"JUST suppose that Darwin's ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth's history.
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full at --
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This is very exciting.
As politics grind us into powder, science goes further down the rabbit hole into the terrifyingly new. Perhaps I understand Bruce Sterling's disdain a little better now.
Here's one of the moments which will stay with me:
In the past few years, a host of genome studies have demonstrated that DNA flows readily between the chromosomes of microbes and the external world. Typically around 10 per cent of the genes in many bacterial genomes seem to have been acquired from other organisms in this way, though the proportion can be several times that (New Scientist, 24 January 2009, p 34). So an individual microbe may have access to the genes found in the entire microbial population around it, including those of other microbe species. "It's natural to wonder if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level," says Goldenfeld.
[...]
So perhaps we can say (as some, such as Tim Morton are now doing) that the thing we call 'human' (along with 'dog', 'cat', hornet, etc) is not, as we suppose, a unique unity but a contingent manifestation, a shambling collection of borrowings, a hive creature, a strange stranger.
.d.