“Human beings any one of us, and our species as a whole are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.” WorldHumansImportantWholeNightHuman BeingsSecretPiecesSkyInformationMountainEssentialsOceanSpeciesWoodsEncountersWildernessPatchesNight SkyChunksCenter Of The World Book:The end of nature Source: The end of nature
“In the beginning, there were bacteria.... [A] nearly universal assumption is that all subsequent life descended from the original life form through a continuous chain of ancestor-descendant pairs. This assumption looks good because all living organisms share biochemical traits. It is conceivable, of course, that life originated more than once on the early earth but that all except one life form died out early, leaving a single lineage as the ancestor of life as we know it. If this did happen, it was the first important species extinction.” IfsKnowsFirstsLooksImportantHappensEarthFormCoursesShareUniversalDiedOriginalsSpeciesLeavingChainsAssumptionPairsAncestorTraitsOrganismsExtinctionDescendantsBacteriaLineageLiving OrganismsSpecies Extinction Author:David M. Raup