Molly

“Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. Description or law, it challenged the theory of special creation and bruited the idea of evolution in a tone of thunderous innuendo.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“Look at that! Life’s more science-fictiony by the day. It’s not just that you get old and your kids leave; it’s that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“There’s a voice that says: "So what?"
It’s not my voice, it’s probably not yours, but it makes itself heard in the arenas of public opinion, querulous and smug and fortified by just a little knowledge, which as always is a dangerous thing. "So what if a bunch of species go extinct?" It says. "Extinction is a natural process. Darwin himself said so, didn’t he? Extinction is the complement of evolution, making room for new species to evolve. There have always been extinctions. So why worry about these extinctions currently being caused by humanity?" And there has always been a pilot light burning in your furnace. So why worry when your house is on fire?”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction

“The term refers to cascading disruptions that can pass between trophic levels—that is, between different categories of interrelated organisms in the hierarchy of energy transfer within an ecosystem.”
― David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions