Sublime

  The Gaia Theory sees planets, at least the Earth, as more than just balls of rocks and mud. They don’t think that Earth has life  on  it. They theorize that Earth is life itself — it’s living. The Gaia theory states that living things and all their non-living and inorganic surroundings evolve together as a single complex living or

Wie die genetischen Schalter gleichsam das Nervensystem der Zelle sind, so bilden die lebenden Organismen die »Nervenzellen« eines Ökosystems.

It appears that nutrient exchange and helping neighbors in times of need is the rule, and this leads to the conclusion that forests are superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies.

“This phenomenon, in which components join together to form larger, stable structures having new properties that could not have been predicted from the characteristics of the individual parts, is known as self-assembly. It is observed at many scales in nature. In the human body, for example, large molecules self-assemble into cellular components kn

I now realize that nature optimizes for the whole, not for the individual, but most people judge good and bad based only on how it affects them. What I had seen was the process of nature at work, which is much more effective at furthering the improvement of the whole than any process man has ever invented.

William Buckley, the archconservative, and Arthur Schlesinger, a highly credentialed liberal, were arguing one day on Buckley’s TV show about America’s budget deficits. They disagreed about nearly everything. The one notion they concurred on enthusiastically was that bureaucratic agencies—such as government departments—mindlessly and inexorably att

First, all such systems exhibit a hierarchical organization. In living systems, proteins combine to form organelles, which combine to form cell types, and so on, through organs, organisms, species, and ultimately ecologies. Economies involve individuals, departments, divisions, companies, economic sectors, and so on, until one reaches national, reg