Alexander P. Wolfe, Ph.D.
Adjunct Professor, Paleobiology
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta
Anthropocene Working Group
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"Gaia is a lot easier to say than a biological cybernetic system with homeostatic tendencies." James Lovelock
"What's the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?" F. Sherwood Rowland
"Dans les champs de l'observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés." Louis Pasteur
"Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little." Epicurus
"It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working; whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life." Charles Darwin
“Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again.” Stephen Jay Gould
“In feedback loops, the comfortable assumption of cause and effect loses meaning, and so efforts to assign them usually end in frustration.” Lee Kump
"When the work of the geologist is finished, and the final comprehensive report written, the longest and most important chapter will be upon the latest and shortest of the geological periods." Grove Karl Gilbert
"Once in a while you can get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right." Robert Hunter & Jerry Garcia
"Lo the angler. He riseth in the morning and upsetteth the whole household. Mighty are his preparations. He goeth forth with great hope in his heart - and when the day is far spent, he returneth, smelling of strong drink, and the truth is not in him." Anonymous
“One never knows, do one?” Fats Waller
Left to right: Eocene chrysophyte cyst with scales; the Holocene-Anthropocene boundary in southwest Greenland; fossil foliage from kimberlite drill core; the Miocene non-marine diatom Miosira
Left to right: Didymosphenia stalk with attached Achnanthidium cells; Late Cretaceous serphitid wasp in Canadian amber; unpermineralized Creataceous ovulate cone; Protected auxosporulation in Aulacoseira explains evolutionary stasis in centric diatoms
