Sublime

Replication in biology is ultimately about the ability of DNA to make a copy of itself during cell division. This is how we start life, and it is a process that continues in some of our cells until our death.

In opposition to the violent and competitive account of life’s emergence given by Darwinian evolution, symbiosis proposes that we are instead the product of cooperation, interaction and mutual dependence. This vision of life is profoundly ecological and relational, and it extends all the way from the sequences of our DNA to the composition of our b

Evolution does not select from an infinite palette: there are specific patterns and shapes in space and time that arise out of the complex and dynamic interactions between the components of biological systems, much as there are common features of cities or animal communities, or of crystal structures or galaxies.

“What that’s trying to codify,” Walker said, “is the fact that some things have so many steps to produce them that it requires a memory.” That memory can be genetic or neurological or something we can’t imagine, but the result takes too many steps to arise otherwise.