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The animal that wins in the struggle for existence is the one that is most successfully adapted to its environment, and yet the environment is always changing. The only permanence is the permanence of change.

— Edmund Sinnott, Cell and Psyche: The Biology of Purpose (1950)
2w ago

The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.

3w ago
notboring.co
Weekly Dose of Optimism #198

Basically, scientists can't see the proteins inside of a cell in real-time in their natural environment. They can image ~10% of the proteins once they're pulled out and purified, using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), or < 1% when they're actually working inside a cell, but most of our cell's proteins operate in the shadows.

3w ago

The boundary between living and non-living matter is not a sharp line but a broad zone of increasing complexity, and to ask where life begins is like asking where a forest begins as one walks from open country into woodland.

4w ago
themarginalian.org
How Evolution Invented Faith: The Patience of the Penguin and the Art of Withstanding Abandonment

The male's stoic, heroic devotion to his duty as incubator and nurse must be unique in nature, involving that almost incredibly long fast under conditions of exposure to intense frost that would kill most other living creatures. It is at last rewarded, while the rookery is still sunless in July, by the return of his mate, fat and full-bellied from her long sojourn amid the krill and small fishes.

1mo ago

The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would have remained unchanged since the earliest days; no evolution, no mankind, nothing.

2mo ago
3quarksdaily.com
How Grains and Grasses Fed (and Still Feed) Humankind

Their leaves send about two thirds of all the food they make to the underworld. There, roots tunnel many meters down. As they grow, they break up clay and rock, exude sugars and other molecules, and interweave their cells with fungi. When the roots die, they add spongy organic matter to the soil.

3mo ago

The eye, like all the other organs, was perfected by natural selection, for good seeing being disadvantageous to every animal, the standard of perfection for this organ is indeterminate.

3mo ago
themarginalian.org
How Flamingos Got Their Pink

It is not simply that flamingos metabolize archaea, digesting them to turn their pigments into plumage coloration — modern molecular analysis reveals that archaea still live intact in the feathers of flamingos, perhaps the way our own past moves through us, lives in us, colors our present with the hue of something deeper than memory, something shimmering with the mystery of what makes life alive.

3mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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