Dorion Sagan Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

Far from leaving microorganisms behind on an evolutionary "ladder," we are both surrounded by them and composed of them.

Dorion Sagan
Our bodies, like those of all life, preserve the environment of an earlier Earth. We coexist with present-day microbes and harbor remnants of others, symbiotically subsumed within our cells. In this way, the microcosm lives on in us and we in it.

Dorion Sagan
Neanderthalers, whatever else they were, were people. They were artists and poets and buriers of the dead.

Dorion Sagan
Only life itself seems powerful enough to have promoted the conditions favoring its own prolonged survival.

Dorion Sagan
No animal has ever really completely left the watery microcosm. The blastula and embryo still develop in the primeval wetness and buoyancy of the womb... No matter how high and dry the mountain top, no matter how secluded and modern the retreat, we sweat and cry what is basically seawater.

Dorion Sagan
The question then becomes: If we have been around painting cave walls and designing artifacts for some 30,000 years at least, how long will it be until Homo sapiens becomes something else? When will a future descendent species look back on us as their naive predecessors?

Dorion Sagan
Life, a watery, carbon-based macromolecular system, is reproducing autopoeisis. The autopoetic view of life is circular. Life is a metabolic machine which not only reproduces but fiercely stores and uses information in order to resist breaking down.

Dorion Sagan
A hydrogen-rich environment exposed to energy in the presence of carbon — conditions that certainly existed throughout our solar system, if not the universe — will, by the rules of chemistry, produce the building blocks of life.

Dorion Sagan