A Long Line of Cells : Collected Essays (1990), p. 244
“What constitutes the primordium of the adult parasite [ Rhizocephala ]? What can be injected through the narrow opening of the dart's hypodermic device? …Imagine going through such complexity as nauplius, cyprid, and kentrogon - and then paring yourself down to just a few cells for a quick and hazardous transition to the adult stage. What a minimal bridge at such a crucial transition! …But other species have achieved the ultimate reduction to a single cell! The dart injects just one cell into the host's interior, and the two parts of the life cyle maintain their indispensable continuity by an absolutely minimal connection - as though, within the rhizocephalan life cycle, nature has inserted a stage analogous to the fertilized egg that establishes minimal connection between generations in ordinary sexual organisms.”
Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 363
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)
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Stephen Jay Gould 274
American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002Related quotes
Red Giants and White Dwarfs : Man's Descent from the Stars (1971), p. 249.

Vol. I, Part III: The Evolution of Life, Ch. 3 : General Aspects of the Evolution Hypothesis; compare: "As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for his birth, / So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man", Alfred Lord Tennyson, Maud (1855)
Principles of Biology (1864)

“But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant”

“Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.”
Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005), p. 2

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance

“Every cell from a cell.”
Omnis cellula e cellula

McKenna interview (1992)
Context: I love child things because there's so much mystery when you're a child. When you're a child, something as simple as a tree doesn't make sense. You see it in the distance and it looks small, but as you go closer, it seems to grow — you haven't got a handle on the rules when you're a child. We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.