Sublime

In Paris later, at the Museum of Natural History (the Jardin des Plantes), with the blessing and counsel of the great Georges Cuvier, he undertook his vast, illustrated Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles, at a time when fewer than a dozen generic types of fossil fish had been named and he was all of twenty-four.

In the 1930s, Max Kleiber, a Swiss agricultural biologist, observed that, across mammal species, from shrews to elephants, the energy required to maintain basic metabolic function is closely correlated with an organism’s body size.

A key element of natural selection then is the beneficial traits that are selected for by the environment increases the survival potential of the species. We can also apply an inversion lens, demonstrating that any adaptive response that is not useful will be selected against. As Rafe Sagarin notes in Learning from the Octopus, goes on to note, “Na