More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Too much change is as destructive as too little. Only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish.”
And that in turn means that there may well be some remnants of these animals still alive on the earth. Why couldn’t you look for them?”
“Perhaps not,” Levine said. “But absence of proof is not proof of absence.
Maybe, he thought, we know more than we realize.
He felt a heavy weight suddenly tear at his backpack, forcing him to his knees in the mud, and he realized in that moment that despite all his planning, despite all his clever deductions, things had gone terribly wrong, and he was about to die.
the truest picture of life in the past incorporated the interplay of all aspects of life, the good and the bad, the strong and the weak. It was no good pretending anything else.
“That’s Creationism and it’s wrong. Just plain wrong.
And it turns out, again and again, that living things seem to have a self-organizing quality. Proteins fold. Enzymes interact. Cells arrange themselves to form organs and the organs arrange themselves to form a coherent individual. Individuals organize themselves to make a population. And populations organize themselves to make a coherent biosphere.
Just some ordinary apes, looking out over the grass.
These big-brained, totally helpless children changed society.
Because raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place.
It’s the most important thing that happens, and it’s the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved. And eventually, a few million years later, we have kids using computers.
But she could see it now: small head, thick neck, huge lumbering body, with a double row of pentagonal plates running along the crest of the back. A dragging tail, with spikes in it.
Stegosaurus. It was a God damn stegosaurus.
“So, Kelly, even at your young age, there’s something you might as well learn now. All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they’ll tell you will be wrong.”
“Human beings are just stuffed full of misinformation.
tyrannosaurs are North American animals—they’ve only been found in the U.S. or Canada.
Heisenberg uncertainty principle: that whatever you studied you also changed.
“Wow,” Arby said. “That was something!”
it was eating a candy bar. And it seemed to be enjoying it.
It was like mountain climbing through a damn kitchen, she thought.
I should have made it nonskid. But who would ever make the undercarriage of a vehicle nonskid?
They were like a band of marauders, shapeless, hissing and snapping at one another.
nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity.
My assumption was that those dinosaurs were like all animals that rely on camouflage. They’re basically ambushers. They’re not particularly fast or active. They stand motionless for hours in an unchanging environment, disappearing into the background, and they wait until some unsuspecting meal comes along. But if they have to keep adjusting to new light conditions, they know they can’t hide. They get anxious. And if they get anxious enough, they finally just run away. Which is what happened.”
He had changed into clothes from the store: a pair of swimming trunks and a tee shirt that said “InGen Bioengineering Labs” and beneath, “We Make The Future.”
But the people were gone.
“All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don’t you take it away from yourself.”
The big animal held it gently for a moment. Then it bit down decisively. The bones snapped and crunched.
The baby threw its head back and swallowed the cheek, and then turned, opened its jaws again, and closed over Dodgson’s neck.
“Human beings are so destructive,” Malcolm said. “I sometimes think we’re a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that’s our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.”
“A hundred years from now, people will look back at us and laugh. They’ll say, ‘You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?’ They’ll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer and better fantasies.” Thorne shook his head. “And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That’s the sea. That’s real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That’s all real. You see all of us together? That’s real. Life is wonderful. It’s a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there
...more
