The honeybee, Apis mellifera, is a species on the cusp of culture and nature … If we’re to seriously improve honeybee health and with it our own wellbeing, we need to make the most of this timely opportunity to realise a more interconnected appro...
Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destru...
Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?
Environmentalists and secular humanists insist that humans will destroy the planet. Corporate capitalists and many religious fundamentalists have no regard for wildlife and nature. Ultimately, this dualistic battle is based on false premises. In fact...
What they discovered was that not only fish, but spiders and many insects can taste their food by the structures that are most likely to first come in contact with the food. And this in many invertebrate species turns out to be the feet.
The UFOs were nothing more than the collective fantasies of a stressed out society... The world into which UFOs had appeared was one of under-the-desk siren drills against nuclear annihilation. Society had made a new myth, a communal idea of somethin...
Denis could think of no logical reason why he should not attempt to mate with Beth Cooper. There were no laws explicitly against it. They were of the same species, and had complementary sex organs, most likely, based on extensive mental modeling Deni...
All there is, is fragments, because a man, even the loneliest of the species, is divided among several persons, animals, worlds. To know a man more than slightly it would be necessary to gather him together from all those quarters, each last scrap of...
I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across univ...
He leaned into Le Voir’s face with the calliper and breathed on him, holding forth on this new science of which calibration was the test; these measurements would describe classes of being and we who had provided the parameters would be fit within ...
An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting t...
I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilli...
England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.
The universe is so arranged that the power to destroy the climate or the ecosystem of your home planet only comes when you also have the wisdom to know that doing so is a fatal mistake. Therefore, any species that does that is suicidal, and will prob...
What an odd thing it is to see an entire species -- billions of people -- playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'music.' (-- The Overlords, from Arthur C. Clarke's Chi...
The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of ‘adaptation through maladaptation’ which is characteristic of our species…the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, ta...
No other species flees from boredom with as much urgency as we do. We are far more eager to do brain work than we are to do physical labor.
Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make l...
I came to the conclusion a while ago that there is nothing romantic or supernatural about loving someone: Love is the privilege of being responsible for another. It was, for a time, what kept me going: Each morning, for a little while, I got to feel ...
The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth - that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but extinct. It's our re...
There is no reason to teach an ape to become human. There are many reasons to teach some apes and some humans to transition the worlds between the species boundaries, especially when our genetics are so similar as to make us 'siblings.' It is the way...
