#holons

Molecules awoke one morning to find that atoms were inside them, enfolded in their very being. And cells awoke one morning to find that molecules were actually inside them, as part of their very being. And you might awake one morning and find that nature is a part of you, literally internal to your being. You are not a part of nature, nature is a part of you. And for just that reason, you treat nature as you would treat your lungs or your kidneys. A spontaneous environmental ethics surges forth from your heart, and you will never again look at a river, a leaf, a deer, a robin, in the same way.

The Flow may have saved Yaz’s life after they got shot up and fell into the Euphrates.

Observations on The Only Me I Know (1/5 The Answers)

According to [G. G.] Simpson, evolution is either ‘basically materialistic’ (whatever that means in this context) - or else there must be a Purposer, a god; man is either the result of a purposeless process or else he must have been 'planned’ from the beginning. But the term 'purpose’ in its biological context implies neither a Purposer nor a cut-and-dried image of the ultimate goal to be achieved. The predator setting out on its nightly round does not look for a particular rabbit or hare, he looks for likely prey; the chess-player cannot generally foresee or plan the ultimate mate situation: he uses his skill to take advantage of the opportunities on the board. Purposiveness means goal-directed instead of random activity, flexible strategies instead of rigid mechanisms, and adaptive behaviour - but on the organism’s own terms: it does not 'adapt’ to a freezing environment by lowering its body temperature, but by burning up more fuel. In a word, as E. W. Sinnot wrote, purpose is 'the directive activity shown by individual organisms that distinguishes living things from inanimate objects.’ Or, to quote the Nobel Laureate H. J. Muller, 'purpose is not imported into nature, and need not be puzzled over as a strange or divine something else that gets inside and makes life go… it is simply implicit in the fact of biological organization, and it is to be studied rather than admired or 'explained.’ Let me repeat: to talk of 'directiveness’ or purpose in this limited sense, in ontogeny, has become respectable once more; but to apply these terms to phylogeny is still considered heretical (or at least in bad taste). But phylogeny is an abstraction, which only acquires a concrete meaning when we realize that 'phylogeny, evolutionary descent, is a sequence of ontogenies,’ and that 'the course of evolution is through changes in ontogeny.’ The quotations in the previous sentence are actually also by Simpson and contain the answer to his own conundrum about the Purposer behind the purpose. The Purposer is each and every individual organism, from the inception of life, which struggled and strove to make the best of its limited opportunities.

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Highlights of It Never Rains… (8/8 Upgrades)

Observations on The Only Me I Know (2/5 The Conversation)