Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.
Each organism, no matter how simple or complex, has around it a sacred bubble of space, a bit of mobile territoriality which only a few other organisms are allowed to penetrate and then only for short periods of time.
We are sliding back into a dark era, and there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.
If our society continues to support basic research on how living organisms function, it is likely that my great grandchildren will be spared the agony of losing family members to most types of cancer.
Most organisms have loads of junk DNA - less pejoratively, noncoding DNA - cluttering their cells.
A big part of green tech will be organisms that eat waste.
What I'm very concerned about is how do we bolster our self-awareness as humans, as biological organisms?
Digital organisms, while not necessarily any more alive than a phone book, are strings of code that replicate and evolve over time. Digital codes are strings of binary digits - bits.
The idea was to study fertilization in as many different phyla and organisms as possible, using the simplest possible equipment and a microscope. Biochemical approaches were not much in vogue, and running gels impossible at first.
The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.
While studying the effects of accumulated stress on the nervous system, I began to suspect that most organisms have an innate capacity to rebound from threatening and stressful events.
When I see how fast technology is advancing, my mind thinks of evolution and how organisms also have to evolve or adapt in order to, in their case, survive.
You are literally never alone. While there are roughly 6.7 billion people on Earth, you may not feel that many of them at all care very much about your existence. But within your colon alone are living at least 1012 billion organisms, or roughly a thousand times the number of people on the planet. Stop your metabolic processes, and you stop theirs.
Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction. What is created is capitalism in a 'new and improved' form - and what is destroyed is self-sustaining capacity, livelihood and dignity of its innumerable and multiplied 'host organisms' into which all of us are drawn/seduced one way or another.
In nerve-free multicellular organisms, the relationships of the cells to each other can only be of a chemical nature. In multicellular organisms with nerve systems, the nerve cells only represent cells like any others, but they have extensions suited to the purpose which they serve, namely the nerves.
Neighborhoods and communities are complex organisms that will be resilient only if they are healthy along a number of interrelated dimensions, much as a human body cannot be healthy without adequate air, water, rest, and food.
If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.
