Amanda

“Ten generations back, for example, the number of ancestral stretches of DNA is around 757 but the number of ancestors is 1,024, guaranteeing that each person has several hundred ancestors from whom he or she has received no DNA whatsoever.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

“But science’s biggest flaw and biggest virtue is that it almost always mistakes agreement for truth.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Bibliomania’ was typically characterized by an immoderate, even ruinous attachment to books acquired through purchase or theft, with a strong suggestion that these books were to serve an inert and possessive collection, rather than for reading or other direct use.”
― Emma Smith, Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers

“For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey