“Is a Science of Beings Possible?”
By Craig Holdrege
Craig here continues his portrayal of the frog, begun in In Context #33. He describes its way of life and situates it within the larger group of amphibians — all while asking how we can understand it as a being, which is also to say: as a characteristic activity — a being-at-work-expressing-itself. This is a question generally ignored within biology.
“DNA and the Whole Organism”
By Stephen L. Talbott
We present here a few excerpts from a much longer article that attempts to show the place of DNA within the context of the cell and organism as integral unities. A key lesson: the organism knows what it is doing with its DNA.
Notes and Reviews
“Amazonian Impressions”
By Henrike Holdrege
Henrike offers a retrospective on our summer’s watery adventure upon the Rio Negro and Amazon rivers. The debut of our full-color format in this issue of In Context is the perfect occasion for presenting some of the snapshots from that excursion. For those of us living in northern climes, the Brazilian rainforest offers many revelations of an entirely different world. Henrike shares some of those revelations here.
“Portraying Soils and Compost: Color, Form, and Pattern”
By Bruno Follador
Bruno describes his work with chromatography as a tool for assessing qualitatively the condition of soil and compost. This work raises interesting questions about the relation between qualitative and aesthetic considerations, on one hand, and the more conventional, quantitative methods for judging soil health and fertility, on the other.
News from the Institute
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