Educators From The United States

"Ideology is not absent in the technocracy... it is simply invisible, having blended into the supposedly indisputable truth of the scientific world view. ...The most effective ideologies are always those that are congruent with the limits of consciousness, for then they work subliminally."

"The view of evolution as a chronic bloody competition among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin's notion of "survival of the fittest," dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networkiing. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing them."

"A young Lynn Margulis fell in love with symbiosis—it was she who finally managed to precisely describe the stages in the process that lead bacteria to become eukaryotic cells—and was emboldened rather than dissuaded by criticism. ...Her seminal article, "On the Origin of Mitosing Cells," was published in 1967... but only after being rejected fifteen times... thanks to her insistence... SET, or serial endosymbiosis theory—became accepted as true."

"Her book Symbiosis in Cell Evolution is one of the classics of biology... In recent years, she has taken some of her important scientific ideas into a more cultural sphere... This is bad. Her story on the origins of sex, in Mystery Dance, written with Dorion Sagan, for example, is naive, full of clichés, and devoid of historical perspective. ...It's unfortunate that she has ventured into some weird second stage."

"If she burned out in a sudden burst of hemorrhagic overactivity, like a blazing celestial object vanishing in its own glory, the end-blaze was not so different than the burning life, as she died near the height of her powers, at the peak of her coruscating personality."

"Sagan's first wife, Lynn Margulis, was one of the principle architects of the Gaia Hypothesis. Put their viewpoints together, and the conclusion you would reach would be that nuclear war could have a significant enough effect that it could even kill Gaia."

"Lynn pioneered some of the most important insights in modern evolutionary science, particularly regarding the role of symbiosis in the origin of evolutionary innovations. Hearing a scientific presentation by Lynn... was one of the mind-expanding events that led me into a career in science."

"In the minds of many people, she went around the powers that be and took her theories directly to the public, which annoyed them all. It particularly annoyed them because she turned out to be right. It's a sin to take your theories to the public, then it is a double sin to take your theories to the public and be right."

"The confidence of Lynn Margulis in the idea of a planetary autopoietic web stems from three decades of pioneering work in microbiology. ...Margulis has not only contributed a great deal to that understanding within the scientific community but has also been able, in collaboration with Dorion Sagan, to explain her radical discoveries in clear and engaging language to the lay reader."

"The scientific backgrounds and areas of expertise of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis turned out out to be a perfect match. Margulis had no problem answering Lovelock's many questions about biological origins of atmospheric gases, while Lovelock contributed concepts from chemistry, thermodynamics, and cybernetics to the emerging Gaia theory. Thus the two scientists were able gradually to identify a complex network of feedback loops that—bring about self-regulation of the planetary system."

"Life is bacterial and those organisms that are not bacteria have evolved from organisms that were. ...Gene exchanges were indispensable to those that would rid themselves of environmental toxins. ...Replicating gene-carrying plasmids owned by the biosphere at large, when borrowed and returned by bacterial metabolic geniuses, alleviated most local environmental dangers, provided said plasmids could temporarily be incorporated into the cells of the threatened bacteria. The tiny bodies of the planetary patina spread to every reach, all microbes reproducing too rapidly for all offspring to survive in any finite universe. Undercover and unwitnessed, life back then was the prodigious progeny of bacteria. It still is."

"Life today is an autopoietic, photosynthetic phenomenon, planetary in scale. A chemical transmutation of sunlight, it exuberantly tries to spread, to outgrow itself. Yet by reproducing, it maintains itself and its past even as it grows. Life transforms to meet the contingencies of its changing environment and in doing so changes that environment. By degrees the environment becomes absorbed into the processes of life, becomes less a static, inanimate backdrop and more and more like a house, nest, or shell—that is, an involved, constructed part of an organic being."

"Soil is not unalive. It is a mixture of broken rock, pollen, fungal filaments, ciliate cysts, bacterial spores, nematodes and other microscopic animals and their parts. 'Nature,' Aristotle observed, 'proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation.' Independence is a political, not a scientific, term."

"The question "What is Life?" is... a linguistic trap. To answer according to the rules of grammar, we must supply a noun, a thing. But life on Earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself."

