What is an organism? It’s not an easy question to answer. When faced with such a challenge, it is natural to employ metaphors that help us formulate some preliminary ideas about what it is we’re dealing with. These metaphors relate something that is mysterious to us, like the organism, to one that is well known to us, such as the machine. We know what machines are, and generally how they function, and so this metaphor […]
This week I finished the audio version of The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, which I discussed in my previous post, and I’d like to give a few responses to the book as a whole now that I’ve completed it. Dawkins’ overall objective with this work is to describe how the dizzying mélange of organized complexity we find in the biological world can be explained by the properties of non-living matter, the blind mutations of […]
I took some time off to visit my mother for a few days recently, one minor consequence of which was the necessity of making an eight hour drive twice in a relatively short period of time. My answer to this dilemma was to download the audio version of physicist Lee Smolin’s book Time Reborn. It has been a while since I’ve had the chance to dig into this type of book, and as one very […]
Embracing Forever 