Ecology And Evolution Quotes

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong

A little hypocrisy and a little compromise oils the wheels of social life

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.

If the soul wants to know God, it cannot do so in time. For so long as the soul is conscious of time or space or any other [object], it cannot know God.

We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in. The man who believes that the resources of the world are infinite, for example, or that if something is good for you then the more of it the better, will not be able to see his errors, because he will not look for evidence of them. For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception - his epistemological premises - he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be. Sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions.

A biomarker of evolution, melanin is the color of life.

A sense of being part of the great all-inclusive life prompts us to reflect on our own place and on how we ought to live. Guarding others' lives, the ecology and the earth is the same as protecting one's own life. By like token, wounding them is the same thing as wounding oneself. Consequently, it is the duty of each of us to participate as members of the life community in the evolution of the universe. We can do this by guarding earth's ecological system.

In other words, this world is not a sin; forgetting that “this world” is the radiance and Goodness of Spirit—there is the sin.

The evolution revolution is here. Global sense makes common sense.

We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory.

MichaelTobias Evolution does not condemn us. Only our choices can do that. It is imperative that we cherish, nurture, and endeavor to protect all life forms. That is the wake-up call of this generation. No environmentalist can be true to him/herself if they inflict pain on other creatures. Vegetarian ethics is basic to the last ecological frontier.

the Many returning to and embracing the One is Good, and is known as wisdom; the One returning to and embracing the Many is Goodness, and is known as compassion.

Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts.

And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself.

It isn’t the world at stake, Ender. Just us. Just humankind. As far as the rest of the earth is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust, it would get on with the next step in evolution. But humanity doesn’t want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive.

The predisposition to religious belief is an ineradicable part of human behavior. Mankind has produced 100,000 religions. It is an illusion to think that scientific humanism and learning will dispel religious belief. Men would rather believe than know... A kind of Darwinistic survival of the fittest has occurred with religions... The ecological principle called Gause's law holds that competition is maximal between species with identical needs... Even submission to secular religions such as Communism and guru cults involve willing subordination of the individual to the group. Religious practices confer biological advantage. The mechanisms of religion include (1) objectification (the reduction of reality to images and definitions that are easily understood and cannot be refuted), (2) commitment through faith (a kind of tribalism enacted through self-surrender), (3) and myth (the narratives that explain the tribe's favored position on the earth, often incorporating supernatural forces struggling for control, apocalypse, and millennium).

From the Hive Manual. The relationship between ecology and evolution is extremely close, deeply implicated in organic changes among a given animal population, and profoundly sensitive to the density of numbers within a given habitat. Our adaptations aim to increase the population tolerance, to permit a human density ten to twelve times greater than is currently considered possible. Out of this, we will get our survival variations.

It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.

The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus.

I see no real evolution in media ecology beyond the “shape shifting” nature that seems to have been deliberately embedded in its fabric. The one thing that must, I think, always define a study we recognize as media ecological is its acknowledgement of the interactions of cultures – and the people who constitute those cultures – and their technologies.

The postmodern poststructuralists go from saying “there is no final perspective” (or “perspectives are boundless”) to saying “therefore there is no advantage in any perspective over another.” This leveling of perspectives is not an interrelation of all perspectives but is itself merely one particular and covertly privileged perspective (and thus ends up, as we have seen, being perfectly self-contradictory: there is no advantaged perspective except mine, which maintains that all other perspectives are not so privileged).

There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key.

Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.

In a fascinating study, Barrett (1999) demonstrated that children as young as three years of age have a sophisticated cognitive understanding of predator-prey encounters. Children from both an industrialized culture and a traditional hunter-horticulturalist culture were able to spontaneously describe the flow of events in a predator-prey encounter in an ecologically accurate way. Moreover, they understood that after a lion kills a prey, the prey is no longer alive, can no longer eat, and can no longer run and that the dead state is permanent. This sophisticated understanding of death from encounters with predators appears to be developed by age three to four.

There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The

Compared to forest or aquatic ecosystems, grassland is unstable. It requires rather precise geological and climatic conditions, and if these conditions are not maintained--if too much rain falls, or too little--it quickly turns into forest or desert, both of which are dominated by woody plants. This instability is reflected in the spectacular but brief careers of various grassland faunas. Humanity, with its dazzling symbioses, preadaptations, and neoteny, is the most spectacular of these--and may well be the briefest.

We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory

A sharp drop in global temperature 115 thousand years before the fall was the start of sporadic ice ages. The last glacial spell Earthers experienced ended only 12.5 TBF.

the hand of death touches every love that the Descenders profess for all and sundry, tears also streaming down the face with “compassion” written all over it.

Stephen Jay Gould has told us that evolution is geared not toward progressive “fitness” but toward simply filling available ecological niches.

To claim the world as created is to claim God's care for it and our responsibility to care for it.

The great leap was one from adaptation to, to control over the natural environment.

As we have seen before, cities are like mad scientists, creating their own crazy ecological concoctions by throwing all kinds of native and foreign elements into the urban melting pot.

These new people had something special: they were not prisoners of their ecological niche, but could change their habits quite easily if prey disappeared, or better opportunities arose.

The planet’s witnessing the appearance of a new creature now, ones that have already conquered all continents and almost every ecological niche. They travel in packs and are anemophilous, covering large distances without difficulty. Now I see them from the window of the bus, these airborne anemones, whole packs of them, roaming the desert. Individual specimens cling on tight to brittle little desert plants, fluttering noisily-perhaps this is the way they communicate. The experts say these plastic bags open up a whole new chapter of earthly existence, breaking nature’s age-old habits. They’re made up of their surfaces exclusively, empty on the inside, and this historic forgoing of all content unexpectedly affords them great evolutionary benefits.

Roszak argued that modern psychology has split the inner life from the outer life, and that we have repressed our “ecological unconscious” that provides “our connection to our evolution on earth.

Everything in that frame is judged in terms of the human, as if we are outside the ecological matrix in which we are embedded, as if evolution ended once and for all with our emergence, with the development of our brains.

First we have to step out of our dream of separation, the insularity with which we have imprisoned ourselves, and acknowledge that we are a part of a multidimensional living spiritual being we call the world. The world is much more than just the physical world we perceive through the senses, just as we are much more than just our own physical bodies. Only as a part of a living whole can we help to heal the whole. Just as we need to work together with the outer ecosystem, we need to work together with the inner worlds. We need their support and help, their power and knowledge. The devas understand the patterns of climate change better than we do, because they are the forces behind the weather and the winds. Just as plant devas know the healing powers of plants (and taught the shamans and healers their knowledge), so are there more powerful devas that know and guide the patterns of evolution of the whole planet.

