This psychedelic cluster shows the cross section of cells in the underground stem of a Sweet Flag plant. The vascular bundles of cells transport water and nutrients through the stems. The plant roots grow sideways and sprout up new plants.

Jack Challoner

I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory.

The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place, whatever my subject, where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or, indeed, the passage of time.

Oliver Sacks

Genes and information do not determine the innermost details of our lives. Rather, the unceasing flow of energy and matter through a world in perpetual disequilibrium conjures genes themselves into existence and still determines their activity, even in our information-soaked lives.

It is the movement that creates the form. The flow of energy and matter through cells structures biological information, rather than the other way around.

If genes channel metabolic flux like riverbanks channel water, then genes do not determine the trajectory of flow any more than riverbanks determine how water cascades down from the mountains to the oceans.

That is determined by the properties of water, the power of the sun and the landscape—by evaporation from the oceans, rainfall high up in the mountains, the softness of the underlying rocks, the loose rolling electrical bonding between the water molecules that make it a rushing coherent liquid, the incessant tug of gravity.

We might channel a river’s flow between raised banks in our cities, but even the cleverest construction is of little use against a serious flood.

Nick Lane, Transformer

By far the most frequent source of new traits is changes in the timing and manner in which already existing genes are expressed and transact with the environment.

Organisms inherit their environments as much as they inherit their genes: a fish inherits not only fins but also water.

Human children inherit a sociocultural context replete with cultural artifacts, symbols, and institutions, and their unique maturational capacities would be inert without a sociocultural context within which to develop.

Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human