Amanda

“The question of when life begins is answered according to the purposes for which we ask it.”
― Carl Zimmer, Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

“Every life holds an epic tale, even if no one alive remembers it.”
― Greg Melville, Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries

“Ten generations back, for example, the number of ancestral stretches of DNA is around 757 but the number of ancestors is 1,024, guaranteeing that each person has several hundred ancestors from whom he or she has received no DNA whatsoever.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“Chickens—lowly chickens!—have a rhodopsin for low-light conditions, four color-sensing pigments, and a pigment in their pineal glands (uninventively called pinopsin) that uses light to help set their circadian rhythm. That’s quite a bit of color, but chickens aren’t so lowly, really. They’re the evolutionary offspring of dinosaurs, after all.”
― Adam Rogers, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern