<
https://longreads.com/2021/03/23/nation-of-plants-excerpt-stefano-mancuso/>
"I am sure that many of the erudite readers of this little book know
On the
Origin of Species by Charles Darwin inside and out. If there is someone who
still has this gap in their education, you are urged to fill it without any
further delay. Darwin’s book is fundamental for understanding how life works.
And it is surprising to think how this book, which literally changed the
history of the world, is actually only a summary of the countless observations
that Darwin gathered for decades throughout the scientific disciplines and
throughout the world in support of his theory of the evolution of living
species. His plan, in fact, was to write a colossal and minutely detailed work
that was meant to report all the fruits of his decades of research. It would be
a work invulnerable to any and all criticism.
As is well known, things did not work out that way. Alfred Russel Wallace’s
announcement that he had arrived at Darwin’s same conclusions regarding
evolution induced Darwin to change his plans and summarize in
Origin his most
brilliant and most evidentially supported deductions, leaving the rest of the
material for subsequent elaboration. Nevertheless, the enormous corpus that he
was working on did not go to waste. On the contrary, the first two chapters of
his magnum opus, which was supposed to be entitled simply
Natural Selection,
became the two volumes of
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under
Domestication, and much of the rest of the material was readapted in the
elaboration of his later works. In any event, in the third chapter of
On the
Origin of Species, dedicated to the famous “struggle for existence” that is
the dominant motif of the whole book, Darwin tells a marvelous story of
relationships. This story is essential for understanding both the bonds between
living beings and how difficult it is to imagine the consequences of
intervening in those relationships."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-child-poverty-leprosy-conservation-california/>
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
