Category: life...

• the ability to metabolize nutrients, grow, reproduce, and respond and adapt to environmental stimuli
• bacteria and cyanobacteria were earth's first living organisms at 3.5 billion years ago
• all known life forms possess either DNA or RNA
• Perform every act in life as though it were your last. (M. Aurelius)
• If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. (J. Campbell)
• the stepwise adaptation of organisms to their environment with increasing precision by small random mutations/changes in their hereditary material - distinguishing them from non-living matter
• the forms and relations of more than a million separate species of plants and animals have been studied by anatomists and taxonomist, physiologist, etc. etc.
• both intelligence and technical civilization have evolved about halfway through the relevant lifetime of the Earth and Sun
• The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean-when boredom seems the very stuff of life. (Henry Miller)
• Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey, and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things. (J. Raban)
• Sunlight stirred the materials on the surface of the Earth into chemical activity. Eventually, this activity became organized in peculiar ways and life began.
• Without life the surface of the Earth and its atmosphere would be very different. We are both spectators and actors in a continuing performance where life is both author and producer, and for which the Earth serves as an ever-changing stage.
• The similarity in structure of the genetic apparatus throughout the living world is so perfect that it cannot possibly be a matter of chance.
• Ninety-five percent of all animals and plants that have ever existed on earth have become extinct.
• Life emerged 3.5 billion to 4 billion years ago. Even the rocks of that era have mostly vanished.
• Paleontology is the science of prehistoric life, of more than 10,000 years ago.

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