Overview
- Authors:
-
-
Lynn Margulis
-
Dorion Sagan
Access this book
Other ways to access
Table of contents (24 chapters)
-
Gaia
-
-
- Dorion Sagan, Lynn Margulis
Pages 235-246
-
-
Evolution and Evolutionists
-
Front Matter
Pages 263-263
-
-
- Dorion Sagan, Lynn Margulis
Pages 283-294
-
-
-
-
Back Matter
Pages 321-368
About this book
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.
Reviews
"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
