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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 18 Oct 2013

Taken: 18 Oct 2013

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Excerpt •
Page 217 •
Image from the book •
Intution pumps & other tools of thinking •
Author •
Daniel Dennett •

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Photo replaced on 18 Oct 2013
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Tree of Life

Tree of Life
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The genomes that exist today are connected by threads of descent to the genomes of their parents and grandparents and so on, back to the beginning of life on Earth. The image facing page 241 (above) the Tree of Life, shows how every person is relatively closely related to every other person – sharing common human ancestors within the last hundred thousand yeas, and sharing ancestors with every dog and whale within the last two hundred million years, and every daisy and redwood tree within the last two billion years.

There are many ways of drawing the Tree of Life. In this one the present is represented along the outer tips of the branches. Only the lineages still alive reach this outer rim. Dinosaurs (except for birds that descended from them) are shown to have gone extinct over 60 million of years ago. All the threads are connected eventually, back at the origin of life – about which more later. If we enlarged the diagram a trillionfold, we could see the family tree of every fly, fish, and frog that ever lived, seeing which died childless (most of them, of course) and which had progeny. Page 217

INTUITION PUMPS & OTHER TOOLS FOR THINKING
10 months ago. Edited 10 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The most wonderful mystery of life may well be in the means by which it created so much diversity from so little physical matter. The biosphere, all organisms combined, makes up only about one part in ten billion of the earth’s mass. It is sparsely distributed through a kilometer-thick layer of woil, water, and air stretched over a half billion square kilometers of surface. If the world were the size of an ordinary desktop globe and its surface were viewed edgewise an arm’s length away, no trace of the biosphere could be seen with the naked eye. Yet life has divided into millions of species, the fundamental units, each playing a unique role in relation to the whole. ~ Page 169 ~ “Biophilia” ~ E. O. Wilson - Author
10 months ago.

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