Ray

“Something in the order of a 107 billion modern humans have existed, though this number depends on when exactly you start counting. All of them – of us – are close cousins, as our species has a single African origin. We don’t quite have the language to describe what that really means. It doesn’t, for example, mean a single couple, a hypothetical Adam and Eve. We think of families and pedigrees and genealogies and ancestry, and we try to think of the deep past in the same way. Who were my ancestors? You might have a simple, traditional family structure or, like me, it could be handsomely untidy, and its tendrils jumbled like old wires in a drawer. But no matter which, everyone’s past becomes muddled sooner or later.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“quotidian”
― Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

“A gene encodes a phenotype – that is, the physical manifestation of a piece of DNA – and differences in those physical manifestations in a population are visible to nature as a means of selecting what works better. The gene that encodes that phenotype is what is transmitted from generation to generation, the unit of inheritance. A gene for processing goat’s milk after weaning was selected in humans over a gene that did not permit digestion of a nutritious drink. Individuals are merely carriers of genes, which drive the necessity of procreating simply so that the existence of the gene is perpetuated.”
― Adam Rutherford, The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War and the Evolution of Us