“The language of evolution is neither mathematics nor computer-generated morphology. Certainly it is not statistics. Rather, natural history, ecology, genetics, and metabolism must be supplemented with accurate knowledge of microbes. Microbial physiology, ecology, and protistology are essential to understand the evolutionary process. The living subvisible world ultimately underlies the behavior, development, ecology, and evolution of […]
“The reason we think we understand nuclear origins is that certain live organisms today behave just the way we think many of their ancestors did. We must reconstruct evolutionary history from living clues that we take to be representative. Evolutionary novelty of the nucleated cell is best comprehended as specific historical products of partnerships and […]
“Vernadsky, a chemist who studied crystallography, was always interested in the structure of minerals. He was a scientific monist with novel insights. Unlike the vitalists, who held that there must be a special, unique property of life that gives it the ability to think and act on its own, Vernadsky saw life as a natural outgrowth […]
I used to have a great view of the garden from more than 100′ up, but now I am only 18″ tall, 3.5′ wide, and 14.5′ long. Metal ligaments now penetrate my soft redwood––impositions of the two bipedal creatures who chose my new form. One of them lives here; I see him poking around all […]
“Under stress, different kinds of individuals, of very different origins and abilities, physically associate. With continued and predictable stress, cyclical and seasonal, these acquaintances become intimate and extend beyond a single encounter. To become significant to the evolutionary process, the former strangers must interact frequently enough to form a stable, unique relationship––and ultimately a permanent […]
“Unlike mutation, the rapid acquisition of new, highly refined traits by acquisition and integration of former strangers confers immediate selective advantages on protoctist, plant, or animal captors. Often the association begins as predatory: One organism attempts to ingest and digest the other, which resists. The subdued prey or undigested bacterium leads to a trapped population. […]
“Wolf Larsen was unconscious, but it was a matter of minutes for the fresh air to restore him. We were working over him, however, when he signed for paper and pencil. ‘Pray do not interrupt me,’ he wrote. ‘I am smiling.’ ‘I am still a bit of the ferment, you see,’ he wrote a little […]
“And ever I loved Maud with increasing love. She was so many-sided, so many-mooded––’protean-mooded’ I called her. But I called her this, and other and dearer things, in my thoughts only. Though the declaration of my love urged and trembled on my tongue a thousand times, I knew that it was no time for such […]
“In our contemporary era, perhaps the most profound insight Confucianism has to offer the world today lies in prompting us to rethink the role of family as the ground and primary site of the consummate life and by extension, of a truly robust democracy. Ironically, we might argue that at the same time, inopportune intimacy […]
“In the Chinese cosmology expressed in the Zhongyong, the lived world is the bottomless unfolding of an always-provisional world order according to the rhythm of its own internal creative processes without any fixed pattern or guiding hand. And in the absence of any creator ‘God,’ this Confucian cosmology lifts the bar rather significantly with respect […]