Sublime

For Freud, the self is – rather than a soul with an eternal nature – a complex amalgam of biological and social impulses, many of them quite ‘Darwinian’ in their primal mechanisms, and the conscious mind is only the surface of the ‘unconscious’, where hidden, largely irrational impulses, repressed desires,

Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger

Von Baer spielt für die ganzheitliche Wissenschaft des Lebens eine vergleichbare Rolle, wie sie Darwin für die Schulbiologie einnimmt.

Margulis was intrigued by the fact that the mitochondria in cells have their own genes. Mitochondria are the cells’ intracellular power factories and supply the energy for all living metabolism. Standard theory had it that only the genes in the nucleus of cells had any importance; the genes in mitochondria were considered irrelevant. Margulis