Gregory Benford

Anyway, the Shanna woman was abrasive, self-obsessed, smug—and those were her good points. Julia suspected that in a pinch the woman might also be careless, the one sin reality never forgave.

They had a legend about a Chemical pinned to a piece of dead matter and allowed to die that way—Diminished to extinction! Apparently a commonplace among Chemicals. Yet after this fearsome loss, the identity emerged from its full subtraction—to claim life again. Such a desperate story! Elementary knowledge tells us that such things do not happen, of course.

Curious, how any tool properly made acquires a beauty.

Better be a bit more diplomatic. Translation: cover your scientific ass.

In any case, caution outweighed theory, as mice knew about elephants.

To us, most human morality is carefully thought-through self-congratulation.

While a gigantic amount has been written or spoken, culture in the end is the fraction that gets remembered.

Seeker laughed. “You are so—well, human. You always think you are the ultimate.”

“And…we’re not.”

Seeker inspected the ceiling. “It seems unlikely.”

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.

For her it was a slippery descent into a labyrinth where twin urges fought, revenge versus survival. These two instincts, already ancient before the first hominid walked, rarely married with any security. Yet if she did not feel the pinch of their competition, she would not be, by her own judgment, a true human.

History held counterexamples to any facile rule.

“He was guilty of the heresy of humanism.”

“How can that be heresy?”

“The narcissistic devotion to things human? ‘Man is the measure of all things?’ Easily.”