Slanted Truths

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This enticing collection is as devoted to the profound power of figures of speech as any oration of old Hellas. Metaphor reigns as we encounter the identification of our Earth as a Single, integrative organism, a tale told in image and passion. The discoveries and conjectures upon which this grand view rest are here as well. I have enjoyed these two dozen pieces hugely. No family tree of animal life but must somewhere disclose a cousinly infolding. We are compact of life past, and the looped handing down is more complex than the Mendel-Morgan dance of chromosomes and genes. That dance is essential, certainly, but it is the vital editing of an epic and many-rooted work, a book more like the Bible than like one great artists Remembrance of Things Past. We follow a few old shelves of bound DNA, not just a single book. Our major biochemical package for oxidative metabolism was de scribed in a small DNA manual, somehow engulfed to become an or ganelle within a lucky ancient ancestral anaerobe, and passed ever since viii FOREWORD from mother to offspring outside of the chromosome shuffie. The sperm do carry half the compact genetic message of the human DNA, but they are too small to transfer this equally essential symbiotic one that comes down from the mothers, within roomy egg after roomy egg.
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan here present their fourth book as a writing team, a collection of their essays on Gaia theory, symbiosis, individuality, and the way science is practiced nowadays. Lynn Margulis is most famous for her now-widely-accepted proposition that the cells of higher plants and animals are not individuals but symbiotic unions of more primitive cells. In these essays, perhaps more clearly than in any of Margulis and Sagan's previous books, we can see how her seemingly disparate interests combine into a coherent and very provocative scientific world-view about the tendency of life to form complex communities.

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Lynn Margulis

Themen in »Slanted Truths«

Animalia DNA biology chromosome evolution genes membrane metabolism oxidative metabolism

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"Although admitting that many predictions of the Gaia Hypothesis remain unproven, Slanted Truths charts the rise of Gaia from obscurity to the pages of the world's leading scientific journals." Trends in Ecology and Evolution "Twenty-four reprinted essays ... ranging from a memoir of J. Robert Oppenheimer through ... to some reflections on science education." Science
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