Aug 30
You know, when we utter easy rationalisations like, “Humans are part of Living Nature too”; or “We just have to re-learn how to belong in an ecosystem again, and not take more than our share”; you know when we say these things we are being completely clueless about how ecosystems work. Right? You know when …
Feb 09
“The devil of complacency is in the ignorance of detail.” This is another post that I’ve resurrected, and updated, from four years back, because it places the Extremophile Choice hypothesis in the context of the broader, and not the currently fashionable, ecological discussion. The original has earned more attention from ecological nerdom than many of my other blogposts, so …
Aug 30
A short selection from Essay Fifty — one of the longer essays, and THE LAST — in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice The Great Way is not difficult; just avoid picking and choosing. —from the Hsin Hsin Ming [1] A Buddhist monk commits to pay attention to whatever “arises” in his or her daily life and, when it’s clearly helpful, …
Aug 25
A short selection from Essay Forty-eight — one of the longer essays, and third from the end — in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice Everyone has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of a dry leaf of an old table …
Aug 16
A short selection from Essay Forty-five in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Do not depart from deceptions and errors; for they of themselves are the nature of True Reality. When all things are illumined by wisdom and there is neither grasping nor throwing away, then you can see into your own nature and gain …
Aug 08
A selection (not so short) from Essay Forty-one in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet, believing what we don’t believe does not exhilarate. —Emily Dickinson [1] So with the stage thus set, we are now finally ready to examine the benefits that flow …
Jul 17
A short selection from Essay Thirty in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. … and one day she slipped off the cover and looked in. Forthwith there escaped a multitude of plagues for hapless man—such as gout, rheumatism, and colic for his body, and envy, spite, and revenge for his mind —Bullfinch’s Mythology With the …
Jul 16
The fourth section of Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice begins. PART IV —Pandora’s Box Give me a lever, a fulcrum, and a place to stand, and I will move the Earth. —Archimedes Prometheus … Gk Myth a demi-god … worshiped by craftsmen. When Zeus hid fire away from man [author’s note: according to Bullfinch’s Mythology, fire …
Jun 21
The Whole of Essay Nineteen in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer. —William of Ockham [1] The flexible behaviour of higher animals can’t be trusted to maintain resource partitions; only innate structure can. Thus ecological stability requires not only that inapposite curiosity …
Jun 08
A short selection from Essay Fifteen in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. A bird might marry a fish, but where would they live? —Tevye character, in Fiddler on the Roof For the need of a niche, or for the good of a ‘race’, sexual traits intensify the cut of new species, just as they …