"In the long run, the most vicious predators, like most dread disease-causing microbes, bring about their own ruin by killing their victims. Restrained predation—the attack that doesn't kill or does kill only slowly—is a recurring theme in evolution. The predatory precursors of mitochondria invaded and exploited their hosts, but the prey resisted. Forced to be content with an expendable part of the prey (its waste)... some mitochondria precursors grew but never killed their providers. ...The original prey was probably a larger bacterium like Thermoplasma."

"The fundamental division of forms of life on Earth is not that between plants and animals, as is commonly assumed, but between prokaryotes—organisms composed of cells with no nucleus, that is, bacteria—and eukaryotes—all other life forms."

"Not only did life originate on earth very early in its history as a planet, but for the first two billion years, Earth was inhabited solely by bacteria."

"From the paramecium to the human race, all life forms are meticulously organized, sophisticated aggregates of evolving microbial life. Far from leaving microorganisms behind on an evolutionary "ladder," we are both surrounded by them and composed of them. Having survived in an unbroken line from the beginnings of life, all organisms today are equally evolved."

"There is little doubt that the planetary patina—including ourselves—is autopoietic. Life at the surface of the Earth seems to regulate itself in the face of external perturbation, and does so without regard for the individuals and species that compose it. More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct, but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, have continued for more than three billion years. ...trillions of communicating, evolving microbes. The visible world is a late-arriving, overgrown portion of the microcosm, and it functions only because of its well-developed connection with the microcosm's activities."

"Why does everybody agree that atmospheric oxygen... comes from life, but no one speaks about the other gases coming from life?"

"[The smallest bacterium] is so much more like people than Stanley Miller’s mixtures of chemicals, because it already has these system properties. So to go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to that bacterium."

"The oxygen crisis that began only two billion years ago prompted the evolution of respiring bacteria. These microbes that used oxygen to derive biochemical energy more efficiently than ever before eventually took over most of the world. Some of the oxygen-breathing bacteria became symbiotic, merging with different (oxygen-eschewing) bacteria to form nucleated cells, which, after becoming sexual, evolved into fungi, plants, and animals."

"I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and microorganisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge, and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date. Eldredge and Gould and their many colleagues tend to codify an incredible ignorance of where the real action is in evolution, as they limit the domain of interest to animals... very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution's creativity. By "codifying ignorance" I refer in part to the fact that they miss four of the five kingdoms of life... bacteria, protoctista, fungi, and plants."

"Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves, and so it cannot so easily be fixed with a single number."

"I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all."

"If you look at other so-called children’s authors, you’ll see they never wrote directly for children. Though Lewis Carroll dedicated his book to Alice, I feel it was an afterthought once the whole was already committed to paper. Beatrix Potter declared, “I write to please myself!” And I think the same can be said of Milne or Tolkien or Laura Ingalls Wilder."

"Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don't remember me at all."

"There's no great loss without some small gain."

"The Little House books are stories of long ago. The way we live and your schools are much different now, so many changes have made living and learning easier. But the real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures and to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong."

"Now is now. It can never be a long time ago."

"All mental and moral development is by self-activity. Education is the economizing of self-effort in the direction of all-sided development."

"John Dewey once said that the progressive education movement began during the 1870's with the work of Francis W. Parker in Quincy, Massachusetts; indeed, he called Parker the "father of progressive education.""

"Form and size constitute the foundation of all search for truth."

"Number was born in superstition and reared in mystery,... numbers were once made the foundation of religion and philosophy, and the tricks of figures have had a marvellous effect on a credulous people."

"The science of arithmetic may be called the science of exact limitation of matter and things in space, force, and time."

"Slowly the human beings have arise n-guided by a glimmering light — and have climbed spiritually from the earth and the clod, from the shrub and tree up the broad walls of the arched sky, to stars, and moon, and sun, and then beyond the sun, for the divinity seeldng and striving imagination stretches away to the invisible, all powerful, all-controlling, all-loving. One who permeates the universe, lives in it, and breathes His life through it, the eternal life to be taken into the human soul. The myth is the obscure image, in the child's soul, of God Himself."

"Old questions are not answered—they only go out of fashion."

