Chain of life
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Our Actual “Eve”
She lived about 150,000 years ago in southern Africa. These days she is known as Mitochondrial Eve. The “Eve” part is a little misleading since unlike the Biblical Eve, Mitochondrial Eve wasn’t the first or only woman alive at the… Continue reading
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Darwin and the Buddha: a Comparison
The teachings of Charles Darwin and Gautama Buddha are worlds apart. Yet their descriptions of life bear similarities to each other and even interlock in ways that expand my view of each. I’ll focus this comparison on On the Origin of… Continue reading
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Dawkins: Not One of Our Ancestors Was a Failure
Richard Dawkins’s theme is upbeat: All organisms that have ever lived—every animal and plant, all bacteria and all fungi, every creeping thing, and all readers of this book—can look back at their ancestors and make the following proud claim: Not… Continue reading
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Survivors and the Terminator
The story of evolution recounts the ways that plants and animals have changed over time as small bodily variations have improved their odds for survival. But what about those species that fitted so successfully early on into stable environments that… Continue reading
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Feeling Old? Envy the Lobster
Death may be difficult to accept, but it is a clear state of affairs: when an organism no longer lives, it has died. Aging, however—wrinkling, weakening, deteriorating and the rest of the assault—seems less self-explanatory. Why does it take place?… Continue reading
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Is DNA Alive?
Is DNA alive? No, it’s not alive…mostly. The only sense in which a DNA molecule is a living thing is that it makes copies of itself, although it can’t even do that on its own. Otherwise, DNA fails all the… Continue reading
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Hope Jahren’s ‘Lab Girl’ and the Dramatic Life of Plants
People admire plants, but we don’t easily relate to them. We don’t sympathize with a plant’s struggles, nor do we particularly identify with any one plant the way we might empathize with our pet dog or cat. Compare the range… Continue reading
Lives on Earth 