Life's Edge Quotes

“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

“The disgusting smell of death of death is the result of certain airborne molecules with evocative names like cadaverine and putrescine. These molecules are not produced by death, however, but by life growing on death. After an animal dies, its cells self destruct and become food for the body's resident bacteria. They chew through the walls of the gut and spread through the body. They release cadaverine and putrescine merely as byproducts of their metabolism. These molecules are not actually dangerous to us. They won't kill us like a whiff of sarin or cyanide. Yet our ancestors evolved a keen sensitivity to these molecules, along with an instinctive response to recoil at the merest whiff.”
― Carl Zimmer, Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

“It was a biochemical Jackson Pollock: a field of strings, tangles, loops.”
― Carl Zimmer, Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

“And then, in the middle of one of my blinks, she lunged. Her languid body turned into a missile.”
― Carl Zimmer, Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

“It’s not just breaking down because it’s old and getting cold,” Spicer said. “It’s being deliberately broken down. Because it is precious.” Spicer explained that every molecule of chlorophyll contains four atoms of nitrogen. If the maple tree in the Arbo simply dropped its leaves in the fall, it would have to make a huge effort in the spring to gather a fresh supply of nitrogen from the soil, which it would then have to pump up from its roots to its branches. Instead, the tree spent the autumn carefully dismantling its chlorophyll into molecular parts, which it moved down little tunnels from the leaves into the branches. There the parts would spend the winter in safekeeping, ready to be quickly moved into new leaves in the spring and reassembled into fresh chlorophyll. It was a smart strategy”
― Carl Zimmer, Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

“Thirteen thousand years ago it fell to Antarctica. It rested in the Allan Hills as the Ice Age glaciers retreated, farmers discovered agriculture, cities rose, and rockets shot into space.”
― Carl Zimmer, Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

“Our own lineage split off from that of chimpanzees roughly seven million years ago.”
― Carl Zimmer, Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

“Infants prefer to look at dots that move in biological patterns rather than random ones. They will look longer at geometrical shapes that seem to be self-propelled than ones that seem to move passively. Children also have a bias toward life in the way they learn: they can learn about animals faster than inanimate objects, and they hold on to the memories of what they learn longer. Our knowledge of life, in other words, arises long before we can tell ourselves what we know.”
― Carl Zimmer, Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive