Saturday, November 14, 2015

Quotes from Lynn Margulis' "What is Life?"

"Bacterial tenacity should not be underestimated.  This entire planet is bacterial. Human technologies and philosophies are permutations of the bacteria.  Eating, infecting, and irreversibly merging with one another, bacteria spun off powerful new prodigies: the protoctists, fungi, plants and animals - all of which keep alive the metabolism and movement of the bacteria from which they derived."

"Death is illusory in quite a real sense.  As sheer persistence of biochemistry, "we" have never died during the passage of three thousand million years.  Mountains and seas and even supercontinents have come and gone, but we have persisted."

"In the normal waking state, human bodies burn sugars aerobically, using oxygen atoms drawn from the air.  But in strenuous activity the body reverts to a distinct metabolism; muscles ferment sugars in the same anaerobic way invented by early bacteria.  Such physiological flashbacks re-present past environmental conditions and the bodies that evolved to live in them.   In a very real sense, all beings today retain traces of Earth's earliest biosphere."

"Life cannot be understood ignoring the sentient observer.  If not for mind, no one would care that life is a certain kind of sunlight-energized cosmic debris.  But it is, and we do."

It's refreshing to think of us all as just a bunch of bacteria, dreaming our bacterial dreams...

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