Quotes About Science

One biographer summed up Lyell's influence on Darwin as follows: "Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin." Darwin himself, after publishing his account of the voyage of the Beagle and also a volume on coral reefs, wrote, "I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell's brains.

As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.

These included mealworms; a hairless, newborn mouse, known as a "pinky"; and the hindquarters of an adult mouse

The windowless room where the po`ouli cells are kept alive—sort of—is called the Frozen Zoo.

we're willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinos

We're no at about 1.1, 1.2 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and the conclusion is that this is already too much. The Arctic sea ice, for example, has been melting far more rapidly than was predicted. We're seeing the Greenland ice sheet beginning to melt more quickly that was predicted. So how do we with this? Sir David King, chief science adviser to British prime minister Tony Blair.

and handjobs on crows.

amphibian fossils are so rare.

useful mnemonic for remembering the geologic periods of the last half-billion years is: Camels Often Sit Down Carefully, Perhaps Their Joints Creak (Cambrian-Ordovician-Silurian-Devonian-Carboniferous-Permian-Triassic-Jurassic-Cretaceous). The mnemonic unfortunately runs out before the most recent periods: the Paleogene, the Neogene, and the current Quaternary.

Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier

so Durrant stroked the area around his cloaca

higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years.

Walter [Alvarez] dubbed the formation the "Crater of Doom." It became more widely known, after the nearest town, as the Chicxulub crater.

Chicxulub crater.

It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degrees Fahrenheit

Coral sex is a rare and amazing sight.

In Cuvier's day, the most prominent proponent of transformisme was his senior colleague at the Museum of Natural History, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. According to Lamarck, there was a force—the "power of life"—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

Female African clawed frogs, when injected with the urine of a pregnant woman, lay eggs within a few hours.)

This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology.

He called it a ptero-dactyle, meaning 'wing-fingered.

Lyell became something of a celebrity—the Steven Pinker of his generation—and

Under what's known as a "business as usual" emissions scenario, surface ocean pH will fall to 8.0 by the middle of this century, and it will drop to 7.8 by the century's end. At that point, the oceans will be 150 percent more acidic than they were at the start of the industrial revolution.*

What is the soul?" a man in the audience asked. "The soul," I said, "was the one who just answered the question 'Why are you really here?' It is the wise and whole and brave part of the self. The soul is the ageless longing for truth that sends scientists into the lab and seekers onto the spiritual path." And

One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.