The Sensory Desktop

We must take our sensory experiences seriously but not literally. This is one place where the concept of a sensory desktop is helpful. We take the icons on a graphical desktop seriously; we won’t, for instance, carelessly drag an icon to the trash, for fear of losing a valuable file. But we don’t take the colors, shapes, or locations of the icons literally. They are not there to resemble the truth. They are there to facilitate useful behaviors. Sensory desktops differ across species. A face...

 Cancer as a Microevolutionary Process

The body of an animal operates as a society or ecosystem whose individual members are cells, reproducing by cell division and organized into collaborative assemblies or tissues. In our earlier discussion of the maintenance of tissues (Chapter 22), our interests were similar to those of the ecologist: cell births, deaths, habitats, territorial limitations, and the maintenance of population sizes. The one ecological topic conspicuously absent was that of natural selection: we said nothing of co...