"Our sense of wonder grows exponentially; the greater the knowledge, the deeper the mystery."


-- E.O. Wilson

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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Quote... Unquote, +Video


“The world of biology is full of miracles, but nothing I have seen is as miraculous as the metamorphosis of the monarch caterpillar. Her brain is a speck of neural tissue a few millimeters long, about a million times smaller than a human brain. With this almost microscopic clump of nerve cells she knows how to manage her new legs and wings, to walk and to fly, to find her way by some unknown means of navigation over thousands of miles from Massachusetts to Mexico. How can all this be done? How are her behaviour patterns programmed first into the genes of the caterpillar and then translated into the neural pathways of the butterfly? These are mysteries which our biological colleagues are very far from having understood. The monarch is proof that nature’s imagination is richer than our own.” --- Freeman Dyson in "Infinite In All Directions"


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