The evolutionary routes are many, she knew, wending through the howling wilderness of the maladaptive, on to… — Gregory Benford
The evolutionary routes are many, she knew, wending through the howling wilderness of the maladaptive, on to their severely narrowed destinations. Biology abounded with convergent examples, destinations arrived at along very different paths. Fruiting bodies of slime molds and myxobacteria alike evolved multicelled advances. Warmbloodedness came forth several times, as did live birth and even penile tumescence. The eyes did indeed have it—as seen in the camera-like eyes of vertebrates and octopi, and the similar tiny preceptors of worms and jellyfish. Nature invented over and over again the mechanisms used by diverse organisms to hear, smell, echolocate, sense the prickle of electric and magnetic fields.
p. 326Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
“Quite patently artificial,” she said.
“Looks like it to me, and I’m just a physicist.”
“I thought you were an engineer-pilot.”
“Hey, physicists can do anything.”
“Um. So they think. But not biology…”
p. 137
Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man’s belt—big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change.
p. 163
There was more known, but always more to be known.
Yes, she thought, and the unknown can masquerade as the unknowable.
p. 212