. . . Neither ecological nor social engineering will lead us to a conflict-free, simple path . . . Utilitarians and others who simply advise us to be happy are unhelpful, because we almost always have to make a choice either between different kinds of happiness--different things to be happy _about_--or between these and other things we want, which nothing to do with happiness. . . . Do we find ourselves a species naturally free from conflict? We do not. There has not, apparently, been in our evolution a kind of rationalization which might seem a possible solution to problems of conflict--namely, a takeover by some major motive, such as the desire for future pleasure, which would automatically rule out all competing desires. Instead, what has developed is our intelligence. And this in some ways makes matters worse, since it shows us many desirable things that we would not otherwise have thought of, as well as the quite sufficient number we knew about for a start. In compensation, however, it does help us to arbitrate. Rules and principles, standards and ideals emerge as part of a priority system by which we guide ourselves through the jungle. They never make the job easy--desires that we put low on our priority system do not merely vanish--but they make it possible. And it is in working out these concepts more fully, in trying to extend their usefulness, that moral philosophy begins. Were there no conflict, it [moral philosophy] could never have arisen. The motivation of living creatures does got boil down to any single basic force, not even an 'instinct of self-preservation.' It is a complex pattern of separate elements, balanced roughly in the constitution of the species, but always liable to need adjusting. Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means to survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural. . . An obsessive creature dominated constantly by one kind of motive, would not survive. All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like. The traditional business of moral philosophy is attempting to understand, clarify, relate, and harmonize so far as possible the claims arising from different sides of our nature. . . . One motive does not necessarily replace another smoothly and unremarked. There is _ambivalence_, conflict behavior.

The sleeping style of each organism is exquisitely adapted to the ecology of the animal. It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quiet on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep.

it’s human behavior, human social behavior, and in many cases abnormal human social behavior. And it is indeed a mess, a subject involving brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things.

As we said, Zen masters talk about Emptiness all the time! But they have a practice and a methodology (zazen) which allows them to discover the transcendental referent via their own developmental signified, and thus their words (the signifiers) remain grounded in experiential, reproducible, fallibilist criteria.

Few ideas in all of human history have been more thoroughly misunderstood than the simple concept of evolution. Intellectuals in Victorian England, eager to use the science of their time to bolster a class system already cracking under the weight of its own injustice, invented the notion that some living things- and thus some people- are "more evolved" than others. That turn of phrase is still much used today, but in the real world, it is quite simple nonsense. Every living being is just as evolved as every other, because every living thing has been shaped by evolution over the exact same period of time since life first evolved

The case I’ve presented in this book suggests that humans are undergoing what biologists call a major transition. Such transitions occur when less complex forms of life combine in some way to give rise to more complex forms. Examples include the transition from independently replicating molecules to replicating packages called chromosomes or, the transition from different kinds of simple cells to more complex cells in which these once-distinct simple cell types came to perform critical functions and become entirely mutually interdependent, such as the nucleus and mitochondria in our own cells. Our species’ dependence on cumulative culture for survival, on living in cooperative groups, on alloparenting and a division of labor and information, and on our communicative repertoires mean that humans have begun to satisfy all the requirements for a major biological transition. Thus, we are literally the beginnings of a new kind of animal.1 By contrast, the wrong way to understand humans is to think that we are just a really smart, though somewhat less hairy, chimpanzee. This view is surprisingly common. Understanding how this major transition is occurring alters how we think about the origins of our species, about the reasons for our immense ecological success, and about the uniqueness of our place in nature. The insights generated alter our understandings of intelligence, faith, innovation, intergroup competition, cooperation, institutions, rituals, and the psychological differences between populations. Recognizing that we are a cultural species means that, even in the short run (when genes don’t have enough time to change), institutions, technologies, and languages are coevolving with psychological biases, cognitive abilities, emotional responses, and preferences. In the longer run, genes are evolving to adapt to these culturally constructed worlds, and this has been, and is now, the primary driver of human genetic evolution. Figure 17.1.

She is soft, but knows when to stand her ground. Natural disasters aren't a mistake. They're not just a big ol' whoopsy that happened when Mother Nature and Source were planning their calendars out. Mother nature is intentional. Everything about her is intentional. Every rainfall, is intentional. Every sunny day, is intentional. Every storm, is intentional and every natural disaster is intentional. She will roar when she needs, when she needs us to take a closer look. That's what natural disasters are. She won't rob us of our opportunity to rise up together- that's our evolution and she's not gonna do our dirty (epic) work for us. But she will nudge us. And she does nudge us. Do you notice? If we don't do our best to take care of global warming, the tides will rise and beach side cities will be wiped. Perhaps our kids or our kids' kids won't ever see the glaciers of today. She's not gonna cover up for us, but she will love us on our journey and gives us clues and signs. It's up to us to pay attention.

When we love a person, we love all that belongs to him; we extend to the children the affection we feel for the parent. Now every Soul is a daughter of the [Godhead]. How can this world be separated from the spiritual world? Those who despise what is so nearly akin to the spiritual world, prove that they know nothing of the spiritual world, except in name. .

It marshals a vast amount of scientific evidence, from physics to biology, and offers extensive arguments, all geared to objectively proving the holistic nature of the universe. It fails to see that if we take a bunch of egos with atomistic concepts and teach them that the universe is holistic, all we will actually get is a bunch of egos with holistic concepts. Precisely because this monological approach, with its unskillful interpretation of an otherwise genuine intuition, ignores or neglects the “I” and the “we” dimensions, it doesn’t understand very well the exact nature of the inner transformations that are necessary in the first place in order to be able to find an identity that embraces the manifest All. Talk about the All as much as we want, nothing fundamentally changes.

But life is fragile. Earth’s occasional encounters with large, wayward comets and asteroids, a formerly common event, wreaks intermittent havoc upon our ecosystem. A mere sixty-five million years ago (less than two percent of Earth’s past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated more than seventy percent of Earth’s flora and fauna—including all the famous outsized dinosaurs. Extinction. This ecological catastrophe enabled our mammal ancestors to fill freshly vacant niches, rather than continue to serve as hors d’oeuvres for T. rex. One big-brained branch of these mammals, that which we call primates, evolved a genus and species (Homo sapiens) with sufficient intelligence to invent methods and tools of science—and to deduce the origin and evolution of the universe.

Within Darwin’s argument for mate choice in Descent was another revolutionary idea: that animals are not merely subject to the extrinsic forces of ecological competition, predation, climate, geography, and so on that create natural selection. Rather, animals can play a distinct and vital role in their own evolution through their sexual and social choices. Whenever the opportunity evolves to enact sexual preferences through mate choice, a new and distinctively aesthetic evolutionary phenomenon occurs.

A huge shift in consciousness is underway in our time. A sea change from the “I and it” marketplace conception of the world to an “I and thou” sense of communal identity. Joanna Macy describes it as a “Great Turning” an ecological revolution widening our awareness of the intricate web that connects us. Teilhard de Chardin called it an evolution of consciousness, an emergence of the “planetization” of humankind. We have to think now like a planet, not like separate individuals. We need a “psyche the size of the earth,” James Hillman says, “the greater part of the souls lies outside the body.

Cultures and religions exist, and are explained, to the extent that they reliably express stucturally enduring relationships among mental states and behaviors and where these material relationships enable a given population of individuals to maintain itself in repeated social interaction within a range of ecological contexts. Cultures and religions are not ontologically distinct “superorganisms” or “independent variables” with precise contents or boundaries. They are no more things in and of themselves, or “natural kinds” with their own special laws, than are cloud or sand patterns. Although

The earlier Aryan invaders of the Gangetic Plain presided over feasts of cattle, horses, goats, buffalo, and sheep. By later Vedic and early Hindu times, during the first millenium B.C., the feasts came to be managed by the priestly caste of Brahmans, who erected rituals of sacrifice around the killing of animals and distributed the meat in the name of the Aryan chiefs and war lords. After 600 B.C., when populations grew denser and domestic animals became proportionately scarcer, the eating of meat was progressively restricted until it became a monopoly of the Brahmans and their sponsors. Ordinary people struggled to conserve enough livestock to meet their own desperate requirements for milk, dung used as fuel, and transport. During this period of crisis, reformist religions arose, most prominently Buddhism and Jainism, that attempted to abolish castes and hereditary priesthoods and to outlaw the killing of animals. The masses embraced the new sects, and in the end their powerful support reclassified the cow into a sacred animal. So it appears that some of the most baffling of religious practices in history might have an ancestry passing in a straight line back to the ancient carnivorous habits of humankind. Cultural anthropologists like to stress that the evolution of religion proceeds down multiple, branching pathways. But these pathways are not infinite in number; they may not even be very numerous. It is even possible that with a more secure knowledge of human nature and ecology, the pathways can be enumerated and the directions of religious evolution in individual cultures explained with a high level of confidence.

Whole Earth Discipline carries on something that began in 1968, when I founded the Whole Earth Catalog. I stayed with the Catalog as editor and publisher until 1984, adding a magazine called CoEvolution Quarterly along the way. The Whole Earth publications were compendia of environmentalist tools and skills (along with much else) and explicitly purveyed a biological way of understanding. Peter Warshall wrote and reviewed about watersheds, soil, and ecology. Richard Nilsen and Rosemary Menninger covered organic farming and community gardens. J. Baldwin was an impeccable source on “appropriate technology”—solar, wind, insulation, bicycles. Lloyd Kahn wrote about handmade houses. We promoted bioregionalism, restoration, and “reinhabitation” of one’s natural environment. There’s now an insightful book about all that by Andrew Kirk—Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (2007).

But while the evolutionary escalator is an incredibly common expression of a belief in human exceptionalism, it doesn’t have any real basis in ecological reality. The view is one Darwin specifically rejected, which makes it all the more ironic that it is the neo-Darwinians that have spread it about so much. Darwin’s own perspective, as the English philosopher Mary Midgley comments, is much different, he did . . . not see evolution as an escalator, but as a sinuous, branching radiating pattern—not a staircase, but perhaps a bush or seaweed. Life-forms diverge from each other to meet particular needs in their various environments. Our own species figures then only as one among the many, with no special status or guarantee of supremacy. This notion has, however, always been found far less exciting than the escalator model, which has been enormously popular ever since it was promoted by Herbert Spencer, in spite of Darwin’s own rejection of it and its evident complete irrelevance to this theory.13

We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the beauteous forms of things.” Our bodies and minds, our “Science and Art,” are as natural and wild as they ever were.

If farming was “the biggest mistake in human history,” which triggered lots of evolutionary mismatch diseases, then why did it spread so rapidly and thoroughly? The biggest reason is that farmers pump out babies much faster than hunter-gatherers. In today’s economy, a higher reproductive rate often entails ominous connotations of expense: more mouths to feed, more college tuition bills to pay. Too many children can be a source of poverty. But to farmers, more offspring yield more wealth because children are a useful, fantastic labor force. After a few years of care, a farmer’s children can work in the fields and in the home, helping to take care of crops, herd animals, mind younger children, and process food. In fact, a large part of the success of farming is that farmers breed their own labor force more effectively than hunter-gatherers, which pumps energy back into the system, driving up fertility rates.20 Farming therefore leads to exponential population growth, causing farming to spread. Another factor that encouraged the spread of agriculture is the way farmers alter the ecology around their farms in ways that hinder if not prevent any more hunting and gathering. Occasionally

So many synapses,' Drisana said. 'Ten trillion synapses in the cortex alone.' Danlo made a fist and asked, 'What do the synapses look like?' 'They're modelled as points of light. Ten trillion points of light.' She didn't explain how neurotransmitters diffuse across the synapses, causing the individual neurons to fire. Danlo knew nothing of chemistry or electricity. Instead, she tried to give him some idea of how the heaume's computer stored and imprinted language. 'The computer remembers the synapse configuration of other brains, brains that hold a particular language. This memory is a simulation of that language. And then in your brain, Danlo, select synapses are excited directly and strengthened. The computer speeds up the synapses' natural evolution.' Danlo tapped the bridge of his nose; his eyes were dark and intent upon a certain sequence of thought. 'The synapses are not allowed to grow naturally, yes?' 'Certainly not. Otherwise imprinting would be impossible.' 'And the synapse configuration – this is really the learning, the essence of another's mind, yes?' 'Yes, Danlo.' 'And not just the learning – isn't this so? You imply that anything in the mind of another could be imprinted in my mind?' 'Almost anything.' 'What about dreams? Could dreams be imprinted?' 'Certainly.' 'And nightmares?' Drisana squeezed his hand and reassured him. 'No one would imprint a nightmare into another.' 'But it is possible, yes?' Drisana nodded her head. 'And the emotions ... the fears or loneliness or rage?' 'Those things, too. Some imprimaturs – certainly they're the dregs of the City – some do such things.' Danlo let his breath out slowly. 'Then how can I know what is real and what is unreal? Is it possible to imprint false memories? Things or events that never happened? Insanity? Could I remember ice as hot or see red as blue? If someone else looked at the world through shaida eyes, would I be infected with this way of seeing things?' Drisana wrung her hands together, sighed, and looked helplessly at Old Father. 'Oh ho, the boy is difficult, and his questions cut like a sarsara!' Old Father stood up and painfully limped over to Danlo. Both his eyes were open, and he spoke clearly. 'All ideas are infectious, Danlo. Most things learned early in life, we do not choose to learn. Ah, and much that comes later. So, it's so: the two wisdoms. The first wisdom: as best we can, we must choose what to put into our brains. And the second wisdom: the healthy brain creates its own ecology; the vital thoughts and ideas eventually drive out the stupid, the malignant and the parasitical.

