Words&Dirt

“The reason we think we understand nuclear origins is that certain live organisms today behave just the way we think many of their ancestors did.  We must reconstruct evolutionary history from living clues that we take to be representative.  Evolutionary novelty of the nucleated cell is best comprehended as specific historical products of partnerships and symbioses, bacterial fusions of DNA whose products (proteins, RNA’s, lipids) interact to generate emergent structures.  Random mutations only refine and alter, but do not produce, species-level change.  Protracted symbioses lead to symbiogenesis: the origin of new organelles, organellar systems, tissues, organs, organisms, and species.  Symbiogenesis, the inheritance of acquired genomes, mostly those of bacteria and other microbes, is the greatest source of evolutionary innovation.”

––Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, pg. 156-7

“In the afternoons, Professor Draper met Homer in the school’s playground––school’s end seemed magically timed to coincide with the professor’s last class of the day at the college––and they would tramp home together.  In the winter, which in Waterville came early, this was a literal tramping––on snowshoes, the mastery of which the professor placed on a level of learning to read and write.

‘Use the body, use the mind, Homer,’ the professor said.

It’s easy to see why Wilbur Larch was impressed with the man.  He vigorously represented usefulness.

In truth, Homer liked the routine of it, the tramp, tramp of it, the utter predictability of it.  An orphan is simply more a child than other children in that essential appreciation of the things that happen daily, on schedule.  For everything that promises to last, to stay the same, the orphan is a sucker.

Dr. Larch ran the boys’ division with as many of the simulated manifestations of daily life as are possible to cultivate at an orphanage.  Meals were promptly served at the same time, every day.  Dr. Larch would read aloud at the same evening hour for the same length of time, even if it meant leaving a chapter in midadventure, with the boys shouting, ‘More, more, just read the next thing that happens!’

And St. Larch would say, ‘Tomorrow, same time, same place.’  There would be groans of disappointment, but Larch knew that he had made a promise; he had established a routine.  ‘Here in St. Cloud’s,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘security is measured by the number of promises kept.  Every child understands a promise––if it is kept––and looks forward to the next promise.  Among orphans, you build security slowly but regularly.'”

––The Cider House Rules, by John Irving, pg. 26