Book Review: Life Evolving: Molecules, Mind, and Meaning: "In this book, Belgian biochemist de Duve comes across as an exceptionally genial, humanistic scientist. Awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in medicine for his groundbreaking work in cell biology, de Duve here surveys the scientific approach to understanding how life began, crucial bottlenecks in its increasing complexity, and the question of the contingency versus the inevitability of the entire process. Born in 1917, de Duve regards this presentation as his testament, which perhaps motivates his addressing, periodically in the text, overtly in the final chapter, religious beliefs about the existence of life. Unlike aggressive scientific atheists such as Richard Dawkins, nonatheist de Duve sympathetically reasons through why it is unnecessary to invoke nonphysical influences. On the other hand, he argues against assertions that life and its evolved forms are dumb, naturally selected flukes. Beneath the philosophizing, de Duve delineates biology excellently and authoritatively, introducing it with wonder and curiosity that are bound to excite the next generation. A worthy legacy of a great career. Gilbert Taylor"
Pioneers! O Pioneers! COME, my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready, Have you your pistols? Have you your sharp-edged axes? Pioneers! O pioneers! For we cannot tarry here, We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers! O you youths, Western youths, So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship, Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost, Pioneers! O pioneers! Have the elder races halted? Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers! All the past we leave behind, We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O pioneers! We detachments steady throwing, Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep, Conquering, holding, dari
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