Sublime

This book is about the social body in which we are the unwitting cells. It is about the hidden ways in which that social group manipulates our psychology, and even our biology. It is about how a social organism scrambles for survival and works for mastery over other organisms of its kind. It is about how we, without the slightest sense of what the

Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful.

atavistic

They begin to squirt a rubbery slime from their pores, entombing themselves in a matrix.

Contact tracing—the gumshoe work of the public health system whereby one goes backward from a known case to see who the patient has been in contact with—revealed that at least sixty people had been exposed to Patient Zero. Amazingly, none of them got sick. Later genetic analyses confirmed that this patient was very likely not responsible for the ep

The human blitzkrieg across America testifies to the incomparable ingenuity and the unsurpassed adaptability of Homo sapiens. No other animal had ever moved into such a huge variety of radically different habitats so quickly, everywhere using virtually the same genes.6

He held center stage through the 1850s; he had overshadowed them all—Silliman, Dana, Henry, Hall, Gray. The voice of Charles Darwin was still to be heard.