Sure. When a behavior occurs, we behavioral biologists ask, “Why did that behavior just happen?” And it turns out that that’s like asking a whole bunch of questions. Part of what we’re asking is, “What occurred in the brain of that individual one second ago?” But we’re also asking, “What were the sensory cues in the environment a minute ago that triggered those neurons?” And we’re also asking, “What did that person’s hormone levels this morning have to do with making him more or less sensitive to those sensory cues that then triggered those neurons?” And then you’re off and running to neuroplasticity—over the course of months, back to childhood, and back to the fetal environment (which turns out to be wildly influential in adult behavior). And then you’re back to genes. If you’re still asking, “Why did that behavior occur?” you’re also asking, “What sort of culture was this person raised in?” Which often winds up meaning, “What were this person’s ancestors doing a couple of hundred years ago, and what were the ecological influences on that?” And finally, you’re asking something about the millions of years of evolutionary pressures. So it’s not just the case that it’s important to look at these things at multiple levels. Ultimately they merge into the same. If you’re talking about the brain, you’re talking about the childhood experiences when the brain was assembled. If you’re talking about genes, you’re implicitly talking about their evolution. All of these are a confluence of influences on behavior that are all interconnected.

The conditions for the evolution of cooperation tell what is necessary, but do not, by themselves, tell what strategies will be most successful. For this question, the tournament approach has offered striking evidence in favor of the robust success of the simplest of all discriminating strategies: TIT FOR TAT. By cooperating on the first move, and then doing whatever the other player did on the previous move, TIT FOR TAT managed to do well with a wide variety of more or less sophisticated decision rules. It not only won the first round of the Computer Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament when facing entries submitted by professional game theorists, but it also won the second round which included over sixty entries designed by people who were able to take the results of the first round into account. It was also the winner in five of the six major variants of the second round (and second in the sixth variant). And most impressive, its success was not based only upon its ability to do well with strategies which scored poorly for themselves. This was shown by an ecological analysis of hypothetical future rounds of the tournament. In this simulation of hundreds of rounds of the tournament, TIT FOR TAT again was the most successful rule, indicating that it can do well with good and bad rules alike. TIT FOR TAT’s robust success is due to being nice, provocable, forgiving, and clear. Its niceness means that it is never the first to defect, and this property prevents it from getting into unnecessary trouble. Its retaliation discourages the other side from persisting whenever defection is tried. Its forgiveness helps restore mutual cooperation. And its clarity makes its behavioral pattern easy to recognize; and once recognized, it is easy to perceive that the best way of dealing with TIT FOR TAT is to cooperate with it.

Quoting from page 308: The Competitive Exclusion Principle. No two organisms that compete in every activity can coexist indefinitely in the same environment. To coexist in time, organisms that are potentially completely competitive must be geographically isolated from each other. Otherwise, the one that is the less efficient yields to the more efficient, no matter how slight the difference. When two competing organisms coexist in the same geographical region, close examination always shows that they are not complete competitors, that one of them draws on a resource of the environment that is not available to the other. The corollary of the principle is that where there is no geographical isolation of genetically and reproductively isolated populations, there must be as many ecological niches as there are populations. The necessary condition for geographical coexistence is ecological specialization. Quoting page 86: The Exclusion Principle in biology plays a role similar to that of the Newtonian laws of motion in physics. It is a prime guide to the discovery of facts. We use the principle coupled with an axiom that is equally fundamental but which is almost never explicitly stated. We may call this the Inequality Axiom, and it states: If two populations are distinguishable, they are competitively unequal. Quoting page 87: Because of the compound-interest effect, no difference between competing populations is trivial. The slightest difference--and our acceptance of the Inequality Axiom asserts that a difference always exists--will result in the eventual extinction of one population by another. Put in another way, the Exclusion Principle tells us that two distinguishable populations can coexist in the same geographical region only if they live in different ecological worlds (thus avoiding complete competition and strict coexistence). Quoting page 88-89: Recall now the sequence of development in the process of speciation. Initially, the freshly isolated populations are nearly the same genetically; as time goes on, they diverge more and more. When they are distinguishably different, but still capable of interbreeding (if put together), we may speak of them as races. Ultimately, if the physical isolation endures long enough, they become so different from each other that interbreeding is impossible; we then say that the two populations are reproductively isolated from each other, and we speak of them as distinct species. ... What are the various possible outcomes of the speciation process, and what their relative frequencies? In the light of our assumption, it is clear that, most often, the speciation process will go no further than the formation of races before the physical isolation comes to an end and the germ plasm of the two races is melded into one by interbreeding. If, however, the speciation process continues until separate species are formed before the physical barrier breaks down, then what happens? The outcome is plainly dependent on the extent to which ecological differentiation has occurred: Do the two species occupy the same ecological niche, or not--that is, are they completely competitive? It seems probable that the degree of ecological differentiation will also increase with time spent in physical isolation. On this assumption, we would predict that, more often than not, "sister species" will be incapable of coexistence: when the physical isolation is at an end, one sister species will extinguish the other. Quoting page 253: The example illustrates the general rule that as a species becomes increasingly "successful," its struggle for existence ceases to be one of struggle with the physical environment or with other species and come to be almost exclusively competition with its own kind. We call that species most successful that has made its own kind its worst enemy. Man enjoys this kind of success.

