The accumulation of genetic mutations were touted to be enough to change one species to another….No. It wasn’t dishonesty. I think it was wish fulfillment and social momentum. Assumptions, made but not verified, were taught as fact.

Why does everybody agree that atmospheric oxygen comes from life, but no one speaks about the other gases coming from life?

The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.

Despite our very recent appearance on the planet, humanity combines arrogance with increasing material demands, even as we become more numerous. Our toughness is a delusion. Have we the intelligence and discipline to vigilantly guard against our tendency to grow without limit?

All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.

The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.

All living beings, not just animals, but plants and microorganisms, perceive. To survive, an organic being must perceive - it must seek, or at least recognize, food and avoid environmental danger.

People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous.

Life learned early on to recognize itself.

Body concentrates order. It continuously self-repairs. Every five days you get a new stomach lining. You get a new liver every two months. Your skin replaces itself every six weeks. Every year, 98 percent of the atoms of your body are replaced. This non-stop chemical replacement, metabolism, is a sure sign of life.

Politicians need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are chosen, the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous.

To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth, or heal our sick planet, is evidence of our immense capacity for self delusion. Rather, we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.

All of us from fertile egg to embryo to corpse, are exactly that: warm, wet, furry animals compelled by the sexuality of our forefathers and foremothers to be, either directly or indirectly, our own exciting and excitable, provocative and provocable selves.

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

We are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.

The notion of saving the planet has nothing to do with intellectual honesty or science. The fact is that the planet was here long before us and will be here long after us. The planet is running fine. What people are talking about is saving themselves and saving their middle-class lifestyles and saving their cash flow.