Life Formation Quotes

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life.

I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.

I can't remember if it was in the third grade in school, I was being told that two amoeba happened to hit in a muddy puddle of water two billion years ago, and I was an accident. I was the result. I wasn't real smart, but I said, 'I don't like the sound of that.'

You cannot go into the womb to form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole-and there it is and you have made it and have felt it, but it has come itself.

Most research into life's murky origin has been carried out by chemists. They've tried a variety of approaches in their attempts to recreate the first steps on the road to life, but little progress has been made. Perhaps that is no surprise, given life's stupendous complexity.

It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.

So how can we test the idea that the transition from nonlife to life is simple enough to happen repeatedly? The most obvious and straightforward way is to search for a second form of life on Earth. No planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so if the path to life is easy, then life should have started up many times over right here.

You could think of the galaxy as a sort of stove with lots of pots on it, and the pots are the interstellar medium, like a chicken broth getting stronger with every reduction. Every time a supernova goes off and sends its heavy elements out into the interstellar medium, we cook up a stew that's better and better for solar systems and life.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.

He rocked in the swells, floating like the first germ of life adrift on the earth's cooling seas, formless macule of plasm trapped in a vapor drop and all creation yet to come.

Thus it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life could easily be produced from inanimate material.

Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something; my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

No planet is more earth-like than Earth itself, so if life really does pop up readily in earth-like conditions, then surely it should have arisen many times right here on our home planet? And how do we know it didn't? The truth is, nobody has looked.

Suppose we were to teach creationism. What would be the content of the teaching? Merely that a creator formed the universe and all species of life ready-made? Nothing more? No details?

Now an embryo may seem like some scientific or laboratory term, but in fact the embryo contains the unique information that defines a person. All you add is food and climate control, and some time, and the embryo becomes you or me.

The first decade of your life is really important; it's formative.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

The manner in which life constructs itself must be dealing with some other principle which we've failed to identify.

I tell my students, with a feeling of pride that I hope they will share, that the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that make up ninety-nine per cent of our living substance were cooked in the deep interiors of earlier generations of dying stars. Gathered up from the ends of the universe, over billions of years, eventually they came to form, in part, the substance of our sun, its planets, and ourselves. Three billion years ago, life arose upon the earth. It is the only life in the solar system.