The wonder of evolution is that it works at all. I mean that literally: If you want to marvel at evolution, that’s what’s marvel-worthy. How does optimization first arise in the universe? If an intelligent agent designed Nature, who designed the intelligent agent? Where is the first design that has no designer? The puzzle is not how the first stage of the bootstrap can be super-clever and super-efficient; the puzzle is how it can happen at all. Evolution resolves the infinite regression, not by being super-clever and super-efficient, but by being stupid and inefficient and working anyway. This is the marvel. For professional reasons, I often have to discuss the slowness, randomness, and blindness of evolution. Afterward someone says: “You just said that evolution can’t plan simultaneous changes, and that evolution is very inefficient because mutations are random. Isn’t that what the creationists say? That you couldn’t assemble a watch by randomly shaking the parts in a box?” But the reply to creationists is not that you can assemble a watch by shaking the parts in a box. The reply is that this is not how evolution works. If you think that evolution does work by whirlwinds assembling 747s, then the creationists have successfully misrepresented biology to you; they’ve sold the strawman. The real answer is that complex machinery evolves either incrementally, or by adapting previous complex machinery used for a new purpose. Squirrels jump from treetop to treetop using just their muscles, but the length they can jump depends to some extent on the aerodynamics of their bodies. So now there are flying squirrels, so aerodynamic they can glide short distances. If birds were wiped out, the descendants of flying squirrels might reoccupy that ecological niche in ten million years, gliding membranes transformed into wings. And the creationists would say, “What good is half a wing? You’d just fall down and splat. How could squirrelbirds possibly have evolved incrementally?

I do not believe that we have finished evolving. And by that, I do not mean that we will continue to make ever more sophisticated machines and intelligent computers, even as we unlock our genetic code and use our biotechnologies to reshape the human form as we once bred new strains of cattle and sheep. We have placed much too great a faith in our technology. Although we will always reach out to new technologies, as our hands naturally do toward pebbles and shells by the seashore, the idea that the technologies of our civilized life have put an end to our biological evolution—that “Man” is a finished product—is almost certainly wrong. It seems to be just the opposite. In the 10,000 years since our ancestors settled down to farm the land, in the few thousand years in which they built great civilizations, the pressures of this new way of life have caused human evolution to actually accelerate. The rate at which genes are being positively selected to engender in us new features and forms has increased as much as a hundredfold. Two genes linked to brain size are rapidly evolving. Perhaps others will change the way our brain interconnects with itself, thus changing the way we think, act, and feel. What other natural forces work transformations deep inside us? Humanity keeps discovering whole new worlds. Without, in only five centuries, we have gone from thinking that the earth formed the center of the universe to gazing through our telescopes and identifying countless new galaxies in an unimaginably vast cosmos of which we are only the tiniest speck. Within, the first scientists to peer through microscopes felt shocked to behold bacteria swarming through our blood and other tissues. They later saw viruses infecting those bacteria in entire ecologies of life living inside life. We do not know all there is to know about life. We have not yet marveled deeply enough at life’s essential miracle. How, we should ask ourselves, do the seemingly soulless elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, zinc, iron, and all the others organize themselves into a fully conscious human being? How does matter manage to move itself? Could it be that an indwelling consciousness makes up the stuff of all things? Could this consciousness somehow animate the whole grand ecology of evolution, from the forming of the first stars to the creation of human beings who look out at the universe’s glittering constellations in wonder? Could consciousness somehow embrace itself, folding back on itself, in a new and natural technology of the soul? If it could, this would give new meaning to Nietzsche’s insight that: “The highest art is self–creation.” Could we, really, shape our own evolution with the full force of our consciousness, even as we might exert our will to reach out and mold a lump of clay into a graceful sculpture? What is consciousness, really? What does it mean to be human?

The playful nip denotes the bite, but it doesn’t denote what would be denoted by the bite.

Earlier in this chapter we noted that a wide range of birds and mammals, including humans, express such behavior in varying ecological contexts. This core complex of intimate emotional connection then, in humans, may rise to the next level: cognitive empathy-an active seeking to understand the other's mental state-and ultimately to "attribution," which is the most complex state of assumption of another's mentality of the moment, modeling it within one's own consciousness. In this section and through the rest of this book we will see that the dawning of the fractal self in the human condition extends the Russian doll to a new outermost entity-namely, a prosocial awareness, pregnant with expansive conscious potential of human beings to empathize across scale through our affinitive worlds of culture and nature. However, the process is full of setbacks, in all societies and on many scales.

We have forgotten our natural ability to live together, including with our fellow nonhumans, because we have lost the sacred collective touchstone that anchors us to the fundamental truth that our lives emerge, grow, and thrive from the same great forces and processes that drive the evolution of the universe.

There are several types of comparative analysis for garnering evidence for an evolutionary adaptation: structural or behavioral resemblance in different phyletic lines owing to ecologically driven functional convergence (analogy), functional transformations from the same ancestral character (homology), functional tradeoffs between traits in the same phyletic line, intrageneric or intrafamilial species comparisons, and ontogenetic development. Analogy (homoplasy) reveals adaptation in similar traits that solve similar environmental problems in phylogenetically unrelated species, for example, the wings of bats and birds and flying insects, the eyes of humans and the octopus, and bipedality in therapods (carnivorous dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus) and humans. Homologies

It took me more than a decade to work my way through the landscape. I owe my liberation from it to the work of geographer David Lowenthal and social critic Marshall McLuhan. Their writing convinced me that the world-as-picture was, on one hand, geared to the superficiality of taste and, on the other, an outcome of a Renaissance mathematical perspective that tended to separate rather than join. Walter Ong's essay "The World as View and the World as Event" convinced me that this distinction between the visual and the tactile was more than ideological. The landscape was an inadequate nexus. It was only a twist in the idea of the co-option of the earth. Indeed, such ideas depended as much on unconscious perception as on intellectual or artistic formulations. I began to feel that something still more biogenic, yet common to humankind, which yet might take partic­ular social or aesthetic expression, held the key to an adequate human ecology. “Over the next decade I read anthropology and child psychology. During that time a meeting of anthropologists took place in Chicago that resulted in the publication of Man the Hunter. I began to think that the appropriate model for human society in its earth habitat may have existed for several million years. If Claude Levi-Strauss were to be believed, nothing had been gained by the onset of civilization except technical mastery, while what had been lost or distorted was a way of interpreting in which nature was an unlimited but essential poetic and intellectual instrument in the achieve­ment of human self-consciousness, both in evolution and in every genera­ tion and individual human life. I knew such an idea would be ridiculed as a throwback to the discredited figure of the noble savage, but when it was considered in light of Erik Erikson's concept of individual development as an identity-shaping sequence I found it irresistible.

Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share,” he explains in another one. “I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.” Stamets sounded very much like the volunteers I met at Hopkins who had had full-blown mystical experiences, people whose sense of themselves as individuals had been subsumed into a larger whole—a form of “unitive consciousness,” which, in Stamets’s case, had folded him into the web of nature, as its not so humble servant. “I think Psilocybes have given me new insights that may allow me to help steer and speed fungal evolution so that we can find solutions to our problems.” Especially in a time of ecological crisis, he suggests, we can’t afford to wait for evolution, unfolding at its normal pace, to put forth these solutions in time. Let the depatterning begin. As

Which they never faced and the people were given duties to protect the only planet as far as now were given money, love, and everything they needed. Ultimate creator who is actual god said to these protection people that remember one thing universe created all, that is it, visitors are from another planet and these dark people are actual owners of this planet and as universe is one, this people should not affected at all, then adam tale and No - One god was born, and those people were secret enough to cover their faces but it is not necessary at all because they don't have secrets to protect. And then history happened, wars for money, rule, slavery everything happened and as these things were going completely inhuman, man made law was to be produced. Then boundaries segragated born countries. But before these visitors visited this planet, whatever was in this planet was very beautiful and these dark people moved across continents as continents shifted by natural process and whatever they were doing before these visitors was completely natural just like animals mating on outdoors, deer runs before tiger, kill or getting killed ecology and evolution. But after these visitors these dark people learned how to do things properly with proper knowledge but because high attitude and enslaving nature of these visitors, these people went against it and again wars, instability and all. the protection people always remembered three things law, business, love and family. The god was to come to find out the truth but when he came, everything was almost settled. And god has decided not to end here for recreation and it is not needed as far as now, but he decided to go after who were sent by visitors (i.e - Visitors from another planet that came to this planet as greedy nature), because god once gave a word to these visitors when they were in their planet that, i have to go after your clan that been sent to search other possible creations beyond my limits and is there another god or creator or universe. But these visitors said whomever been sent were never returned but god told them I will go after them by any means and wherever you will establish, stablish peace. That's all

Atoms, elements and molecules are three important knowledge in Physics, chemistry and Biology. mathematics comes where counting starts, when counting and measurement started, integers were required. Stephen hawking says integers were created by god and everything else is work of man. Man sees pattern in everything and they are searched and applied to other sciences for engineering, management and application problems. Physics, it is required understand the physical nature or meaning of why it happens, chemistry is for chemical nature, Biology is for that why it happened. Biology touch medicine, plants and animals. In medicine how these atoms, elements and molecules interplay with each other by bondage is being explained. Human emotions and responses are because of biochemistry, hormones i e anatomy and physiology. This physiology deals with each and every organs and their functions. When this atom in elements are disturbed whatever they made i e macromolecules DNA, RNA and Protein and other micro and macro nutrients and which affects the physiology of different organs on different scales and then diseases are born because of this imbalance/ disturb in homeostasis. There many technical words are there which are hard to explain in single para. But let me get into short, these atoms in elements and molecules made interplay because of ecological stimulus i e so called god. and when opposite sex meets it triggers various responses on body of each. It is also harmone and they are acting because of atoms inside elements and continuous generation or degenerations of cell cycle. There is a god cell called totipotent stem cell, less gods are pluripotent, multi potent and noni potent stem cells. So finally each and every organ system including brain cells are affected because of interplay of atoms inside elements and their bondages in making complex molecules, which are ruled by ecological stimulus i e god. So everything is basically biology and medicine even for animals, plants and microbes and other life forms. process differs in each living organisms. The biggest mystery is Brain and DNA. Brain has lots of unexplained phenomenon and even dreams are not completely understood by science that is where spiritualism/ soul touches. DNA is long molecule which has many applications as genetic engineering. genomics, personal medicine, DNA as tool for data storage, DNA in panspermia theory and many more. So everything happens to women and men and other sexes are because of Biology, Medicine and ecology. In ecology every organisms are inter connected and inter dependent. Now physics - it touch all technical aspects but it needs mathematics and statistics to lay foundation for why and how it happened and later chemistry, biology also included inside physics. Mathematics gave raise to computers and which is for fast calculation on any applications in any sciences. As physiological imbalances lead to diseases and disorders, genetic mutations, again old concept evolution was retaken to understand how new biology evolves. For evolution and disease mechanisms, epidemiology and statistics was required and statistics was as a data tool considered in all sciences now a days. Ultimate science is to break the atoms to see what is inside- CERN, but it creates lots of mysterious unanswerable questions. laws in physics were discovered and invented with mathematics to understand the universe from atoms. Theory of everything is a long search and have no answers. While searching inside atoms, so many hypothesis like worm holes and time travel born but not yet invented as far as my knowledge. atom is universe, and humans are universe they have everything that universe has. ecology is god that affects humans and climate. In business these computerized AI applications are trying to figure out human emotions by their mechanism of writing, reading, texting, posting on social media and bla bla. Arts is trying to figure out human emotions in art way.

My personal note about love - There is no true love as far as my knowledge only attachments and vibrations that keep two souls and bodies for sometime and then they sperate. Somehow if they are trapped what is so called as social bondage i e Marriage, then they have responsibilities, children to make and nurture them. But world needs human resources so marriage is needed but here the concept of marriage in south and north. concept of marriage in south india is different than concept of marriage in north india where manu smiriti is written and rajputs (My previous life clans) dominates. Bhramin concept of marriage is totally unique. so when you love someone within your culture it becomes strong family bondage that is hard to break but that affects organization you work, if you inter marry concept of trust may break anytime, that is why north rajputs follow the concept of vibrations in love but that is not suitable in south india. And because of sexual activities it affects the society and ecology. So finally for my personal choice which is true true true love is almost impossible anywhere even within same culture or inter culture because both have their own pros and cons and trust issues, that is why i choose to be single but if I marry then I will keep my marrital relationship out of context or out of my organization or institution where i am going to. Sex is primary desire for men and women and also for theird genders. In western concept sex has gone into multiple varieties even incest nature. It is now difficult to classify which one is right and which one is wrong becaus they context specific and completely personal but problem is where legality is touching. So my personal choice is if getting married whatever community the girl is from I will keep it out of my research institutional context but most probably i will not marry as I am not sure about immorality and where immorality comes into touch and it may get against the meaning of what is ganapathy. Ganapathy should never be immoral nor his wife. so i will most probably be single and friendly to anyone, any sex, any nationality but i will keep recording each every aspect of science and where immorality comes to. And when i choose to die, I will write all about science and immorality and spirtulism and souls desire. Prostituion or porn industry can never be avoided completely nor should be avoided as it researches about human emotions. they are track records of human evolution. But I see these prostitutes and porn industry as a tool for finding where immorality comes forward. And inside research institutions whereever I am going to I will keep observing everything that goes in science. Traditional and modern science both i will keep on observing for sure. So finally if i marry somehow whomever it is, the girl should be out of my research working context or completely same mind set. And My marriage should not ruin the name of Ganapathy so they girl i choose will be very specific that can not ruin my names reputation at any cost. the girl i touch should be fire that fires other guys if they desire for her and she fires other girls that try to reach me

Ontology as the ground of ethics was the original tenet of philosophy. Their divorce, which is the divorce of the "objective" and "subjective" realms, is the modern destiny. Their reunion can be effected, if at all, only from the "objective" end, that is to say, through a revision of the idea of nature. And it is becoming rather than abiding nature which would hold out any such promise. From the immanent direction of its total evolution there may be elicited a destination of man by whose terms the person, in the act of fulfilling himself, would at the same time realize a concern of universal substance. Hence would result a principle of ethics which is ultimately grounded neither in the autonomy of the self nor in the needs of the community, but in an objective assignment by the nature of things.

Not in Emptiness, but as Emptiness, I am released from the fate of a never-ending addition of parts, and I stand free as the Source and Suchness of the glorious display. I taste the sky and swallow whole the Kosmos, and nothing is added to me; I disappear in a million forms and nothing is subtracted; I rise as the sun to greet my own day, and nothing moves at all.

Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity John Gribbin, Random House (2005) F.F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader Frank Partnoy, Penguin Books (1999) Ice Age John & Mary Gribbin, Barnes & Noble (2002) How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It Arthur Herman, Three Rivers Press (2002) Models of My Life Herbert A. Simon The MIT Press (1996) A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals About the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and Universe Gino Segre, Viking Books (2002) Andrew Carnegie Joseph Frazier Wall, Oxford University Press (1970) Guns Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Jared M. Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal Jared Nt[. Diamond, Perennial (1992) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Robert B. Cialdini, Perennial Currents (1998) The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Benjamin franklin, Yale Nota Bene (2003) Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos Garrett Hardin, Oxford University Press (1995) The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press (1990) Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. Ron Chernow, Vintage (2004) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor David Sandes, W. W Norton & Company (1998) The Warren Buffett Portfolio: Mastering the Power of the Focus Investment Strategist Robert G. Hagstrom, Wiley (2000) Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters Matt Ridley, Harper Collins Publishers (2000) Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giz.ting In Roger Fisher, William, and Bruce Patton, Penguin Books Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information Robert Wright, Harper Collins Publishers (1989) Only the Paranoid Survive Andy Grove, Currency (1996 And a few from your editor... Les Schwab: Pride in Performance Les Schwab, Pacific Northwest Books (1986) Men and Rubber: The Story of Business Harvey S. Firestone, Kessinger Publishing (2003) Men to Match My Mountains: The Opening of the Far West, 1840-1900 Irving Stone, Book Sales (2001)

As David Hull writes, “officially we are all supposed to value interdisciplinary research, but in reality just about every feature of academia frustrates genuinely interdisciplinary work. Those of us who are engaged in it are the last hired and the first fired.”24

Rate independence is a general property of information,” explains Howard Pattee.

Interdisciplinary research is risky business. It entails importing technical concepts from many specialized fields and then tying them together, often metaphorically. Settling on the right level of detail is tricky. How much molecular biology is necessary to make a point? How much is sufficient to satisfy relevant experts that I have done my homework? A psychologist might be put off by more molecular biology than is needed, while a molecular biologist might be put off by omission of the nuances of the field. In this, the book can be at once too scholarly for some and not scholarly enough for others. This challenge is baked into all interdisciplinary research, and the more interdisciplinary the research, the more prominent the challenge.

There is a continual turnover of theories as they are altered or replaced by new ones. So all the theories are being subjected to variation and selection, according to criteria which are themselves subject to variation and selection. The whole process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche. Variants of theories, like genetic mutations, are continually being created, and less successful variants become extinct when more successful variants take over. ‘Success’ is the ability to survive repeatedly under the selective pressures – criticism – brought to bear in that niche, and the criteria for that criticism depend partly on the physical characteristics of the niche and partly on the attributes of other genes and species (i.e. other ideas) that are already present there.

The belief in the sanctity of one’s idiosyncrasy—especially if it be a group idiosyncrasy, and therefore sustained and intensified by mutual flattery—is rapidly converted into a belief in its superiority. More

The “Higher Self” camp is notoriously immune to social concerns. Everything that happens to one is said to be “one’s own choice”—the hyper-agentic Higher Self is responsible for everything that happens—this is the monological and totally disengaged Ego gone horribly amok in omnipotent self-only fantasies. This simply represses the networks of communions that are just as important as agency in constituting the manifestation of Spirit. This is not Eros; this is Phobos—a withdrawal from social engagement and intersubjective action. All of this totally overlooks the fact that Spirit manifests not only as Self (I) but as intersubjective Community (We) and as an objective State of Affairs (It)—as Buddha, Sangha, Dharma—each inseparably interwoven with the others and interwoven in the Good and the Goodness of the All.

Thus, he says, those who would “eliminate from the universe” what they think of as “inferior beings” would simply “eliminate Providence itself,” whose nature it is to “produce all things and to diversify all in the manner of their existence.

that which one can deviate from is not the true Tao.

In understandably wishing to increase freedom and liberty, it paradoxically left massive road kill everywhere on the highway to rational heaven.

Suppose that, through legislation (an artificial means) and through a government-run school voucher program (an artificially created market), public schools are privatized. "Natural evolution" will then take place: Schools will have to compete, only the best competitors will survive, and those schools that cannot compete will cease to exist. The surviving schools, by the Folk Theory of the Best Result, will be the best schools. It is an argument entirely based on two metaphors and a folk theory, all of which derive from Strict Father morality. Many people do not notice that Evolution Is Survival Of The Best Competitor is, indeed, a metaphor, much less a Strict Father metaphor. One way to reveal its metaphorical character is to contrast it with a metaphor for evolution that takes the perspective of Nurturant Parent morality: Evolution Is The Survival Of The Best Nurtured. Here "best nurtured" is taken to include both literal nurturing by parents and others and metaphorical nurturing by nature itself. Where fitting an ecological niche is being metaphorized as winning a competition in one case, it is metaphorized as being cared for by nature in the other. Both are metaphors for evolution, but they have very different entailments, especially when combined with the metaphor Natural Change Is Evolution and the folk theory that evolution yields the best result. Putting these together yields a very different composite metaphor for natural change, namely, Natural Change Is The Survival Of The Best Nurtured, which produces the best result. Applied to the issue of whether public schools should be privatized, this metaphor would entail that they should not be. Rather, public schools need to be "better nurtured," that is, given the resources they need to improve: better-trained and better-paid teachers, smaller classes, better facilities, programs for involving parents, community involvement, and so on.

Subspecialty : Botany Studies : plants Subspecialty : Zoology Studies : animals Subspecialty : Marine biology Studies : organisms living in and around oceans, and seas Subspecialty : Fresh water biology Studies : organisms living in and around freshwater lakes, streams, rivers, ponds, etc. Subspecialty : Microbiology Studies : microorganisms Subspecialty : Bacteriology Studies : bacteria Subspecialty : Virology Studies : viruses ( see Figure below ) Subspecialty : Entomology Studies : insects Subspecialty : Taxonomy Studies : the classification of organisms Subspecialty : Studies : Life Science : Cell biology What it Examines : cells and their structures (see Figure below ) Life Science : Anatomy What it Examines : the structures of animals Life Science : Morphology What it Examines : the form and structure of living organisms Life Science : Physiology What it Examines : the physical and chemical functions of tissues and organs Life Science : Immunology What it Examines : the mechanisms inside organisms that protect them from disease and infection Life Science : Neuroscience What it Examines : the nervous system Life Science : Developmental biology and embryology What it Examines : the growth and development of plants and animals Life Science : Genetics What it Examines : the genetic make up of all living organisms (heredity) Life Science : Biochemistry What it Examines : the chemistry of living organisms Life Science : Molecular biology What it Examines : biology at the molecular level Life Science : Epidemiology What it Examines : how diseases arise and spread Life Science : What it Examines : Life Science : Ecology What it Examines : how various organisms interact with their environments Life Science : Biogeography What it Examines : the distribution of living organisms (see Figure below ) Life Science : Population biology What it Examines : the biodiversity, evolution, and environmental biology of populations of organisms Life Science : What it Examines :

In this regard, the pure Ego or pure Self is virtually identical with what the Hindus call Atman (or the pure Witness that itself is never witnessed—is never an object—but contains all objects in itself).

Oppression as a causal explanation is deficient and inadequate in almost every respect, since, among other things, it simply does not fit the data curve. “These oppression theories,” says Chafetz, “are based on vaguely defined concepts often ill suited to operationalization, such as ‘patriarchy,’ ‘female subordination,’ and ‘sexism.’ The use of such emotion-laden but unclear terms, combined typically with a heavily normative approach to the topic of sex inequality, results in a maximum of rhetoric but a minimum of clear insight.” No, this polarization of the sexes—with males dominating the public/productive sphere and females dominating the private/reproductive, to the detriment of both—has virtually nothing to do with male oppression and female sheepdom/subjugation. It has everything to do with life in the biosphere.

The noosphere, not the biosphere, would determine rights and responsibilities. And these rights were not previously repressed, they were previously meaningless (they were not oppressed, they had simply not yet emerged).

We are part of the natural world and evolved within its embrace. This understanding is perhaps as ancient as humanity itself. Giving children the gift of knowing nature as their home, of feeling themselves as part of the web of life is an invaluable life resource for exploring their inner self and for developing their ability to act in this world and on its behalf. It is perhaps our culture’s break with nature, the viewing of our planet as nothing more than a collection of things to be exploited and discarded, that has brought us to this time of crisis. And perhaps more than anything else, this time of turmoil and transformation calls for a rediscovery of humanity’s place within the earth community. This revisioning of our relationship with life on earth, rooted in indigenous wisdom and shaped for contemporary times, is perhaps the cornerstone of the human initiation and evolution being called for today. For children to discover their place within the natural world, to grow their connection with it, has everything to do with their ability to remain grounded in turbulent times, everything to do with their being able to grow their vision and play their part in this upcoming transition.

Friends (at least good ones) like one another, enjoy one another’s company, and maintain mutual goodwill. They help one another in times of need, listen to one another’s problems, make sacrifices, and provide emotional support when necessary. They share confidences and can be trusted not to divulge important secrets. Their relationship is personal and private, and it does not answer to a higher authority. They engage in constructive conflict management, and they try to resolve differences among themselves. Friends should not go to court to resolve a dispute. Ideally, friends do not care what they get out of the relationship but value the friendship for its own sake. They are honest with one another, feel free to express themselves to one another, but do not pass judgment. Finally, unlike partners in kin or work relations, one can choose one’s friends.

If we see the biologically differentiated roles of men and women as something imposed by men on women, then we to simultaneously assume the complete pigification of and the total sheepification of women. To automatically assume that differentiation of roles is the result of domination is to automatically define a particular group as victim, which automatically and irrevocably disempowers that group in the very attempt to liberate it.

Mutual Aid. Studies of friendship in Western contexts consistently find that people see friends as people they can trust to offer help, to care for them, to look out for their interests, and to make sacrifices in times of need.23 Of all the qualities of friendship considered here, mutual aid is also the most frequently cited behavior in cross-cultural descriptions of friendship (described in 93 percent of societies and never disconfirmed).

one of the first steps toward an integral postmodernity is the development and establishment of a genuine environmental ethics, or a moral and ethical stance to nonhuman holons.

even as it surreptitiously dipped into that dimension for its own hidden judgments, judgments which it forcefully and vehemently made and then flat-out denied making. “Empirical knowledge alone is true knowledge”—and where is the empirical proof for that?

Our basic understanding of evolutionary theory (how evolution works) in the early twenty-first century may be summed up as follows:   1. Mutation introduces genetic variation, which may introduce phenotypic variation. 2. Developmental processes can introduce broader phenotypic variation, which may be heritable. 3. Gene flow and genetic drift mix genetic variation (and potentially its phenotypic correlates) without regard to the function of those genes or traits. 4. Natural selection shapes genotypic and phenotypic variation in response to specific constraints and pressures in the environment. 5. At any given time one or more of the processes above can be affecting a population. 6. Dynamic organism-environment interaction can result in niche construction, changing pressures of natural selection and resulting in ecological inheritance. 7. Cultural patterns and contexts can impact gene flow and the pressures of natural selection, which in turn can affect genetic evolution (gene-culture coevolution). 8. Multiple inheritance systems (genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic) can all provide information and contexts that enable populations to change over time or avoid certain changes.

Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The

starting with the Renaissance and running through the Enlightenment, there occurred what we might call “the great reversal.” Suddenly, very suddenly, the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in—and the transition was bloody, arguably the bloodiest cognitive transformation in European history.

Collaboration and Competition. We must re-educate and improve awareness of the falsehoods erected around Darwinism and increase the recognition that evolution and ecology are a dynamic balance of competitive and mutually supportive linkages.

We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages. Only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain. That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.