Genes Are Like Sentences, Genomes Are Like Books, by Brock Haussamen

Simplified though the comparison is, it’s startling what genetics and written language have in common considering that the second is a recent human invention and the first represents the formation of life almost four billion years ago.

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It’s Diversity All the Way Down, by Brock Haussamen

“The most impressive aspect of the living world is its diversity. No two individuals in sexually reproducing populations are the same, nor are any two populations, species, or higher taxa [categories of organisms]. Wherever one looks in nature, one finds…

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How Our Brains Often Get Things Wrong, by Brock Haussamen

If you’re feeling cynical about people and their errors and foolishness, a place to go to buttress your mood is Wikipedia’s List of Cognitive Biases. It describes more than 150 ways in which our thinking systematically deviates from objective observation and…

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Survivors and the Terminator, by Brock Haussamen

Horseshoe crabs, after half a billion years, still crowd the beach.  (delaware-surf-fishing.com) The story of biological evolution recounts the ways that most plants and animals have changed over time as small bodily variations improved their odds of survival. But what…

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[A Pedagogy of Gaia] How I Celebrated the Equinox by Bart Everson

If we lived in a truly Earth-honoring society, I wouldn’t have to do this. If our society cherished our planet as source and sustainer of life, the Equinox would be surely be more widely known and celebrated as a sort of secular holy day. But we don’t live in such a society, to our impoverishment and peril. And that’s why we need to nourish a revolutionary spirit. And that’s why I make a point to celebrate the Equinox. And that’s why I took the day off.

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Learning to Live in Time and Place by Émile Wayne

I will soon celebrate the one-year anniversary of my cross-country trek from southern California to New Jersey, as well as my birthday. Anniversaries are good opportunities to stop and take stock of things, to imagine what could have been done…

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