Zitat des Tages von Lynn Margulis:
People think the earth is going to die and they have to save it. That's ridiculous. If you rid the earth of flowering plants, people would die, period. But the earth was without flowering plants for almost all of its history.
My work more than didn't fit in. It crossed willy-nilly the boundaries that people had spent their lives building up. It hits some 30 subfields of biology, even geology.
All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.
Life learned early on to recognize itself.
People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous.
Life on earth is such a good story you cannot afford to miss the beginning... Beneath our superficial differences we are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.
Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly.
Body concentrates order. It continuously self-repairs. Every five days you get a new stomach lining. You get a new liver every two months. Your skin replaces itself every six weeks. Every year, 98 percent of the atoms of your body are replaced. This non-stop chemical replacement, metabolism, is a sure sign of life.
Politicians need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are 'chosen', the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous.
All living beings, not just animals, but plants and microorganisms, perceive. To survive, an organic being must perceive - it must seek, or at least recognize, food and avoid environmental danger.
I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.