"All of the elements crucial to life--oxygen , nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, carbon--return to a usable form through the intervention of microbes....Ecology is based on the restorative decomposition of microbes and molds, acting on plants and animals after they have died to return their valuable chemical nutrients to the total living system of life on earth," p186.
Props to the guys behind the scene, the microbes, recycling the building blocks of life with the consequence that life can continue. The nitrogen cycle hinges on bacteria. The linchpin of understanding ecology lies in the understanding of the interactions amongst the bacteria. Clean energy, oil spills, fertilizers, medicine, all can be influenced by deep knowledge in the molecular interactions at the simplest level.
"One study doesn't prove a generality any more than a single swallow makes a summer, but when our first rigorous data point to a conclusion so at variance with traditional views, we must sit up and take notice, and [italics mine] then go out to make more tests," p208.
Science of course is skeptical and not eager to believe conclusions that are drawn from a single experiment. Peer review is important. But opposing the rigor of science is the gullibility of the public and the sometimes sensationalism of science writers. Too often, claims with novel ideas are published, but the studies inspired by scientists wishing to replicate the findings and unable to, rarely make the news. In Bad Pharma, Ben Goldacre describes an example of a scientific journal refusing to publish the data that refuted a study published previously in their own journal. As an undergrad and fifth author, I have an email attached to an non-influential journal, and I constantly am getting messages asking me to submit articles. I doubt the editors scrutinize received submissions too deeply. (That is another testable claim.)
"At any of a hundred thousand steps in the particular sequence that actually led to modern humans, a tiny and perfectly plausible variation would have produced a different outcome, making history cascade down another pathway that could never have led to Homo sapiens, or to any self-conscious creature...We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction," p215-216.
I think there is beauty in the view that we are accidents. That view makes me appreciate my existence more; of all the possible ways in which the history of life could have played out, this is the one that includes me and everyone that I know and love! I'm here and they are here. What should I be doing my gifted time? because whatever I do today, I trade one day of my life for it. Should be something good!
No comments:
Post a Comment