source: Charles Sturt (1834). “Two expeditions into the interior of Southern Australia: during the years 1828, 1829, 1830 and 1831 with observations on ... New South Wales”, p.34

topic: Change, Country, Valleys, Wellington, Geological Time

My father was a soil scientist with the Geological Survey.

- Jim Fowler

topic: Father, Soil, Scientist, Geological Time

The grounds on which golf is played are called links, being the barren sandy soil from which the sea has retired in recent geological times. In their natural state links are covered with long, rank bent grass and gorse. Links are too barren for cultivation: but sheep, rabbits, geese and professionals pick up a precarious livelihood on them.

- Charles Walter Simpson

topic: Golf, Sheep, Sea, Sandy, Geological Time

I want to see books taken out of historical time and placed into a different timeline, such as evolutionary or geological time, as a means of putting the human experience in context.

- Douglas Coupland

source: Source: feathertale.com

topic: Taken, Book, Mean, Timelines, Geological Time

The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time, you can't find anything like us.

- Elizabeth Kolbert

source: Source: www.motherjones.com

topic: Looks, Earth, Natural, Geological Time

How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation', with an ugly emphasis on Brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?

- W.N.P. Barbellion

source: W. N. P. Barbellion (2017). “The Journal of a Disappointed Man”, p.35, Penguin UK

topic: Christian, Couple, Hate, Geological Time

On the geological time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about deep time. ... Geologists ... see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the Earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s across the sky ... Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death.

- John McPhee

topic: Thinking, Islands, Race, Swiftness, Fling

They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.

- Arundhati Roy

topic: Growing Up, Eye, Trying, Geological Time

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

- Nhat Hanh

source: "Zen and the art of protecting the planet" by Jo Confino, www.theguardian.com. August 26, 2010.

topic: Thinking, Years, Different, Civilisation, Geological Time

The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation].

- Kurt Gödel

source: "Nature's Imagination". Book by J. Cornwall, p.161-189, 1995.

topic: Law, Atmosphere, Body, Laws Of Physics, Geological Time

The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically "sudden" origins at single bedding planes.

- Stephen Jay Gould

source: "Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, pp. 2 - 3, 1987.

topic: Views, Long, Misunderstood, Speciation, Sudden Change

My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.

- Stephen Jay Gould

topic: Generations, Paleontology, Fields, Geological Time

Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years - the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.

- Michael Crichton

source: Michael Crichton (1997). “Michael Crichton's Jurassic World”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

topic: Children, Animal, Years, Geological Time

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.

- Richard Dawkins

source: Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition”, p.56, Oxford University Press

topic: Hands, Forever, Survival, Shuffling, Chromosomes

Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological time within a Darwinian individual of the appropriate scale. If a change in a local population does not gain such protection, it becomes-to borrow Dawkins's metaphor at a macroevolutionary scale-a transient duststorm in the desert of time, a passing cloud without borders, integrity, or even the capacity to act as a unit of selection, in the panorama of life's phylogeny.

- Stephen Jay Gould

source: Stephen Jay GOULD, Stephen Jay Gould (2009). “Punctuated Equilibrium”, p.83, Harvard University Press

topic: Life, Integrity, Clouds, Speciation, Panorama

I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,-this is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature.

- Louis Agassiz

source: Louis Agassiz (2003). “Agassiz on Evolution: Methods of study in natural history”

topic: Eggs, Growth, Done, Geological Time, Single Sentence

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