The second time you have resorted to personal attack.
Well, I am asking you to give some justification for what you stated, in your post, were your beliefs. Unless, of course, you were just mentioning them in passing, and didn't expect your readers to consider it a contribution to the discussion in the thread.And your unposted definition is ...?Um, I'll gamble and say I'll be happy with any definition from a respected dictionary. Your definition - which I have snipped - is as useful as defining strawberry jam as 'sticky and red'. (my italics)
I was not following your arguments, I was leap-frogging them. The life-form on this planet is the eco-system. The human race, and all of the other species we see around us are just parts of that organism, just as we consider all of the different cells in our body to be part of us. Our cells go about their business unknowing and uncaring about us as a whole, just as we do in the eco-system. The human race will disappear, just as so many other species have done, but the eco-system will go on.What do you mean by unit of life? What do you mean by significant? I can't accept, taking the words at their everyday value, that the statement is accurate or useful.
The eco-system regulates itself by natural selection. Too many plants and the extra oxygen they produce leads to more, bigger and better animals to eat them and produce more carbon dioxide. Our bodies use such mechanisms to grow and to limit growth. Our cells compete and evolve too. Some of the ways they evolve are called cancers.The rest of your post shows that you do not appear to understand natural selection, nor evolution. If, however, you do understand it then you appear to be suggesting that it is wrong.
Not on my part, "standing on the shoulders of giants" and all that. Isaac Asimov introducing himself in his SF magazine first issue :-That will require some argument on your part.
Isaac preferred stories from authors who were scientists and were based on, at least some part, on solid science. Of course a lot of it is speculation, unproven and unproveable, but it comes from informed sources, and to my mind, works as a hypothesis.I have published about 40 books of fiction, mostly science fiction, about 140 books of nonfiction, mostly science... I have a Ph. D. in chemistry from Columbia and I am Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Boston School of Medicine."
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