If all these considerations are correct, then the appearance of eyes really could have ignited the Cambrian explosion. And if that’s the case, then the evolution of the eye must certainly number among...
Radical feminists and evolutionists agree that males are a serious cost to society.
Pigments such as haemoglobin are coloured because they absorb light of particular colours (bands of light, as in a rainbow) and reflect back light of other colours. The pattern of light absorbed by a...
The myosin in our own skeletal muscles is more closely related to the myosin driving the flight muscles of that irritating housefly buzzing around your head than it is to the myosin in the muscles of...
There’s no greater insult in science than to say that an argument is ‘not even wrong’, that it is invulnerable to disproof.
One begins to wonder if all the most interesting problems in physics are now in biology.
Nothing is more conservative than a bacterium.
Men are even worse: a hundred rounds of cell division are needed to make sperm, with each round linked inexorably to more mutations. Because sperm production goes on throughout life, round after round...
Life itself turned our planet blue and green, as tiny photosynthetic bacteria cleansed the oceans of air and sea, and filled them with oxygen. Powered by this new and potent source of energy, life eru...
Without programmed cell death, the bonds that bind cells in complex multicellular organisms might never have evolved.
If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don’t actually live longer, it just seems longer.’1
Thermodynamics is one of those words best avoided in a book with any pretence to be popular, but it is more engaging if seen for what it is: the science of 'desire'. The existence of atoms and molecul...
We have established on thermodynamic grounds that to make a cell from scratch requires a continuous flow of reactive carbon and chemical energy across rudimentary catalysts in a constrained through-fl...
Without a high flux of carbon and energy that is physically channelled over inorganic catalysts, there is no possibility of evolving cells. I would rate this as a necessity anywhere in the universe: g...
Core consciousness operates in the present, rebuilding itself moment by moment, mapping out how the self is altered by external objects, draping perceptions with feelings. Extended consciousness uses...
But whatever our beliefs, this richness of understanding should be a cause for marvel and celebration.
To doubt that life evolved, even if some of the details described in this book may yet prove wrong, is to doubt the convergence of evidence, from molecules to men, from bacteria to planetary systems....
At the level of their biochemistry, the barrier between bacteria and complex cells barely exists.
To visualize this dance, the transparent components of the cell had to be coloured using a stain. As it happened, the stains that were best able to colour the chromosomes were acidic. Unfortunately, t...
We should not be too quick to dismiss our own [ocular] arrangement. As so often in biology, the situation is more complex.....we have the advantage that our own light-sensitive cells are embedded dire...
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