"Argyris is best known for his theory, in collaboration with the late philosophy scholar Donald Schön, on the two types of learning — single-loop and double-loop. This theory refers to the way people respond to changes in their environment. Single-loop learning is the repeated attempt at the same problem by an organization or individual, without varying the method or questioning the goal. Double-loop learning goes beyond that, modifying the goal in light of the experience.Argyris’s work raises profound questions about how organizations run, and casts doubt on what is widely accepted as good practice. But he offers management a profound exploration of the fundamental principles of organizational behavior and human interaction in the workplace."

"Another group at MIT and Harvard University developed the notion of “organizational learning.” Chris Argyris and Donald Schön were the key figures in this group. Argyris was a student of Kurt Lewin, who was a participant in the Macy Foundation meetings that were chaired by Warren McCulloch."

"A social system does not move smoothly from one state of its culture to another... Something old must come apart in order for something new to come together. But for individuals within the system, there is no clear grasp of the next stable state - only a clear picture of the one to be lost Hence, the coming apart carries uncertainty and anguish for the members of the system since it puts at risk the basis for self-identity that the system had provided."

"Belief in the stable state serves primarily to protect us from apprehension of the threats inherent in change. Belief in stability is a means of maintaining stability, or at any rate the illusion of stability. But the most threatening situations are those that confront us with uncertainty, and by ‘uncertainty’, I don’t mean risk, which is a probability ratio which we all know how to handle, particularly those who are managers of industry. We can deal with risk."

"Probably there is no department of science, no form o humanity, in which greater advances have been made of late years, than in the medical and moral management of the insane. When we contrast the spacious and airy apartments of the insane. When we contrast the spacious and airy apartments and the grounds of our asylums, with the dark, and narrow, and dirty cells, in which, twenty years ago, the best accommodated of these poor creatures were immured - their neat and confortable dress, with their former rags and nakedness - their wholesome food, with their former rags and nakedness - their wholesome food, their former rations - and abovel all, the kindness and affection which is shown to them noew, with their ulter neglect in the days when they were executed from the privileges and society of men, we find ourselves shuddering at the thought of what we have seen, and lost in admiration of what we now see. Wherever the Christian religion exists,we find the same rapid advances making towards the accomplishment of the great purposes of humanity. It seems as if the miracles of our Saviour were meant as protoypes of what his religion was to accomplish. It is by the influence of this religion of the march of science and philosophical discovery, that, by all Christian nations, the winds and the waves have been rebuked - that man is enabled to ride out the storm upon the ocean, as if it were hushed, and, like Peter of old, to walk upon the sea as on dry land."

"Readers of Tom Masson's charming little stories, light essays and graceful verse, would hardly suspect the author of being a constant student of the philosophy of Kant, Schopenhauer and Plato; yet a philosopher Mr. Masson certainly is, and the depth of his philosophy is proven by this gem from his recent volume, A Corner in Women:"

"If you want to be a flaming youth, you must have money to burn."

"Prohibition may be a disputed theory, but none can complain that it doesn't hold water."

"No brain is stronger than its weakest think."

"A religious spirit animates the infancy of our literature, and must continue to gloe in its maturity.The public taste calls for this quality, and would relish no work in which it might be supplanted by a principle of infidelity. Our best authors have written under the influence of Christian feeling; but had they been destitute of this sentiment, they would have found it necessary to accommodate themselves to the opinions of the people, and follow Christian precedents. The beneficent influence of religion on literature, is like that of our evening sun, when it awakens in the clouds those beautiful and burning tints, which clothe the firmament in gold and purple. It constitutes the heart of learning - the great source of its moral power.Religion addresses itself to the highest and holiest of our sentiments - benevolence and veneration, and their excitement stirs up the imagination, strengthens the undeerstanding, and purifies the taste. Thus, both in the mind of the author and the reader, Christianity and literature act and react on each other, with the effect of elevating both, and carrying the human character to the highest perfection which it is destined to reach. Learning should be proud of this companionship, and exert all her wisdom to render it perpetual."

"“Be yourself” is about the worst advice you can give some people."

"Think of what would happen to us in America if there were no humorists; life would be one long Congressional record."

"Hamlet is the tragedy of tackling a family problem too soon after college"