“an obligatory manifestation of matter . . .” Quoted in Nuland, How We Live, p. 121.
“If you wished to create another living object . . .” Schopf, p. 107.
“There is nothing special about the substances . . .” Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 112.
“As one leading biology text puts it . . .” Wallace et al., Biology: The Science of Life, p. 428.
“Well into the 1950s . . .” Margulis and Sagan, p. 71.
“We can only infer from this rapidity . . .” New York Times, “Life on Mars? So What?” August 11, 1996.
“was chemically destined to be.” Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 328.
“when tens of thousands of Australians . . .” Sydney Morning Herald, “Aerial Blast Rocks Towns,” September 29, 1969; and “Farmer Finds ‘Meteor Soot,’ ” September 30, 1969.
“it was studded with amino acids . . .” Davies, pp. 209-10.
“A few other carbonaceous chondrites . . .” Nature, “Life’s Sweet Beginnings?” December 20-27, 2001, p. 857, and Earth, “Life’s Crucible,” February 1998, p. 37.
“at the very fringe of scientific respectability . . .” Gribbin, In the Beginning, p. 78.
“suggested that our noses evolved . . .” Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 190.
“Wherever you go in the world . . .” Ridley, Genome, p. 21.
“We can’t be certain that what you are holding . . .” Victoria Bennett interview, Australia National University, Canberra, August 21, 2001.
“full of noxious vapors . . .” Ferris, Seeing in the Dark, p. 200.
“the most important single metabolic innovation . . .” Margulis and Sagan, p. 78.
“Our white cells actually use oxygen . . .” Note provided by Dr. Laurence Smaje.
“But about 3.5 billion years ago . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 186.
“This is truly time traveling . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 66.
“the slowest-evolving organisms on Earth . . .” Schopf, p. 212
“Animals could not summon up the energy to work,” Fortey, Life, p. 89.
“nothing more than a sludge of simple microbes.” Margulis and Sagan, p. 17.
“you could pack a billion . . .” Brown, The Energy of Life, p. 101.
“Such fossils have been found just once . . .” Ward and Brownlee, p. 10.
“little more than ‘bags of chemicals’. . .” Drury, p. 68.
“to fill eighty books of five hundred pages.” Sagan, p. 227.
“Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist . . .” Biddle, p. 16.
“a herd of about one trillion bacteria . . .” Ashcroft, p. 248; and Sagan and Margulis, Garden of Microbial Delights, p. 4.
“Your digestive system alone . . .” Biddle, p. 57.
“no detectable function at all.” National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 51.
“about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells.” Margulis and Sagan, p. 67.
“We couldn’t survive a day without them.” New York Times, “From Birth, Our Body Houses a Microbe Zoo,” October 15, 1996, p. C3.
“Algae and other tiny organisms . . .” Sagan and Margulis, p. 11.
“Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism . .
