The Mind

To me the most astounding fact in the universe, even more astounding than the flight of the Monarch butterfly, is the power of mind which drives my fingers as I write these words. Somehow, by natural processes still totally mysterious, a million butterfly brains working together in a human skull have the power to dream, to calculate, to see and to hear, to speak and to listen, to translate thoughts and feelings into marks on paper which other brains can interpret. Mind, through the long cours...

 Tyranny of the Gene Tempered by Junk DNA

The analogies between the genetic evolution of biological species and the cultural evolution of human societies have been brilliantly explored by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. The book is mainly concerned with biological evolution; the cultural analogies are only pursued in the last chapter. Dawkins's main theme is the tyranny which the rigid demands of the replication apparatus have imposed upon all biological species throughout evolutionary history. Every species is the pris...

 Spring Recapitulates Evolution

Spring provides a kind of annual recapitulation of the evolution of life on Earth, an opportunity to celebrate anew the greening of the planet three and a half billion years ago by the first photosynthesizing bacteria. All life—the whole glorious parade along the path—depends upon the photosynthesizers. As spring dresses the deciduous woodlands in its Easter best, the nonphotosynthesizers get moving too. Suddenly the woods are skittering, fluttering, munching. singing. From rock-hard seed cas...

 The Evolution of Photosynthesis

When the first single-celled organisms appeared on Earth, more than 3 billion years ago, they fed upon carbohydrates—sugars—dissolved in the sea. The sugars had their origin in chance chemical reactions. Life, however, multiplied exponentially; one cell made two, two made four, four made eight, and so on. Self replication is the essence of life. It was inevitable that burgeoning organisms in the sea would outstrip their catch-as-catch-can food supply It would seem that life was doomed to a de...