The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn’t prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.
In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.
In some ways, I had a traditional ‘old South’ upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.
The laws of biology are written in the language of diversity.
Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms – if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms.
I turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger: the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystems, the little things, as I like to say, who run the world.
When all else fails, men turn to reason.
If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning. From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge. And from mastery of the novel and beautiful world awaiting every child comes self-confidence.
Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.
The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.
What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.
The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names.
Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.
Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth’s surface, but they do...
Genius is the summed production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall.
So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months.
Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.