How the Earth Turned Green Quotes

“At the cellular level a general purpose cell is more complex than any individual cell in a large multicellular organism.”
― Joseph E. Armstrong, How the Earth Turned Green: A Brief 3.8-Billion-Year History of Plants

“And it now seems certain that the ecology of Earth operated on a unicellular basis for at least two-thirds of life’s history on Earth. All of this suggests that if Earth is typical, then even if life on other planets is common, it will mostly be microscopic.”
― Joseph E. Armstrong, How the Earth Turned Green: A Brief 3.8-Billion-Year History of Plants

“As will be demonstrated in subsequent chapters, for the vast majority of Earth history, photosynthetic organisms were limited to aquatic environments, and a green pigment works very well in aquatic environments because blue and red wavelengths penetrate water better than green. Land plants are green because their aquatic ancestors were green, and why else would land plants have an aquatic-adapted photosynthetic pigment?”
― Joseph E. Armstrong, How the Earth Turned Green: A Brief 3.8-Billion-Year History of Plants

“We humans breathe an oxygen-rich atmosphere and respire aerobically all because cyanobacteria somehow came to possess two different photosystems from two different sources.”
― Joseph E. Armstrong, How the Earth Turned Green: A Brief 3.8-Billion-Year History of Plants

“The construction of such complex systems by natural processes seems quite unlikely when we first confront them as a whole. However, our ability to recognize and understand the components of metabolisms and to interpret them from a phylogenetic perspective has slowly made it apparent that rather than being elegantly designed assemblies, metabolisms are nature’s “most wonderfully contrived Rube Goldberg machines” (Knoll 2003). All metabolisms are constructed of components, smaller, simpler sets of reactions, some of which are so versatile that they can function in two or more different ways. These components have been cobbled together in various ways in different groups of organisms, and the contraptions work. But metabolisms are not the wonderfully elegant things they may seem on first or superficial examination.”
― Joseph E. Armstrong, How the Earth Turned Green: A Brief 3.8-Billion-Year History of Plants

“The universe is estimated to be 13.75 billion years old (± 0.11 by), about three times older than Earth. According to the most popular current theory, everything began when a quantum fluctuation in a void produced an unimaginably hot, unstable bubble of energy that expanded explosively in a Big Bang that ultimately produced all matter and energy.”
― Joseph E. Armstrong, How the Earth Turned Green: A Brief 3.8-Billion-Year History of Plants

“When you do science you cannot ignore the data. Anyone can pose an alternative explanation by ignoring what is known; thinking of a plausible alternative explanation that accounts for everything known is a real intellectual challenge not to be taken lightly. Critics of science routinely and universally fail this challenge.”
― Joseph E. Armstrong, How the Earth Turned Green: A Brief 3.8-Billion-Year History of Plants