A God, in other words, much like ourselves. In his zeal to know the mind of God, the creationist finds only a mirror.

Population genetics certainly underpins the origin of species, but the persistence of species is commonly adjudicated by Earth's environmental dynamism.

Neanderthals, often caricatured as brutes, but actually sophisticated hunter-gatherers, with diverse tools and brains larger than our own.

call this interval "interglacial" rather than "post-glacial" because for the past million years, Earth has oscillated between glacial cold and interglacial warmth on a 100,000-year timescale dictated by metronomic variations in Earth's orbit around the sun. There is no reason to believe that our current warmth is anything other than an interglacial interval destined to give way to renewed glacial advance in the future.

By way of contrast, on uninhabited Wrangell Island, an isolated scrap of land in the Chukchi Sea north of Siberia, mammoths survived until about 4,000 years ago.

Most new species arise not from the insensibly gradual transformation of large populations but rather by the rapid differentiation of small, isolated populations at the periphery of the main group.

The cyanobacteria, a group of photosynthetic bacteria tinted blue-green by chlorophyll and other pigments, harvest sunlight and fix CO2 much like eukaryotic algae and land plants. However, when hydrogen sulfide (H2S, well known for its "rotten egg" smell) is present, many cyanobacteria use this gas rather than water to supply the electrons needed for photosynthesis. Sulfur and sulfate are formed as by-products, but oxygen is not.

I think you can say that life is a system in which proteins and nucleic acids interact in ways that allow the structure to grow and reproduce. It's that growth and reproduction, the ability to make more of yourself, that's important.

If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.