Islomjon

“It has been determined that luminous matter—the stars and hot gas we see in the sky by eye and instrument—constitutes a mere 0.5 percent of the total mass of our universe. Another 4.5 percent is nonluminous matter, such as planets and dead stars, made of the same familiar atoms. In addition, 26 percent is composed of something different than atoms or their constituent elementary particles. Dubbed dark matter, it remains unidentified. The remaining, dominant 69 percent of the universe is an even more mysterious dark energy that has resulted in an accelerating expansion of the universe that will continue indefinitely into the future, making the universe increasingly dilute.”
― Victor J. Stenger, God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos

“I have only to renew my pact with Solitude, to which I have tried to be unfaithful.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Bacteria simply divide themselves in two when the time seems right, as can many single-celled eukaryotes. Many plants and animals have the ability to reproduce themselves on their own quite comfortably. Even among the species that do reproduce sexually, many can switch over to cloning. If you walk through a stand of hundreds of quaking aspen trees on a Colorado mountainside, you may be walking through a forest of clones,
produced not by seeds but by the roots of a single tree that come back up out of the ground to form new saplings.
Hermaphrodites, such as sea slugs and earthworms, are equipped with male and female sex organs and can fertilize themselves or mate with another. Some species of lizards are all mothers: in a process called parthenogenesis, they somehow trigger their unfertilized eggs to start developing. Compared with these other ways to reproduce, sex is slow and costly. A hundred parthenogenetic female lizards can produce far more offspring than fifty males and fifty females. In only fifty generations, a single cloning lizard could swamp the descendants of a million sexual ones.”
― Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

“Intellectual fascination crosses many boundaries.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself