Main description:

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.

Contents:

I Memoirs.- 1 Sunday with J. Robert Oppenheimer.- 2 The Red Shoe Dilemma.- II Symbiosis and Individuality.- 3 Marriage of Convenience.- 4 Swimming Against the Current.- 5 The Uncut Self.- 6 Power to the Protoctists.- 7 From Kefir to Death.- 8 Kingdom Animalia: The Zoological Malaise From a Microbial Perspective.- 9 Speculation on Speculation.- III Gaia.- 10 The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere-The Gaia Hypothesis.- 11 Gaia and Philosophy.- 12 The Global Sulfur Cycle and Emiliania Huxleyi.- 13 Descartes, Dualism, and Beyond.- 14 What Narcissus Saw: The Oceanic “EYE”.- 15 A Good Four-Letter Word.- 16 The BIOTA and GAIA: One Hundred Fifty Years of Support for Environmental Sciences.- 17 GAIA and the Colonization of Mars.- 18 Futures.- 19 A Pox Called Man.- IV Evolution and Evolutionists.- 20 Big Trouble in Biology: Physiological Autopoiesis versus Mechanistic neo-Darwinism.- 21 The Riddle of Sex.- 22 Words as Battle Cries-Symbiogenesis and the New Field of Endocytobiology.- 23 Science Education, USA: Not Science, Not Yet Education.- 24 An Epistemological Afterword.- References.- Professional Literature on Gaia.- Popular Literature on Gaia.- Contributors.