Lyall Watson Quotes

The Earth has been lawned with life for something over 3.5 billion years. That's a span of time great enough to encompass some honest-to-goodness catastrophe. For example, 700 million years ago, Earth underwent a planet-wide deep freeze, with ice covering the oceans from the poles to the equator.

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.

Remember my mantra: distinct... or extinct.

They are unique in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life that they enclose.

The snow leopard is absolutely magnificent. It represents really what endangered species are all about.

Turtles are very stable and have been around forever. But they have problems adapting. When humans came along, turtles came under serious threat. Biodiversity is good, and I think it is good in technology as well.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

I think when you work on fossils, and you realize that a species is there, and it's abundant for quite a long period of time, and then at some point it's no longer there - and so, when you look at that bigger picture, yes, you realize that either you change and adapt, or, as a species, you go extinct.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

This all comes down to what we know about life on Earth.

If every human being disappeared off the face of the earth in an instant, the earth would still keep spinning and the planet would develop new life forms.

It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

We'll all die out eventually. Humans will be gone. And all I'm saying is, when people worry about polar bears disappearing or whatever, it's like, 'Well that's life, things will come and go, we'll find new species.'

Life is extraordinarily resilient. It's been around for over a billion years.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.

As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.

This is the rollcall of evolution happening in the space of a few generations, the greatest loss of living things that make up our biodiversity since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.

Mountains and oceans have whole worlds of innumerable wondrous features. We should understand that it is not only our distant surroundings that are like this, but even what is right here, even a single drop of water.

I love the world the Lord has created; I love the mountains, the rivers, the valleys, the skies. I love the forests, the fields, the flowers. I love the mysteries of evolution and dna and the big bang. I want to know the majesties of the Lord's Creation. I cannot close my eyes to all this. I cannot turn away from science and scientific exploration.

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.

Nature, in her blind thirst for life has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature.