In Context #8

Fall 2002

Feature Articles

“Portraying a Meadow”
By Craig Holdrege
The plants of a bottomland woods and those of a meadow give us strikingly different pictures of those two environments.

“Love and Detachment: How We Can Reconnect with Nature”
By Stephen L. Talbott
To overcome our alienation from the world, it is not enough to immerse ourselves in nature. We must learn to walk into the scientific laboratory, take up the language of cause, mechanism, and all the rest, and learn to shape-shift this language into a speech revealing a fuller reality.

Notes and Reviews

“African Impressions (Part 1)”
By Craig Holdrege
The author records some of the experiences on his first trip to Africa. The cast of characters includes elephants, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and lions.

“Do Organisms Merely Survive?”
By Stephen L. Talbott
To say that organisms strive to survive — or, that an organism’s traits can be explained through a process of random variation and survival of the fittest—is to make a hollow statement. It is a very different matter to explain the distinctive character of the organism that survives.

“The Tyranny of a Concept: The Case of the Peppered Moth”
By Craig Holdrege
A new book, whose writing was stimulated by an article Craig wrote, details the misguided history of evolutionary theorizing surrounding the peppered moth.