We are all of us the living graves of extinct beasts, and hold within us the sheep, the lion, and the eagle of our forefathers. Strange kinships bind us to the creatures of field and forest, and the blood in our veins runs down from a time when the world was young.
The plate tectonics model that would arise from her discovery would go on to change our understanding of life itself: Tectonic activity mixes surface and ocean chemistry, recycling elements to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature stable, and is what allowed Earth's waters to remain liquid for the billions of years that complex life needed to evolve. Without it, we would have never risen from the oceans to measure the
4w ago
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.
Today, we know that diatoms — thousands of species of unicellular algae, each a living Noether theorem housed in a shell of opal — are not created for admiration but create the admirer: Every life-form on Earth depends on them.
1mo ago
The botanist who studies the flora of a distant country is compelled to admit that the very plants which seem most strikingly unlike anything in his own country are, when he comes to know them, simply variations of types with which he is perfectly familiar.
2mo 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.
Selection went especially bonkers during the Bronze Age (around 3,000 years ago). That's when gene frequencies for everything from immune function to body fat to intelligence were most in flux. Over the last 10,000 years, selection pushed the genetic predictor of cognitive performance up by roughly a full standard deviation — most of it between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago.
Studies show that animals living in urban environments around the world exhibit common sets of behaviors. At the same time, these urban animals are losing traits they would need in the wild. This process of urban animals' behavior becoming more similar is known as "behavioral homogenization," and it accompanies the loss of species diversity with urbanization.
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
The hypothesis that life originates in the inorganic world is the only hypothesis consonant with the present state of scientific knowledge.
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.
4mo ago
The human species is engaged in the act of creating itself. We are shaping our own evolution through the choices we make, and this is both our greatest burden and our highest calling.
They are what that the German microbiologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary was studying when he coined the word symbiosis, which is the technology evolution invented for unselfing.
4mo ago
The human species is engaged in the act of creating itself. We are shaping our own evolution through the choices we make, yet we proceed as though we were merely passive observers of our own development.
It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real. It may be that we evolved to dream ourselves into reality — a laboratory of consciousness that began in the bird brain.
In a study published on Thursday in the journal Science, a team of researchers report that men with a lot of Neanderthal ancestry and women with a lot of modern human ancestry had a strong preference to mate with each other. However it played out, the preference was intense.
5mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
