Daniel Martins

“Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.”
― Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord

“Most new species arise not from the insensibly gradual transformation of large populations but rather by the rapid differentiation of small, isolated populations at the periphery of the main group.”
― Andrew H. Knoll, Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth

“What are stories for if we don't learn from them?”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

“One clear theme of evolutionary history is the cumulative nature of biological diversity. Individual species (of nucleated organisms at least) may come and go in geological succession, their extinctions emphasizing the fragility of populations in a world of competition and environmental change. But the history of guilds—of fundamentally distinct morphological and physiological ways of making a biological living—is one of accrual. The long view of evolution is unmistakably one of accumulation through time, governed by rules of ecosystem function. The replacement series implied by the Generations of Abraham approach fails to capture this basic attribute of biological history.”
― Andrew H. Knoll, Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth