Cell Theory Quotes

I've never been surer of anything. Except maybe cell theory.

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.

I actually plan to mess up my life and start over every seven years. That way, I’ll never get in a rut. I read somewhere that most of your cells only live about seven years anyway, so in theory you literally are a new person; I figure that’s the best time to start over.

Study, along the lines which the theologies have mapped, will never lead us to discovery of the fundamental facts of our existence. That goal must be attained by means of exact science and can only be achieved by such means. The fact that man, for ages, has superstitiously believed in what he calls a God does not prove at all that his theory has been right. There have been many gods – all makeshifts, born of inability to fathom the deep fundamental truth. There must be something at the bottom of existence, and man, in ignorance, being unable to discover what it is through reason, because his reason has been so imperfect, undeveloped, has used, instead, imagination, and created figments, of one kind or another, which, according to the country he was born in, the suggestions of his environment, satisfied him for the time being. Not one of all the gods of all the various theologies has ever really been proved. We accept no ordinary scientific fact without the final proof; why should we, then, be satisfied in this most mighty of all matters, with a mere theory? Destruction of false theories will not decrease the sum of human happiness in future, any more than it has in the past... The days of miracles have passed. I do not believe, of course, that there was ever any day of actual miracles. I cannot understand that there were ever any miracles at all. My guide must be my reason, and at thought of miracles my reason is rebellious. Personally, I do not believe that Christ laid claim to doing miracles, or asserted that he had miraculous power... Our intelligence is the aggregate intelligence of the cells which make us up. There is no soul, distinct from mind, and what we speak of as the mind is just the aggregate intelligence of cells. It is fallacious to declare that we have souls apart from animal intelligence, apart from brains. It is the brain that keeps us going. There is nothing beyond that. Life goes on endlessly, but no more in human beings than in other animals, or, for that matter, than in vegetables. Life, collectively, must be immortal, human beings, individually, cannot be, as I see it, for they are not the individuals – they are mere aggregates of cells. There is no supernatural. We are continually learning new things. There are powers within us which have not yet been developed and they will develop. We shall learn things of ourselves, which will be full of wonders, but none of them will be beyond the natural. [Columbian Magazine interview]

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.

An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth. All our relations. The process that brings anything to its current form—chemical, synthetic, technological, or otherwise—doesn’t make the product not a product of the living earth. Buildings, freeways, cars—are these not of the earth? Were they shipped in from Mars, the moon? Is it because they’re processed, manufactured, or that we handle them? Are we so different? Were we at one time not something else entirely, Homo sapiens, single-celled organisms, space dust, unidentifiable pre-bang quantum theory? Cities form in the same way as galaxies.

The transpersonal experiences revealing the Earth as an intelligent, conscious entity are corroborated by scientific evidence. Gregory Bateson, who created a brilliant synthesis of cybernetics, information and systems theory, the theory of evolution, anthropology, and psychology came to the conclusion that it was logically inevitable to assume that mental processes occurred at all levels in any system or natural phenomenon of sufficient complexity. He believed that mental processes are present in cells, organs, tissues, organisms, animal and human groups, eco-systems, and even the earth and universe as a whole.

If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.

meander, v. "...because when it all comes down to it, there's no such thing as a two-hit wonder. So it's better just to have that one song that everyone knows, instead of diluting it with a follow-up that only half succeeds. I mean, who really cares what Soft Cell's next single was, as long as we have 'Tainted Love'?" I stop. You're still listening. "Wait," I say. "What was I talking about? How did we get to 'Tainted Love'?" "Let's see," you say, "I believe we started roughly at the Democratic gains in the South, then jumped back to the election of 1948, dipping briefly into northern constructions of the South, vis-a-vis Steel Magnolias, Birth of a Nation, Johnny Cash, and Fried Green Tomatoes. Which landed you on To Kill a Mockingbird, and how it is both Southern and universal, which -- correct me if I'm wrong -- got us to Harper Lee and her lack of a follow-up novel, intersected with the theory, probably wrong, that Truman Capote wrote the novel, then hopping over to literary one-hit wonders, and using musical one-hit wonders to make a point about their special place in our culture. I think." "Thank you," I say. "That's wonderful.

The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers. To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!

Arriving at cell theory has been considered even more important to biology than Darwin’s theory of evolution,

Your frequent claim that we must understand religious belief as a “social construct,” produced by “societal causes,” dependent upon “social and cultural institutions,” admitting of “sociological questions,” and the like, while it will warm the hearts of most anthropologists, is either trivially true or obscurantist. It is part and parcel of the double standard that so worries me—the demolition of which is the explicit aim of The Reason Project. Epidemiology is also a “social construct” with “societal causes,” etc.—but this doesn’t mean that the germ theory of disease isn’t true or that any rival “construct”—like one suggesting that child rape will cure AIDS—isn’t a dangerous, deplorable, and unnecessary eruption of primeval stupidity. We either have good reasons or bad reasons for what we believe; we can be open to evidence and argument, or we can be closed; we can tolerate (and even seek) criticism of our most cherished views, or we can hide behind authority, sanctity, and dogma. The main reason why children are still raised to think that the universe is 6,000 years old is not because religion as a “social institution” hasn’t been appropriately coddled and cajoled, but because polite people (and scientists terrified of losing their funding) haven’t laughed this belief off the face of the earth. We did not lose a decade of progress on stem-cell research in the United States because of religion as a “social construct”; we lost it because of the behavioural and emotional consequences of a specific belief. If there were a line in the book of Genesis that read – “The soul enters the womb on the hundredth day (you idiots)” – we wouldn’t have lost a step on stem-cell research, and there would not be a Christian or Jew anywhere who would worry about souls in Petri dishes suffering the torments of the damned. The beliefs currently rattling around in the heads of human beings are some of the most potent forces on earth; some of the craziest and most divisive of these are “religious,” and so-dubbed they are treated with absurd deference, even in the halls of science; this is a very bad combination—that is my point.

I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it's not about you. It's what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not.

You have not had any privacy since the first day you owned your first cell phone. They can track everything. They can hear recordings of anything you have ever said on your cell. And read everything you ever read, and everything you ever typed. And see every location you've ever been to. That's just how cells work. Your privacy is a willful illusion.

The cause of nutrition and growth resides not in the organism as a whole but in the separate elementary parts—the cells.

the cell can and must do something that no man-made factory can achieve, namely, reproduce its entire self to order.

...we are all in the situation of the inmate who prefers working in the prison laundry to sitting in the cell watching TV all day.

Depression, we are told over and over again, is a brain disease, a chemical imbalance that can be adjusted by antidepressant medication. In an informational brochure issued to inform the public about depression, the US National Institute for Mental Health tells people that 'depressive illnesses are disorders of the brain' and adds that 'important neurotransmitters - chemicals that brain cells use to communicate - appear to be out of balance'. This view is so widespread that it was even proffered by the editors of PLoS [Public Library of Science] Medicine in their summary that accompanied our article. 'Depression,' they wrote, 'is a serious medical illness caused by imbalances in the brain chemicals that regulate mood', and they went on to say that antidepressants are supposed to work by correcting these imbalances. The editors wrote their comment on chemical imbalances as if it were an established fact, and this is also how it is presented by drug companies. Actually, it is not. Instead, even its proponents have to admit that it is a controversial hypothesis that has not yet been proven. Not only is the chemical-imbalance hypothesis unproven, but I will argue that it is about as close as a theory gets in science to being dis-proven by the evidence.

His fingerprints are all over today’s technologies. Photoelectric cells and lasers, nuclear power and fiber optics, space travel, and even semiconductors all trace back to his theories.

Darwin, with his Origin of Species, his theories about Natural Selection, the Survival of the Fittest, and the influence of environment, shed a flood of light upon the great problems of plant and animal life. These things had been guessed, prophesied, asserted, hinted by many others, but Darwin, with infinite patience, with perfect care and candor, found the facts, fulfilled the prophecies, and demonstrated the truth of the guesses, hints and assertions. He was, in my judgment, the keenest observer, the best judge of the meaning and value of a fact, the greatest Naturalist the world has produced. The theological view began to look small and mean. Spencer gave his theory of evolution and sustained it by countless facts. He stood at a great height, and with the eyes of a philosopher, a profound thinker, surveyed the world. He has influenced the thought of the wisest. Theology looked more absurd than ever. Huxley entered the lists for Darwin. No man ever had a sharper sword -- a better shield. He challenged the world. The great theologians and the small scientists -- those who had more courage than sense, accepted the challenge. Their poor bodies were carried away by their friends. Huxley had intelligence, industry, genius, and the courage to express his thought. He was absolutely loyal to what he thought was truth. Without prejudice and without fear, he followed the footsteps of life from the lowest to the highest forms. Theology looked smaller still. Haeckel began at the simplest cell, went from change to change -- from form to form -- followed the line of development, the path of life, until he reached the human race. It was all natural. There had been no interference from without. I read the works of these great men -- of many others – and became convinced that they were right, and that all the theologians -- all the believers in "special creation" were absolutely wrong. The Garden of Eden faded away, Adam and Eve fell back to dust, the snake crawled into the grass, and Jehovah became a miserable myth.

Since the Common Rule says that research subjects must be allowed to withdraw from research at any time, these experts have told me that, in theory, the Lacks family might be able to withdraw HeLa cells from all research worldwide. And in fact, there are precedents for such a case, including one in which a woman successfully had her father’s DNA removed from a database in Iceland. Every researcher I’ve mentioned that idea to shudders at the thought of it.

Winning the Origins Lottery Nontheistic models adhere to a central premise that humans arose by strictly natural unguided steps from a bacterial life-form that sprang into being 3.8 billion years ago. Famed evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, an advocate for the hypothesis that natural selection and mutations can efficiently generate distinctly different species, nevertheless calculated the probability that humans (or a similarly intelligent species) arose from single-celled organisms as a possibility so small (10-1,000,000) that it might as well be zero (roughly equivalent to the likelihood of winning the California lottery 150,000 consecutive times with the purchase of just one ticket each time).2 He and other evolutionary biologists agree that natural selection and mutations could have yielded any of a virtually infinite number of other outcomes. Astrophysicists Brandon Carter, John Barrow, and Frank Tipler produced an even smaller probability.

The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on the multiplication of blood cells by division in bird and mammalian embryos and on the division of muscle bundles in frog larvae. Since then I have continued these observations in frog larvae, where it is possible to follow the history of tissues back to segmentation.

And it turns out, again and again, that living things seem to have a self-organizing quality. Proteins fold. Enzymes interact. Cells arrange themselves to form organs and the organs arrange themselves to form a coherent individual. Individuals organize themselves to make a population. And populations organize themselves to make a coherent biosphere. From complexity theory, we’re starting to have a sense of how this self-organization may happen, and what it means. And it implies a major change in how we view evolution.

Cancer, above all other diseases, has countless secondary causes. But, even for cancer, there is only one prime cause. Summarized in a few words, the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar.

The reality is that most of us grow up strapped in an educational system that favors obedience over independent thinking. We’re rewarded for trusting authority, and punished for challenging it. We focus on memorizing the stuff other people came up with—formulas in math, grammar rules in English, theories in physics, cell functions in biology—rather than grasping the logic behind our most important breakthroughs and tracing the footsteps of their discovery. We answer test questions with what we think our teacher wants to hear. We chase grades instead of knowledge. And worst of all, we leave the classroom woefully unequipped with the thinking skills that matter most: how to balance open-mindedness with skepticism, how to identify bias, and how to challenge assumptions—including our own—in a way that’s truly objective.

Knowledge in the brain is distributed. Nothing we know is stored in one place, such as one cell or one column. Nor is anything stored everywhere, like in a hologram. Knowledge of something is distributed in thousands of columns, but these are a small subset of all the columns.

We realized that the brain’s model of the world is built using maplike reference frames. Not one reference frame, but hundreds of thousands of them. Indeed, we now understand that most of the cells in your neocortex are dedicated to creating and manipulating reference frames, which the brain uses to plan and think.

early theories of the origin of life did not need to address, nor did they anticipate, this problem. Since scientists did not know about the information-bearing properties of DNA, or how the cell uses that functionally specified information to build proteins, they did not worry about explaining these features of life.

The claim that “mental illnesses are diagnosable disorders of the brain” is not based on scientific research; it is a lie, an error, or a naive revival of the somatic premise of the long-discredited humoral theory of disease. My claim that mental illnesses are fictitious illnesses is also not based on scientific research; it rests on the materialist-scientific definition of illness as a pathological alteration of cells, tissues, and organs. If we accept this scientific definition of disease, then it follows that mental illness is a metaphor, and that asserting that view is asserting an analytic truth, not subject to empirical falsification.

The multiplicity of human identity is not just a spiritual principle, it’s a biological fact—a basic ecological reality. ... only 10% of the cells in your body belong to you. The rest are the cells of bacteria and microorganisms that call your body home, and without these symbionts living on and within your physical self, you would be unable to digest and process the nutrients necessary to keep you alive. Your physical body is teeming with a microscopic diversity of life that rivals a rainforest. The insight of the Gaia Theory—that “the Earth system behaves as a single self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components”—is as much a statement about our own physical bodies as it is about the planet. If we imagine the Earth as the body of a goddess, we can also imagine our own bodies as a sacred home to an ecologically complex and diverse array of microscopic life." -- Alison Leigh Lilly, "Naming the Water: Human and Deity Identity from an Earth-Centered Perspective

Although DNA does not convey information that is received, understood, or used by a conscious mind, it does have information that is received and used by the cell’s machinery to build the structures critical to the maintenance of life. DNA displays a property—functional specificity—that transcends the merely mathematical formalism of Shannon’s theory. Is

Coke had a theory to explain grown-ups, as he did for most things in life. In his view, babies are born with a specific number of brain cells, which waste away and die off as people get older. So by the time they reach thirty—and certainly by the time they reach forty—most of their brain cells are gone. This explains why grown-ups do and say the things they do.

The Future is an illusion because, at the most fundamental level, Choice is an illusion. I am a believer in the theory, popular among physicists, that every time there is a Choice, the universe splits: both choices come to pass, but in now-separate universes. And so on, and on, with every choice of every particle, every atom, every molecule, every cell, every being, coming into being. In this universe of universes, everything happens, and every combination of things happens. Our universe is a mote of dust in an ever-growing dust-storm of possibilities, but each mote of dust in that storm is generating its own dust-storm of possibilities every instant, the motes of which in turn... But you get the general impression. Indeed to think of ourselves as single selves, and our universe as a single universe, is to be blinded, by the limitations of our senses and our consciousness, to the infinite-faceted truth: that we are infinite in a universe of universes that are each infinitely infinite..." "An intriguingly intricate view of the world," I said (...) Pat Sheeran nodded. "And it is astonishing how little practical difference it makes," he said. "All my other lives are as inaccessible to me as if they did not exist at all. No doubt in other universes I am a beggar, a revolutionary thinker, an academic, an accountant; a drinker, a thinker, a writer of books; I lose a freckle, gain a mole, shade off into men nothing like me at all; I have sons, fire guns, live forever, die too young. Whenever any particle in this universe changes state, I am split and travel in both directions, multiplied. But here I am, suffering the illusion of unity in this endlessly bifurcating moment. Yet sometimes, I wave my arms for the joy of creating a spray of universes." I said startled at the implications, “Though it may make no practical difference, the implications are nonetheless startling." "Indeed," said Pat Sheeran. "I had immediately to file all the fiction on my shelves under Non-Fiction. For it is an unavoidable corollary of this theory, that Fiction is impossible. For all novels are true histories of worlds as real as ours, but which we cannot see. All stories are possible, all histories have happened. I, billion-bodied, live a trillion lives every quantum instant. Those trillion lives branch out, a quintillion times a second, as every particle in every atom in each mote of dust on land, in sea, and sky, and space, and star, flickering in and out of being in the void, hesitates and decides its next stage. All tragedies, all triumphs, are mine, are yours." "It is a curious and difficult thing, to think that all is possible. No, probable. No, certain," I said, attempting to grasp the largeness of the thought."That nothing is improbable." "It is a comforting thought, some nights, to this version of me, now," said Pat Sheeran, and we roared on.

I've always believed in the Nero Wolfe theory of knowledge. You can just sit quietly in your room - according to Pascal, the activity that if practiced more assiduously would free humanity from most of its troubles, but that was before e-mail - and through sheer mental effort force the tiniest snippets of information to yield the entire story of which they are a fragment, because the whole truth is contained in every particle of it, the way every human cell contains our DNA.

His conversion (tawbat) was begun by Ḥasan of Baṣra. Ạt first he was a usurer and committed all sorts of wickedness, but God gave him a sincere repentance, and he learned from Ḥasan something of the theory and practice of religion. His native tongue was Persian (‘ajamí), and he could not speak Arabic correctly. One evening Ḥasan of Baṣra passed by the door of his cell. Ḥabíb had uttered the call to prayer and was standing, engaged in devotion. Ḥasan came in, but would not pray under his leadership, because Ḥabíb was unable to speak Arabic fluently or recite the Koran correctly. The same night, Ḥasan dreamed that he saw God and said to Him: “O Lord, wherein does Thy good pleasure consist?” and that God answered: “O Ḥasan, you found My good pleasure, but did not know its value: if yesternight you had said your prayers after Ḥabíb, and if the rightness of his intention had restrained you from taking offence at his pronunciation, I should have been well pleased with you.

Answers were sought by transplanting the blastema to other positions on the animal. The experiments only made matters worse. If the blastema was moved within live to seven days after it first appeared, and grafted near the hind leg, it grew into a second hind leg, even though it came from an amputated foreleg. Well, that was okay. The body could be divided into "spheres of influence" or "organizational territories,"each of which contained information on the local anatomy. A blastema into a hind-limb territory naturally became a hind limb. This was an attractive theory, but unfounded. Exactly what did this territory consist of? No one knew. To make matters worse, it was then found that transplantation of a slightly older blastema from a foreleg stump to a hind-limb area produced a foreleg. The young blastema knew where it was; the older one knew where it had been! Somehow this pinhead of primitive cells with absolutely no distinguishing characteristics contained enough information to build a complete foreleg, no matter where it was placed. How? We still don't know.

Could I love everyone and even include bad people? I bowed my forehead into my clasped hands, feeling faint. Instead of thinking gigantic thoughts, I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of. Someone once made this pew I’m sitting on, I thought. Someone sanded the wood and varnished it. Someone carried it into the church. Someone laid the tiles on the floor, someone fitted the windows. Each brick was placed by human hands, each hinge fitted on each door, every road surface outside, every bulb in every streetlight. And even things built by machines were really built by human beings, who built the machines initially. And human beings themselves, made by other humans, struggling to create happy children and families. Me, all the clothing I wear, all the language I know. Who put me here in this church, thinking these thoughts? Other people, some I know very well and others I have never met. Am I myself, or am I them? Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me. It is the others. Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labour of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain which is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes. When I opened my eyes I felt that I had understood something, and the cells of my body seemed to light up like millions of glowing points of contact, and I was aware of something profound. Then I stood up from my seat and collapsed.

Among other members of our cell I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich, Founder and Director of the Sex-Pol. (Institute for Sexual Politics). He was a Freudian Marxist; inspired by Malinowski, he had just published a book called 'The Function of the Orgasm,' in which he expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the Proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cock-eyed than it sounds.

Order Out of Chaos ... At the right temperature ... two peptide molecules will stay together long enough on average to find a third. Then the little trio finds a fourth peptide to attract into the little huddle, just through the random side-stepping and tumbling induced by all the rolling water molecules. Something extraordinary is happening: a larger structure is emerging from a finer system, not in spite of the chaotic and random motion of that system but because of it. Without the chaotic exploration of possibilities, the rare peptide molecules would never find each other, would never investigate all possible ways of aggregating so that the tape-like polymers emerge as the most likely assemblies. It is because of the random motion of all the fine degrees of freedom that the emergent, larger structures can assume the form they do. Even more is true when the number of molecules present becomes truly enormous, as is automatically the case for any amount of matter big enough to see. Out of the disorder emerges a ... pattern of emergent structure from a substrate of chaos.... The exact pressure of a gas, the emergence of fibrillar structures, the height in the atmosphere at which clouds condense, the temperature at which ice forms, even the formation of the delicate membranes surrounding every living cell in the realm of biology -- all this beauty and order becomes both possible and predictable because of the chaotic world underneath them.... Even the structures and phenomena that we find most beautiful of all, those that make life itself possible, grow up from roots in a chaotic underworld. Were the chaos to cease, they would wither and collapse, frozen rigid and lifeless at the temperatures of intergalactic space. This creative tension between the chaotic and the ordered lies within the foundations of science today, but it is a narrative theme of human culture that is as old as any. We saw it depicted in the ancient biblical creation narratives of the last chapter, building through the wisdom, poetic and prophetic literature. It is now time to return to those foundational narratives as they attain their climax in a text shot through with the storm, the flood and the earthquake, and our terrifying ignorance in the face of a cosmos apparently out of control. It is one of the greatest nature writings of the ancient world: the book of Job.

Let the chromosomes be represented by the keyboard of a grand piano-a very grand piano with thousands of keys. Then each key will be a gene. Every cell in the body carries a microscopic but complete keyboard in its nucleus. But each specialised cell is only permitted to sound one chord, according to its specialty-the rest of its genetic keyboard has been inactivated by scotch tape. The fertilised egg, and the first few generations of its daughter cells, had the complete keyboard at their disposal. But succesive generations have, at each 'point of no return', larger and larger areas of it covered by scotch tape. In the end, a muscle cell can only do one thing: contract-strike a single chord. The scotch tape is known in the language of genetics as the 'repressor'. The agent which strikes the key and activates the gene is an 'inducer'. A mutated gene is a key which has gone out of tune. When quite a lot of key have gone quite a lot out of tune, the result, we were asked to believe, was a much improved, wonderful new melody- a reptile transformed into a bird, or a monkey into a man. It seems that at some point the theory must have gone wrong. The point where it went wrong was the atomistic concept of the gene.

He postulated that many neurons can combine into a coalition, becoming a single processing unit. The connection patterns of these units, which can change, make up the algorithms (which can also change with the changing connection patterns) that determine the brain’s response to a stimulus. From this idea came the mantra “Cells that fire together wire together.” According to this theory, learning has a biological basis in the “wiring” patterns of neurons. Hebb noted that the brain is active all the time, not just when stimulated; inputs from the outside can only modify that ongoing activity. Hebb’s proposal made sense to those designing artificial neural networks, and it was put to use in computer programs.

(William) Hamilton recast the central ideas (of the evolutionary theory of aging) in mathematical form. Though this work tells us a good deal about why human lives take the course they do, Hamilton was a biologist whose great love was insects and their relatives, especially insects which make both our lives and an octopus’s life seem rather humdrum. Hamilton found mites in which the females hang suspended in the air with their swollen bodies packed with newly hatched young, and the males in the brood search out and copulate with their sisters there inside the mother. He found tiny beetles in which the males produce “and manhandle sperm cells longer than their whole bodies. Hamilton died in 2000, after catching malaria on a trip to Africa to investigate the origins of HIV. About a decade before his death, he wrote about how he would like his own burial to go. He wanted his body carried to the forests of Brazil and laid out to be eaten from the inside by an enormous winged Coprophanaeus beetle using his body to nurture its young, who would emerge from him and fly off. 'No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra [wing covers] which we will all hold over our “backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.

The ancestors of the higher animals must be regarded as one-celled beings, similar to the Amoebae which at the present day occur in our rivers, pools, and lakes. The incontrovertible fact that each human individual develops from an egg, which, in common with those of all animals, is a simple cell, most clearly proves that the most remote ancestors of man were primordial animals of this sort, of a form equivalent to a simple cell. When, therefore, the theory of the animal descent of man is condemned as a 'horrible, shocking, and immoral' doctrine, tho unalterable fact, which can be proved at any moment under the microscope, that the human egg is a simple cell, which is in no way different to those of other mammals, must equally be pronounced 'horrible, shocking, and immoral.

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

We may regard the cell quite apart from its familiar morphological aspects, and contemplate its constitution from the purely chemical standpoint. We are obliged to adopt the view, that the protoplasm is equipped with certain atomic groups, whose function especially consists in fixing to themselves food-stuffs, of importance to the cell-life. Adopting the nomenclature of organic chemistry, these groups may be designated side-chains. We may assume that the protoplasm consists of a special executive centre (Leistungs-centrum) in connection with which are nutritive side-chains... The relationship of the corresponding groups, i.e., those of the food-stuff, and those of the cell, must be specific. They must be adapted to one another, as, e.g., male and female screw (Pasteur), or as lock and key (E. Fischer).

One of the most severe and challenging of all pains is said to be phantom limb pain, when the sufferer perceives agonies in a part of the body that has been lost to accident or amputation. It is an obvious irony that one of the greatest pains we feel can be in a part of us that is no longer there. Worse, unlike normal pain, which usually abates as a wound heals, phantom pain may go on for a lifetime. No one can yet explain why. One theory is that in the absence of receiving any signal from the nerve fibers in the missing body part, the brain interprets this as an injury so severe that the cells have died, and so sends out an unending call of distress, like a burglar alarm that won’t turn off. If surgeons know they are going to amputate a limb, they now often numb the nerves in the affected limb over a period of days beforehand to prepare the brain for the oncoming loss of feeling. The practice has been found to greatly reduce phantom limb pain.

But there is also some empirical evidence that sheds light on the relationship between quantum principles and consciousness. Anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff claims to have found evidence that anesthesia arrests consciousness by hindering the motion of electrons in microtubules, minute tunnels of protein that serve as a kind of skeleton for cells. Hameroff speculates that microtubules could be a possible site for quantum effects in the brain,17 and his speculations have led mathematical physicist Roger Penrose to endorse the hypothesis.18 Attempts to develop models of consciousness based on quantum mechanics have also been made by neuroscientist John Eccles, and physicists Henry Stapp and Evan Harris Walker.o Walker and the experimental physicist Helmut Schmidt (the latter responsible for many of the micro-PK experiments described earlier) have also proposed mathematical theories of psi based on quantum mechanics.19 These theories rest upon two propositions that are now supported by experimental evidence: that mind can influence random quantum events, and that influence can occur instantaneously at a distance.p

The unsatisfying but honest answer is that I don’t know for sure, but probably not. The beast machine theory proposes that consciousness in humans and other animals arose in evolution, emerges in each of us during development, and operates from moment to moment in ways intimately connected with our status as living systems. All of our experiences and perceptions stem from our nature as self-sustaining living machines that care about their own persistence. My intuition – and again it’s only an intuition – is that the materiality of life will turn out to be important for all manifestations of consciousness. One reason for this is that the imperative for regulation and self-maintenance in living systems isn’t restricted to just one level, such as the integrity of the whole body. Self-maintenance for living systems goes all the way down, even down to the level of individual cells. Every cell in your body – in any body – is continually regenerating the conditions necessary for its own integrity over time. The same cannot be said for any current or near-future computer, and would not be true even for a silicon beast machine of the sort I just described.

Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry and that in order to regain your health you should donate something to the church, make a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness. Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you and that she could cast it out using song, dance, and the blood of a black cockerel. In the Middle East, doctors brought up on classical traditions might explain that your four bodily humors were out of balance and that you should harmonize them with a proper diet and foul-smelling potions. In India, Ayurvedic experts would offer their own theories concerning the balance between the three bodily elements known as doshas and recommend a treatment of herbs, massages, and yoga postures. Chinese physicians, Siberian shamans, African witch doctors, Amerindian medicine men—every empire, kingdom, and tribe had its own traditions and experts, each espousing different views about the human body and the nature of sickness, and each offering their own cornucopia of rituals, concoctions, and cures. Some of them worked surprisingly well, whereas others were little short of a death sentence. The only thing that united European, Chinese, African, and American medical practices was that everywhere at least a third of all children died before reaching adulthood, and average life expectancy was far below fifty.14 Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live. In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran, or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar-looking hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian, Japanese, Iranian, and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.15 Presumably even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.

The unification of our understanding of life with our understanding of matter and energy was the greatest scientific achievement of the second half of the twentieth century. One of its many consequences was to pull the rug out from under social scientists like Kroeber and Lowie who had invoked the “sound scientific method” of placing the living and nonliving in parallel universes. We now know that cells did not always come from other cells and that the emergence of life did not create a second world where before there was just one. Cells evolved from simpler replicating molecules, a nonliving part of the physical world, and may be understood as collections of molecular machinery—fantastically complicated machinery, of course, but machinery nonetheless. This leaves one wall standing in the landscape of knowledge, the one that twentieth-century social scientists guarded so jealously. It divides matter from mind, the material from the spiritual, the physical from the mental, biology from culture, nature from society, and the sciences from the social sciences, humanities, and arts. The division was built into each of the doctrines of the official theory: the blank slate given by biology versus the contents inscribed by experience and culture, the nobility of the savage in the state of nature versus the corruption of social institutions, the machine following inescapable laws versus the ghost that is free to choose and to improve the human condition. But this wall, too, is falling.

Men cooperate with one another. The totality of interhuman relations engendered by such cooperation is called society. Society is not an entity in itself. It is an aspect of human action. It does not exist or live outside of the conduct of people. It is an orientation of human action. Society neither thinks nor acts. Individuais in thinking and acting constitute a complex of relations and facts that are called social relations and facts. The issue has been confused by an arithmetical metaphor. Is society, people asked, merely a sum of individuals or is it more than this and thereby an entity endowed with independent reality? The question is nonsensical. Society is neither the sum of individuais nor more nor less. Arithmetical concepts cannot be applied to the matter. Another confusion arises from the no less empty question whether society is—in logic and in time—anterior to individuais or not. The evolution of society and that of civilization were not two distinct processes but one and the same process. The biological passing of a species of primates beyond the levei of a mere animal existence and their transformation into primitive men implied already the development of the first rudiments of social cooperation. Homo sapiens appeared on the stage of earthly events neither as a solitary foodseeker nor as a member of a gregarious flock, but as a being consciously cooperating with other beings of his own kind. Only in cooperation with his fellows could he develop language, the indispensable tool of thinking. We cannot even imagine a reasonable being living in perfect isolation and not cooperating at least with members of his family, clan, or tribe. Man as man is necessarily a social animal. Some sort of cooperation is an essential characteristic of his nature. But awareness of this fact does not justify dealing with social relations as if they were something else than relations or with society as if it were an independent entity outside or above the actions of individual men. Finally there are the misconstructions caused by the organismic metaphor. We may compare society to a biological organism. The tertium comparationis is the fact that division of labor and cooperation exist among the various parts of a biological body as among the various members of society. But the biological evolution that resulted in the emergence of the structurefunction systems of plant and animal bodies was a purely physiological process in which no trace of a conscious activity on the part of the cells can be discovered. On the other hand, human society is an intellectual and spiritual phenomenon. In cooperating with their fellows, individuais do not divest themselves of their individuality. They retain the power to act antisocially, and often make use of it. Its place in the structure of the body is invariably assigned to each cell. But individuais spontaneously choose the way in which they integrate themselves into social cooperation. Men have ideas and seek chosen ends, while the cells and organs of the body lack such autonomy.

I refer, of course, to the theory that Plato in his Symposium puts into the mouth of Aristophanes and which deals not only with the origin of the sexual instinct but also with its most important variations in relation to the object. Human nature was once quite other than now. Originally there were three sexes, three and not as to-day two: besides the male and the female there existed a third sex which had an equal share in the two first . . . . In these beings everything was double: thus, they had four hands and four feet, two faces, two genital parts, and so on. Then Zeus allowed himself to be persuaded to cut these beings in two, as one divides pears to stew them. . . . When all nature was divided in this way, to each human being came the longing for his own other half, and the two halves embraced and entwined their bodies and desired to grow together again.‘36 Are we to follow the clue of the poet-philosopher and make the daring assumption that living substance was at the time of its animation rent into small particles, which since that time strive for reunion by means of the sexual instincts? That these instincts—in which the chemical affinity of inanimate matter is continued—passing through the realm of the protozoa gradually overcome all hindrances set to their striving by an environment charged with stimuli dangerous to life, and are impelled by it to form a protecting covering layer? And that these dispersed fragments of living substance thus achieve a multicellular organisation, and finally transfer to the germ-cells in a highly concentrated form the instinct for reunion? I think this is the point at which to break off.

I refer, of course, to the theory that Plato in his Symposium puts into the mouth of Aristophanes and which deals not only with the origin of the sexual instinct but also with its most important variations in relation to the object. Human nature was once quite other than now. Originally there were three sexes, three and not as to-day two: besides the male and the female there existed a third sex which had an equal share in the two first . . . . In these beings everything was double: thus, they had four hands and four feet, two faces, two genital parts, and so on. Then Zeus allowed himself to be persuaded to cut these beings in two, as one divides pears to stew them. . . . When all nature was divided in this way, to each human being came the longing for his own other half, and the two halves embraced and entwined their bodies and desired to grow together again.‘36 Are we to follow the clue of the poet-philosopher and make the daring assumption that living substance was at the time of its animation rent into small particles, which since that time strive for reunion by means of the sexual instincts? That these instincts—in which the chemical affinity of inanimate matter is continued—passing through the realm of the protozoa gradually overcome all hindrances set to their striving by an environment charged with stimuli dangerous to life, and are impelled by it to form a protecting covering layer? And that these dispersed fragments of living substance thus achieve a multicellular organisation, and finally transfer to the germ-cells in a highly concentrated form the instinct for reunion? I think this is the point at which to break off.

The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions. Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. Science resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Despite the popularity of this view, the DeValoises felt it was only a partial truth. To test their assumption they used Fourier's equations to convert plaid and checkerboard patterns into simple wave forms. Then they tested to see how the brain cells in the visual cortex responded to these new wave-form images. What they found was that the brain cells responded not to the original patterns, but to the Fourier translations of the patterns. Only one conclusion could be drawn. The brain was using Fourier mathematics—the same mathematics holography employed—to convert visual images into the Fourier language of wave forms. 12 The DeValoises' discovery was subsequently confirmed by numerous other laboratories around the world, and although it did not provide absolute proof the brain was a hologram, it supplied enough evidence to convince Pribram his theory was correct. Spurred on by the idea that the visual cortex was responding not to patterns but to the frequencies of various wave forms, he began to reassess the role frequency played in the other senses. It didn't take long for him to realize that the importance of this role had perhaps been overlooked by twentieth-century scientists. Over a century before the DeValoises' discovery, the German physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had shown that the ear was a frequency analyzer. More recent research revealed that our sense of smell seems to be based on what are called osmic frequencies. Bekesy's work had clearly demonstrated that our skin is sensitive to frequencies of vibration, and he even produced some evidence that taste may involve frequency analysis. Interestingly, Bekesy also discovered that the mathematical equations that enabled him to predict how his subjects would respond to various frequencies of vibration were also of the Fourier genre.

Many people experience only the “theory of love” in this world, in which they “know” or “think” they are loved—but do not receive this love in a deeply embodied way. Often we look back on our “perfect” childhoods and cannot fathom where our deep emotional injuries have come from. Our parents love us, they say they love us and we know they love us; they fed and clothed us, worried about us, and took care of us to the best of their abilities. But often, at best, we have only been receiving the theory of love, and at worst we have been on the receiving end of emotional abuse or control, either subtle or overt. Primordial Love means original love, our first love—which extends from the Source of Creation deep into every cell of our being and every quality of our soul. In physical form it is given from a deeply loving heart presence; it is intimate, playful, sensual, sensitive, responsive, feeling, emotionally intelligent, kind, intuitive. When we have not received enough true primordial Love, we resist it and feel overwhelmed and out of control when we receive love—as if it is destroying the safe barrier we have erected around ourselves. Like a bud, we need to trust and open to deeply embodied love; to allow the “sunshine” in to nourish us and bring us back to life again. When we are touched by primordial Love we feel truly seen, felt, and received at a soul level. Our physical bioenergetic and spiritual pathways open to intimate connection with others, with earth, with animals, with All of existence. Primordial Love wires our physical, neural, and soulful pathways to become a living chalice for Love. We become wired to receive love from all sources, physical and nonphysical, and to trust in loving touch. From this embodied place we can truly give love to others and pass the gift of love on, rather than passing forward paradigms of lack, sacrifice, and suffering.

Indeed, it’s a virtue for a scientist to change their mind. The biologist Richard Dawkins recounts his experience of ‘a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford’ who for years had: passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artefact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said – with passion – “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red … In practice, not all scientists would [say that]. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal – unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.25 This is what people mean when they talk about science being ‘self-correcting’. Eventually, even if it takes many years or decades, older, incorrect ideas are overturned by data (or sometimes, as was rather morbidly noted by the physicist Max Planck, by all their stubborn proponents dying and leaving science to the next generation). Again, that’s the theory. In practice, though, the publication system described earlier in this chapter sits awkwardly with the Mertonian Norms, in many ways obstructing the process of self-correction. The specifics of this contradiction – between the competition for grants and clamour for prestigious publications on the one hand, and the open, dispassionate, sceptical appraisal of science on the other – will become increasingly clear as we progress through the book. 25. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Books, 2006): pp. 320–21.

This, in turn, has given us a “unified theory of aging” that brings the various strands of research into a single, coherent tapestry. Scientists now know what aging is. It is the accumulation of errors at the genetic and cellular level. These errors can build up in various ways. For example, metabolism creates free radicals and oxidation, which damage the delicate molecular machinery of our cells, causing them to age; errors can build up in the form of “junk” molecular debris accumulating inside and outside the cells. The buildup of these genetic errors is a by-product of the second law of thermodynamics: total entropy (that is, chaos) always increases. This is why rusting, rotting, decaying, etc., are universal features of life. The second law is inescapable. Everything, from the flowers in the field to our bodies and even the universe itself, is doomed to wither and die. But there is a small but important loophole in the second law that states total entropy always increases. This means that you can actually reduce entropy in one place and reverse aging, as long as you increase entropy somewhere else. So it’s possible to get younger, at the expense of wreaking havoc elsewhere. (This was alluded to in Oscar Wilde’s famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Mr. Gray was mysteriously eternally young. But his secret was the painting of himself that aged horribly. So the total amount of aging still increased.) The principle of entropy can also be seen by looking behind a refrigerator. Inside the refrigerator, entropy decreases as the temperature drops. But to lower the entropy, you have to have a motor, which increases the heat generated behind the refrigerator, increasing the entropy outside the machine. That is why refrigerators are always hot in the back. As Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once said, “There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured.

With the introduction of radio, we now had a superfast. convenient, and wireless way of communicating over long distances. Historically, the lack of a fast and reliable communication system was one of the great obstacles to the march of history. (In 490 BCE, after the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks and the Persians, a poor runner was ordered to spread the news of the Greek victory as fast as he could. Bravely, he ran 26 miles to Athens after previously running 147 miles to Sparta, and then, according to legend, dropped dead of sheer exhaustion. His heroism, in the age before telecommunication, is now celebrated in the modern marathon.) Today, we take for granted that we can send messages and information effortlessly across the globe, utilizing the fact that energy can be transformed in many ways. For example, when speaking on a cell phone, the energy of the sound of your voice converts to mechanical energy in a vibrating diaphragm. The diaphragm is attached to a magnet that relies on the interchangeability of electricity and magnetism to create an electrical impulse, the kind that can be transported and read by a computer. This electrical impulse is then translated into electromagnetic waves that are picked up by a nearby microwave tower. There, the message is amplified and sent across the globe. But Maxwell's equations not only gave us nearly instantaneous communication via radio, cell phone, and fiber-optic cables, they also opened up the entire electromagnetic spectrum, of which visible light and radio were just two members. In the 166os, Newton had shown that white light, when sent through a prism, can be broken up into the colors of the rainbow. In 1800, William Herschel had asked himself a simple question: What lies beyond the colors of the rainbow, which extend from red to violet? He took a prism, which created a rainbow in his lab, and placed a thermometer below the color red, where there was no color at all. Much to his surprise, the temperature of this blank area began to rise. In other words, there was a "color" below red that was invisible to the naked eye but contained energy. It was called infrared light. Today, we realize that there is an entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, most of which is invisible, and each has a distinct wavelength. The wavelength of radio and TV, for example, is longer than that of visible light. The wavelength of the colors of the rainbow, in turn, is longer than that of ultraviolet and X-rays. This also meant that the reality we see all around us is only the tiniest sliver of the complete EM spectrum, the smallest approximation of a much larger universe

Dr. Hobson (with Dr. Robert McCarley) made history by proposing the first serious challenge to Freud’s theory of dreams, called the “activation synthesis theory.” In 1977, they proposed the idea that dreams originate from random neural firings in the brain stem, which travel up to the cortex, which then tries to make sense of these random signals. The key to dreams lies in nodes found in the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, which squirts out special chemicals, called adrenergics, that keep us alert. As we go to sleep, the brain stem activates another system, the cholinergic, which emits chemicals that put us in a dream state. As we dream, cholinergic neurons in the brain stem begin to fire, setting off erratic pulses of electrical energy called PGO (pontine-geniculate-occipital) waves. These waves travel up the brain stem into the visual cortex, stimulating it to create dreams. Cells in the visual cortex begin to resonate hundreds of times per second in an irregular fashion, which is perhaps responsible for the sometimes incoherent nature of dreams. This system also emits chemicals that decouple parts of the brain involved with reason and logic. The lack of checks coming from the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices, along with the brain becoming extremely sensitive to stray thoughts, may account for the bizarre, erratic nature of dreams. Studies have shown that it is possible to enter the cholinergic state without sleep. Dr. Edgar Garcia-Rill of the University of Arkansas claims that meditation, worrying, or being placed in an isolation tank can induce this cholinergic state. Pilots and drivers facing the monotony of a blank windshield for many hours may also enter this state. In his research, he has found that schizophrenics have an unusually large number of cholinergic neurons in their brain stem, which may explain some of their hallucinations. To make his studies more efficient, Dr. Allan Hobson had his subjects put on a special nightcap that can automatically record data during a dream. One sensor connected to the nightcap registers the movements of a person’s head (because head movements usually occur when dreams end). Another sensor measures movements of the eyelids (because REM sleep causes eyelids to move). When his subjects wake up, they immediately record what they dreamed about, and the information from the nightcap is fed into a computer. In this way, Dr. Hobson has accumulated a vast amount of information about dreams. So what is the meaning of dreams? I asked him. He dismisses what he calls the “mystique of fortune-cookie dream interpretation.” He does not see any hidden message from the cosmos in dreams. Instead, he believes that after the PGO waves surge from the brain stem into the cortical areas, the cortex is trying to make sense of these erratic signals and winds up creating a narrative out of them: a dream.

A folded triangle of paper landed in the center of his notebook. Normally he’d unfold it discreetly, but Beamis was so clueless that the note could have hit him in the head and he wouldn’t notice. Loopy script in purple pen. The paper smelled like her. What’s your #? Wow. Hunter clicked his pen and wrote below her words. I have a theory about girls who ask for your number before asking for your name. Then he folded it up and flicked it back. It took every ounce of self-control to not watch her unfold it. The paper landed back on his desk in record time. I have a theory about boys who prefer writing to texting. He put his pen against the paper. I have a theory about girls with theories. Then he waited, not looking, fighting the small smile that wanted to play on his lips. The paper didn’t reappear. After a minute, he sighed and went back to his French essay. When the folded triangle smacked him in the temple, he jumped a mile. His chair scraped the floor, and Beamis paused in his lecture, turning from the board. “Is there a problem?” “No.” Hunter coughed, covering the note with his hand. “Sorry.” When the coast was clear, he unfolded the triangle. It was a new piece of paper. My name is Kate. Kate. Hunter almost said the name out loud. What was wrong with him? It fit her perfectly, though. Short and blunt and somehow indescribably hot. Another piece of paper landed on his notebook, a small strip rolled up tiny. This time, there was only a phone number. Hunter felt like someone had punched him in the stomach and he couldn’t remember how to breathe. Then he pulled out his cell phone and typed under the desk. Come here often? Her response appeared almost immediately. First timer. Beamis was facing the classroom now, so Hunter kept his gaze up until it was safe. When he looked back, Kate had written again. I bet I could strip na**d and this guy wouldn’t even notice. Hunter’s pulse jumped. But this was easier, looking at the phone instead of into her eyes. I would notice. There was a long pause, during which he wondered if he’d said the wrong thing. Then a new text appeared. I have a theory about boys who picture you na**d before sharing their name. He smiled. My name is Hunter. Where you from? This time, her response appeared immediately. Just transferred from St. Mary’s in Annapolis. Now he was imagining her in a little plaid skirt and knee-high socks. Another text appeared. Stop imagining me in the outfit. He grinned. How did you know? You’re a boy. I’m still waiting to hear your theory on piercings. Right. IMO, you have to be crazy hot to pull off either piercings or tattoos. Otherwise you’re just enhancing the ugly. Hunter stared at the phone, wondering if she was hitting on him—or insulting him. Before he could figure it out, another message appeared. What does the tattoo on your arm say? He slid his fingers across the keys. It says “ask me about this tattoo.” Liar. Mission accomplished, I’d say. He heard a small sound from her direction and peeked over. She was still staring at her phone, but she had a smile on her face, like she was trying to stifle a giggle. Mission accomplished, he’d say.

How Aging Stems from Trade-Offs Aging occurs because our body must make a trade-off between reproducing and staying in good repair, according to the author’s “disposable soma” theory. Given a limited supply of energy, the amount that goes to making and protecting sperm and eggs tips the scale away from ensuring that “somatic” cells—skin, bone, muscle, and so on—remain in good condition. As a result, cells accumulate damage over time, which ultimately causes some organ or another to become diseased. If bodily functioning is sufficiently compromised, death ensues.

As religion starts to mix with politics, we have a culture that allows us to fall behind what were previously third world nations, because we are now treating science the way we did sex in the 1950s, banning or burying evolution theories and research into promising lifesaving areas such as stem-cell research.

Ever since about 3.8 billion years ago, when the first cells began quivering in the primordial ooze, Evolution has produced a nonstop parade of inflatable noses, bizarre genitalia, awkward feeding habits, aggressively antisocial tendencies, and mucus. So much mucus.

Thanks to the rapid advances in network theory it appears that we are not far from the next major step: constructing a general theory of complexity. The pressure is enormous. In the twenty-first century, complexity is not a vague science buzzword any longer, but an equally pressing challenge for everything from the economy to cell biology. Yet, most earlier attempts to construct a theory of complexity have overlooked the deep link between it and networks. In most systems, complexity starts where networks turn nontrivial. No matter how puzzled we are by the behavior of an electron or an atom, we rarely call it complex, as quantum mechanics offers us the tools to describe them with remarkable accuracy. The demystification of crystals-highly regular networks of atoms and molecules-is one of the major success stories of twentieth-century physics, resulting in the development of the transistor and the discovery of superconductivity. Yet, we continue to struggle with systems for which the interaction map between the components is less ordered and rigid, hoping to give self-organization a chance.

These findings completely defy the calorie-balance theory of obesity. According to standard advice, the best way to lose weight or avoid weight gain is to cut back on calories. And that’s exactly what we did with the fast-acting carbohydrate group—in essence, we put them on a low-calorie diet. But despite having consumed less food, they had more fat. They also had significantly increased heart disease risk factors. Consistent with the Fat Cell Theory of Obesity figure (see here), the fast-acting carbohydrate increased insulin levels, causing calories to be stored as fat at the expense of the animals’ lean tissues and overall health.

One possible explanation would be that quite randomly the twin with schizophrenia had spontaneously developed mutations in genes in certain cells, for example in the brain. This could happen if the DNA replication machinery had malfunctioned at some point during brain development. These changes might increase his or her susceptibility to a disorder. This is theoretically possible, but scientists have failed to find much data to support this theory.

Exactly the opposite is the case," the biologist will reply. "Everywhere, it is a case of machine operators and not of machine parts, for all the individual cells of the reflex arc act by transfer of stimuli, not by transfer of movement. But a stimulus has to be noticed [gemerkt] by the subject and does not appear at all in objects.

intelligent design is an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins that challenges strictly materialistic views of evolution.

It is hard for anyone who has not given himself wholeheartedly to a belief (and I say again, Miss V., that is how it is: you give yourself to it, it does not fall upon you like sanctifying grace from Heaven) to appreciate how the believer’s conscious mind can separate itself into many compartments containing many, conflicting, dogmas. These are not sealed compartments; they are like the cells of a battery (I think this is how a battery works), over which the electrical charge plays, leaping from one cell to another, gathering force and direction as it goes. You put in the acid of world-historical necessity and the distilled water of pure theory and connect up your points and with a flash and a shudder the patched-together monster of commitment, sutures straining and ape brow clenched, rises in jerky slow motion from Dr. Diabolo’s operating table.

We assume that the vital relations between the organism’s cells and organs are established and maintained by information transmission through signs and not by rigid tissue structures. Since sign processes do not figure in the traditional medical model of the body, not only the doctrine of signs, but also the organizing principle introduced by systems theory will have far-reaching effects on our conceptions of the structure of the body. The traditional model has been developed by anatomists studying corpses. (“Ana-tomy” is derived from the Greek word for “cutting open”, and originally meant dissection.) In this model’s spatial order, bones, joints, muscles, and internal organs are enclosed by the skin as an outer integument. This image neglects that organisms are “autopoietic” – that is, self-constructing and self-maintaining systems (Maturana 1980) in which bones, joints, muscles, internal organs, and the skin enclosing them also participate in the process of autopoiesis. Therefore, as Victor von Weizsacker (1930) has put it, health is not a capital resource which one may exhaust, but exists only so long as it is continually generated. If it ceases to be generated, one is already ill.

when Schaeffer’s group proved irrefutably that the cytoplasm of a tumor cell could initiate and drive cancer, it was impossible to ignore the results.

A single gene for green eyes isn't worth very much unless it's backed up by the dozens or hundreds of genes that specify the structure of the eye itself. Each gene had to work as part of a team, realized Holland. And any theory that didn't take that fact into account was missing a crucial part of the story. Come to think on it, that was also what Hebb had been saying in the mental realm. Hebb's cell assemblies were a bit like genes, in that they were supposed to be the fundamental units of thought. But in isolation the cell assemblies were almost nothing. A tone, a flash of light, a command for a muscle twitch-the only way they could mean anything was to link up into larger concepts and more complex behaviors.

ketone bodies dramatically tilted the ratio of armed glutathione (the antioxidant form) to unarmed glutathione, beefing up the cellular defense of healthy cells as they transitioned to ketone body metabolism.

balanced diet of low-sugar, low-salt whole foods, little or no red meat, possibly fish, and lots of fruits and vegetables, as well as exercise, stimulates the production of neurotransmitters, hormones, and neurotrophic proteins.15 All of the above contribute to good brain chemistry. Exercise especially leads to healthy and even new brain cells that rid themselves of toxins and communicate well with each other. As a result of exercise and good nutrition, we become inoculated against stress, feel energized, and stay younger, healthier, and more focused. While in this context I can only hint at mind-body fitness, it is surely part of the foundation of our well-being.

One of the latest theories of aging—and my favorite—is presented by my friend and colleague David Sinclair in Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To. The information theory of aging proposes that we age and become more susceptible to diseases because our cells lose information. DNA stores information digitally, but the cells have an analog format that can modulate the function of genes in the sequence of the DNA.

There appears to be significant research indicating a dramatic drop in inflammation, improvements in insulin signaling, and a near total “reset” of immune function with fasts of 3–5 days. Abnormal and or pre-cancerous cells appear to be pushed towards apoptosis, which essentially selects for healthy cell types. In total this describes a process which should (in theory) reverse many of the signs and symptoms of aging while reducing the processes that appear to be at play in autoimmunity and cancer.

yourselves properly.” The tall guy smiled. “What can I do for you?” “You can call someone for me. Sergeant Leach at the 110th. Tell her where I am. She might have a message for me. If she does, you can come and tell me what it is.” “You want me to feed your dog and pick up your dry cleaning, too?” “I don’t have dry cleaning. Or a dog. But you can call Major Sullivan, at JAG, if you like. She’s my lawyer. Tell her I want to see her, here, by the close of business today. Tell her I need a client conference. Tell her it’s extremely important.” “That it?” “No. Next you can call Captain Edmonds, at HRC. She’s my other lawyer. Tell her I want to see her right after Major Sullivan. Tell her I have urgent things to discuss.” “Anything else?” “How many customers do you have today?” “Just you and one other.” “Which would be Major Turner, right?” “Correct.” “Is she nearby?” “This is the only cell block we got.” “She needs to know her lawyer is out of action. She needs to get another one. You need to go see her and make sure she does.” “That’s a weird thing for you to say.” “What happened to Moorcroft was nothing to do with me. You’ll know that soon enough. And the best way of getting the egg off your face is not to get it on in the first place.” “Still a weird thing for you to say. Who died and made you president of the ACLU?” “I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. So did you. Major Turner is entitled to competent representation at all times. That’s the theory. And a gap will look bad, when the appeals kick in. So tell her she needs to meet with someone new. As soon as possible. This afternoon would be good. Make sure she grasps that.” “Anything else?” “We’re all good now,” Reacher said. “Thank you, captain.” “You’re welcome,” the tall

As hospitals in New York City filled up with acutely sick patients, a new conspiracy theory was hatched on social media. Lunatics claimed that the hospitals were actually empty, and they stalked the entrances and parking lots with their cell phone cameras to come up with “proof.” Look, they said, there aren’t many cars in the parking lot! Dr. Bray, at Elmhurst, heard this shit secondhand. “They think the hospital is empty,” she said, positively stunned. Bray wondered: Where are they getting this stuff? The answer, in part, was Fox. The network often mainstreamed ideas from the far right fringe, and that’s exactly what Fox News contributor Sara Carter did on March 29, during a segment on a Sunday night talk show. “You can see it on Twitter,” she said. “People are saying, ‘Film your hospital,’ people are driving by their hospitals and they’re not seeing—in the ones that I’m seeing—they’re not seeing anybody in the parking lots. They’re not seeing anybody drive up. So, people are wondering what’s going inside the hospital.” Bray’s reaction: She wished her hospital was empty. “This is worse than war,” she said. In Geneva, the head of the World Health Organization said countries like the U.S. were in the eye of the Covid-19 storm. In Washington, Dr. Anthony Fauci went on TV and warned Americans to brace for 100,000-plus deaths from the coronavirus. He said millions could be infected. But the president had something else on his mind. He tweeted that his ratings were “so high.” This was the Fox News presidency in action. Here’s how it happened.

As hospitals in New York City filled up with acutely sick patients, a new conspiracy theory was hatched on social media. Lunatics claimed that the hospitals were actually empty, and they stalked the entrances and parking lots with their cell phone cameras to come up with “proof.” Look, they said, there aren’t many cars in the parking lot! Dr. Bray, at Elmhurst, heard this shit secondhand. “They think the hospital is empty,” she said, positively stunned. Bray wondered: Where are they getting this stuff? The answer, in part, was Fox. The network often mainstreamed ideas from the far right fringe, and that’s exactly what Fox News contributor Sara Carter did on March 29, during a segment on a Sunday night talk show.

As hospitals in New York City filled up with acutely sick patients, a new conspiracy theory was hatched on social media. Lunatics claimed that the hospitals were actually empty, and they stalked the entrances and parking lots with their cell phone cameras to come up with “proof.” Look, they said, there aren’t many cars in the parking lot! Dr. Bray, at Elmhurst, heard this shit secondhand. “They think the hospital is empty,” she said, positively stunned. Bray wondered: Where are they getting this stuff? The answer, in part, was Fox. The network often mainstreamed ideas from the far right fringe, and that’s exactly what Fox News contributor Sara Carter did on March 29, during a segment on a Sunday night talk show. “You can see it on Twitter,” she said. “People are saying, ‘Film your hospital,’ people are driving by their hospitals and they’re not seeing—in the ones that I’m seeing—they’re not seeing anybody in the parking lots. They’re not seeing anybody drive up. So, people are wondering what’s going inside the hospital.” Bray’s reaction: She wished her hospital was empty. “This is worse than war,” she said. In

Orgone is the name given by Wilhelm Reich to a vital energy found on the earth. It is also called the Fifth Element. Wilhelm Reich was a psychoanalyst, a protégé of Freud, practicing in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. Wilhelm Reich's discovery of orgone began with his research of a physical bio-energy basis for Sigmund Freud's theories of neurosis in humans. Wilhelm Reich believed that traumatic experiences blocked the natural flow of life-energy in the body, leading to physical and mental disease. Wilhelm Reich concluded that the libidinal-energy that Freud discussed was the primordial-energy of life itself, connected to more than just sexuality. Orgone was everywhere and Reich measured this energy-in-motion over the surface of the earth. He even determined that its motion affected weather formation. Reich also studied the effects of the fascist society he lived in on individuals' emotional processing, and worked to promote more freedom. On November 3, 1957, Wilhelm Reich died in his jail cell of a heart failure.

Sometimes, the superstitions show the mysterious and specific ways to search, investigate, and realize the negative and positive results. I do not dig into the detail of the subject; however, in short, to define the concerns that I felt and feel yet. As criminals sell the drugs, to cause the health problems to innocent people; similarly, such criminals can adapt the various directions, to damage the humanity since many of us suffer from prostate and other cancer, which one may never consider that it is a natural consequence. One can always think that it became a victim of the criminals, who succeeded to victimize others. During the discussion with one of the urologists, whom I am under treatment, I expressed my concerns, referring to the examples as the Japanese scientist Minoru Shirota, created the mixture of skimmed milk with bacterium Lactobacillus casei Shirota, as Yakult, which develops health; conversely, one may prepare the beads of Helicobacter pylori, as homeopathy medicine that can cause cancer bacteria. The scientists should investigate such a matter, which is natural and unnatural since the world is under the criminals, and the evil-minded people, who can adopt such ways. It may seem as, an illusion; however, it can be the reality? Is it possible that criminals and spy agencies can pass on and transmit the cancerous cells in any form, to their opponents or cancerous medical manufacturers can involve, for selling and financial benefits upon the human sufferings? As far as one can realize, yes, it is possible, according to an illusion theory that, I have stated above insight of this passage. However, further study, investigation, and research should be on its way, for the concrete and significant outcome of that since the money-mongers can adopt all routes for their greediness and criminal motives, with the calibration of medical professionals.

It seems to be characteristic of the human mind that when it sees a black box in action, it imagines that the contents of the box are simple. A happy example is seen in the comic strip <>. Calvin is always jumping in a box with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, and travelling back in time, or <> himself into animal shapes, or using it as a <> and making clones of him-self. A little boy like Calvin easily imagines that a box can fly like an airplane (or something), because Calvin doesn't know how airplanes work. In some ways, grown-up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys like Calvin. For example, centuries ago it was thought that insects and other small animals arose directly fom spoiled food. This was easy to believe, because small animals were thought to be very simple (before the invention of the microscope, naturalists thought that insects had no internal organs). But as biology progressed and careful experiments showed that protected food did not breed life, the theory of spontaneous generation retreated to the limits beyond which science detect what was really happening. (...) The key to persuading people was the portrayal of the cells as <>. One of the chief advocates of the spontaneous generation during the middle of the nineteenth century was Ernst Haeckel, a great admirer of Darwin and an eager popularizer of Darwin's theory. From the limited view of cells that microscope provided, Haeckel believed that a cell was a <> not much different from a piece of microscopic Jell-O. So it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life, with no internal organs, could be produced easily from inanimate material. Now, of course, we know better.

It seems to be characteristic of the human mind that when it sees a black box in action, it imagines that the contents of the box are simple. A happy example is seen in the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes". Calvin is always jumping in a box with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, and travelling back in time, or "transmogrifying" himself into animal shapes, or using it as a "duplicator" and making clones of him-self. A little boy like Calvin easily imagines that a box can fly like an airplane (or something), because Calvin doesn't know how airplanes work. In some ways, grown-up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys like Calvin. For example, centuries ago it was thought that insects and other small animals arose directly fom spoiled food. This was easy to believe, because small animals were thought to be very simple (before the invention of the microscope, naturalists thought that insects had no internal organs). But as biology progressed and careful experiments showed that protected food did not breed life, the theory of spontaneous generation retreated to the limits beyond which science detect what was really happening. (...) The key to persuading people was the portrayal of the cells as "simple". One of the chief advocates of the spontaneous generation during the middle of the nineteenth century was Ernst Haeckel, a great admirer of Darwin and an eager popularizer of Darwin's theory. From the limited view of cells that microscope provided, Haeckel believed that a cell was a "simple lump of albuminous combination of carbon" not much different from a piece of microscopic Jell-O. So it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life, with no internal organs, could be produced easily from inanimate material. Now, of course, we know better.

Call ME a Nigga: I utter these words as a political battle cry for the Black, damned, and forsaken— that is, for the staggeringly high percentage of poor black boys and men languishing in Gail cells, for those selling drugs, gangbanging, or otherwise scrambling for survival and self-respect. I say it because we have a fundamental divide that needs bridging. This divide is cultural fact as well as a social fact. It is an economic divide crossed by moral judgement. It is the divide between the haves and the have-nots, but it is also, for many, seen as a divide between the morally upstanding and the morally corrupt.

To expand on the above list, I think the most powerful strategy out there to avoid or treat cancer is to starve your cancer cells by depriving them of their only food source – sugar. Normal cells in your body can adapt to different energy sources, allowing them to use both carbs and fat for fuel. Cancer cells, on the other hand, do not express that metabolic flexibility and are only able to use sugar as an energy source. A man by the name of Dr. Otto Warburg was actually given the Nobel Prize in Physiology for this discovery over 75 years ago, and still virtually no oncologist actually uses this information! He discovered that cancer cells have a fundamentally different energy metabolism compared to healthy cells. He called his theory the “Warburg Effect,” which occurs in up to 80 percent of cancers.

The atavistic theory proposes that cancer is a reversion to an evolutionarily earlier format, the unicellular cell. Cancer already exists buried deep into every cell of every multicellular animal. This basic blueprint is already assembled, needing only to be uncovered. This atavism is essentially a backward, not a forward, evolution. It is a return to an earlier surviving version. This plausibly explains how every cancer in history develops independently but still looks the same.

What explains their advantage? Contrary to one popular theory, it’s not a high red-blood-cell count. Compared with Caucasians, Sherpas actually have fewer red blood cells per liter of blood. Nor is the difference explained by diet, acclimatization, metabolism, iron-deficiency, or environmental factors. At sea level, Sherpas have such a low red-blood-cell count that they are technically anemic, but, curiously, they don’t show symptoms. Overall, Sherpas require as much oxygen as anybody else, but they have less of it dissolved in their blood. Scientists initially found this puzzling. Red blood cells ferry oxygen around the body, and other populations well adapted to altitude, such as the Quechua and the Aymara of the Andean highlands, have veins teeming with red blood cells. How do Sherpas manage with less at a much higher altitude than the Andes? Probably by circulating blood faster. Sherpas have wider blood vessels. They breathe more often when at rest, providing their blood with more oxygen to absorb, and they exhale more nitric oxide, a marker of efficient lung circulation. There is also a genetic explanation. Sherpas’ red-blood-cell count stays low because of Hypoxia Inducible Factor 2-alpha, a gene that regulates response to low oxygen and turns on other genes. In addition, Sherpas have inherited a dominant genetic trait that improves hemoglobin saturation, allowing their red blood cells to soak up more oxygen. Sherpas’ thin blood, in turn, may prevent the sort of clotting that crippled Art Gilkey on K2. This genetic advantage only enhances the Sherpa mystique. Lowlanders clutching the Lonely Planet guide are convinced they want to hire “a sherpa,” even if they don’t know what a Sherpa is, and, after three generations of gathering tourist dollars, Sherpas now rank among the richest and most visible of Nepal’s fifty or so ethnicities. They didn’t start out that way.

at the National Institute on Aging. He has devoted much of his life to studying the brain and the effects of cutting caloric intake by fasting up to several days a week.25 In laboratory experiments, Professor Mattson and his colleagues have found that intermittent fasting, which in his definition means limiting caloric intake at least two days a week, can help improve neural connections in the hippocampus while protecting neurons against the accumulation of those dangerous amyloid plaques.26 According to his theory, fasting challenges the brain, forcing it to react by activating adaptive stress responses that help it cope with disease. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. One thing we know is that when fasting is done correctly, it can increase the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein I defined earlier that helps protect and strengthen neural connections while also spurring new growth of brain cells. Physical exertion and cognitive

The leap from maps to fluid flow seemed so great that even those most responsible sometimes felt it was like a dream. How nature could tie such complexity to such simplicity was far from obvious. "You have to regard it as a kind of miracle, not like the usual connection between theory and experiment," Jerry Gollub said. Within a few years, the miracle was being repeated again and again in a vast bestiary of laboratory systems: bigger fluid cells with water and mercury, electronic oscillators, lasers, even chemical reactions. Theorists adapted Feigenbaum's techiniques and found other mathematical routes to chaos, cousins of period-doubling: such patterns as intermittency and quasiperiodicity. These, too, proved universal in theory and experiment.

In the age of computer simulation, when flows in everything from jet turbines to heart valves are modeled on supercomputers, it is hard to remember how easily nature can confound an experimenter. In fact, no computer today can completely simulate even so simple a system as Libchaber's liquid helium cell. Whenever a good physicist examines a simulation, he must wonder what bit of reality was left out, what potential surprise was sidestepped. Libchaber liked to say that he would not want to fly in a simulated airplane-he would wonder what had been missed. Furthermore, he would say that computer simulations help to build intuition or to refine calculations, but they do not give birth to genuine discovery. This, at any rate, is the experimenter's creed. His experiment was so immaculate, his scientific goals so abstract, that there were still physicists who considered Libchaber's work more philosophy or mathematics than physics. He believed, in turn, that the ruling standards of his field were reductionist, giving primacy to the properties of atoms. "A physicist would ask me, How does this atom come here and stick there? And what is the sensitivity to the surface? And can you write the Hamiltonian of the system? "And if I tell him, I don't care, what interests me is this shape, the mathematics of the shape and the evolution, the bifurcation from this shape to that shape to this shape, he will tell me, that's not physics, you are doing mathematics. Even today he will tell me that. Then what can I say? Yes, of course, I am doing mathematics. But it is relevant to what is around us. That is nature, too." The patterns he found were indeed abstract. They were mathematical. They said nothing about the properties of liquid helium or copper or about the behavior of atoms near absolute zero. But they were the patterns that Libchaber's mystical forbears had dreamed of. They made legitimate a realm of experimentation in which many scientists, from chemists to electrical engineers, soon became explorers, seeking out the new elements of motion. The patterns were there to see the first time eh succeeded in raising the temperature enough to isolate the first period-doubling, and the next, and the next. According to the new theory, the bifurcations should have produced a geometry with precise scaling, and that was just what Libchaber saw, the universal Feigenbaum constants turning in that instant from a mathematical ideal to a physical reality, measurable and reproducible. He remembered the feeling long afterward, the eerie witnessing of one bifurcation after another and then the realization that he was seeing an infinite cascade, rich with structure. It was, as he said, amusing.

A biologist is at first glance perhaps an unlikely source for a new theory of the universe. But at a time when biologists believe they have discovered the “universal cell” in the form of embryonic stem cells, and some cosmologists predict that a unifying theory of the universe may be discovered in the next two decades, it is perhaps inevitable that a biologist finally seeks to unify existing theories of the “physical world” with those of the “living world.

Can the trees and flowers which we see all around us at all times have themselves formed such perfect systems as to bring about a phenomenon such as photosynthesis, some parts of which are still not fully understood, in their own bodies? Did plants choose to use carbon dioxide (CO2), of the gases in the air, to produce food? Did they themselves determine the amount of CO2 they would use? Could plants have designed those mechanisms which make up the root system and which enable them to take the materials necessary for photosynthesis from the soil? Did plants bring about a transport system where different types of tubes are used for transporting nutrients and water? As ever, defenders of the theory of evolution searching for an answer 16 The solar energy trapped by the chlorophyll in the leaf, carbon-dioxide in the air, and water in the plant go through various processes and are used to produce glucose and oxygen. These complex processes do not take place in a factory, but in special structures like those in the leaf in the picture, and which measure only one thousandth of a millimeter across. Sunlight Chlorophyll Glucose 6H2O Water Light Chlorophyll Carbon dioxide + Water Glucose + Oxygen 6CO2 Carbon dioxide 6O2 Oxygen C6 H12O 6 to the question of how plants emerged have resorted to "chance" as their only re m e d y. They have claimed that from one species of plant which came about by chance, an infinite variety of plants have emerged, again by chance, and that features such as smell, taste, and colour, particular to each species, again came about by chance. But they have been unable to give any scientific proof of these claims. Evolutionists explain moss turning into a strawberry plant, or a poplar, or a rose bush, by saying that conditions brought about by chance differentiated them. Whereas when just one plant cell is observed, a system so complex will be seen as could not have come about by minute changes over time. This complex system and other mechanisms in plants definitively disprove the coincidence scenarios put forward as evolutionist logic. In this situation just one result emerges.

But will she not see that her meter sticks are contracted when laid out in the [direction of motion] - and even decontract when turned in the [other] direction? No, because the retina of her eye will also be contracted, so that just the same cells receive the image of the meter stick as if both stick and observer were at rest.

While Crick (and his co-workers) cracked the genetic code—a set of instructions, in general terms, for building a body—Edelman realized early that the genetic code could not specify or control the fate of every single cell in the body, that cellular development, especially in the nervous system, was subject to all sorts of contingencies—nerve cells could die, could migrate (Edelman spoke of such migrants as “gypsies”), could connect up with each other in unpredictable ways—so that even by the time of birth the fine neural circuitry is quite different even in the brains of identical twins; they are already different individuals who respond to experience in individual ways. Darwin, studying the morphology of barnacles a century before Crick or Edelman, observed that no two barnacles of the same species were ever exactly the same; biological populations consisted not of identical replicas but of different and distinct individuals. It was upon such a population of variants that natural selection could act, preserving some lineages for posterity, condemning others to extinction (Edelman liked to call natural selection “a huge death machine”). Edelman conceived, almost from the start of his career, that processes analogous to natural selection might be crucial for individual organisms—especially higher animals—in the course of their lives, with life experiences serving to strengthen certain neuronal connections or constellations in the nervous system and to weaken or extinguish others.4 Edelman thought of the basic unit of selection and change as being not a single neuron but groups of fifty to a thousand interconnected neurons; thus he called his hypothesis the theory of neuronal group selection. He saw his own work as the completion of Darwin’s task, adding selection at a cellular level within the life span of a single individual to that of natural selection over many generations. Clearly

One consistent feature stood out: The samples all displayed a striking depletion of white blood cells within the lymph nodes and bone marrow, precisely the tissues that become packed with the feverishly dividing cells of lymphoma patients. Two Yale pharmacologists, Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman, who had contracted to study the therapeutic effects of nitrogen mustard, made the connection. In a burst of imagination they entertained the possibility that the war gas possessed a dual nature, that it was a strange Jekyll-and-Hyde compound that could exist both on the battlefield and within a physician’s clinic.

Johnson’s theory is that the fructose in sugar increases uric acid production, which switches susceptible humans into hibernation mode, producing hyperphagia (overeating due to increased hunger), IR, and elevated blood glucose, insulin and triglyceride concentrations, leading to fat accumulation in the liver and fat cells.