Islomjon

“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

“Four and a half billion is a number almost beyond reckoning. The current Guinness world record for longevity is held by a French woman who lived to celebrate her 122nd birthday—so humans fall far short of living even for 4.5 billion seconds (about 144 years). All of recorded human history is much less than 4.5 billion minutes. And yet geologists claim that Earth has been around for more than 4.5 billion years.”
― Robert M. Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet

“All but the most heroically strong among us would slip another step lower in the face of this loss. It is true that hope, no matter how irrational, can sustain us in the darkest of times. But nothing can break us more effectively than hope given and then taken away capriciously. Manipulating these psychological variables is a powerful but double-edged sword.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

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