Manuel De Landa
"...living creatures and their inorganic counterparts share a crucial dependence on intense flows of energy and materials. In many respects the circulation is what matters, not the particular forms that it causes to emerge. As biogeographer Ian G. Simmons puts it, "the flow of energy and mineral nutrients through an ecosystem manifest themselves as actual animals and plants of a particular species." Our organic bodies are, in this sense, nothing but temporary coagulations in these flows: we capture in our bodies a certain portion of the flow at birth, then release it again when we die and microorganisms transform us into a new batch of raw materials." pg 104
"...the emergence of an ecosystem is a blind groping from stable state to stable state in which each plant assemblage creates the condition that stabilize the next one." pg 106
"The increasing elaboration of sauces and complex dishes which began in Europe in the fifteenth century (and in China and Islam much earlier) added more layers of culture to the circulation of raw matter-energy. However, these cultural additives, important as they were, should not blind us to the fact that ultimately it was still the nutritional value of the flow that mattered. Nothing serves better to remind us of this fact than the recurrent famines that plagued Europe and other continents, not only in medieval times but until the very eve of the Industrial Revolution. In extreme cases, people would not only eat biomass that had not been culturally sanctioned (such as grass, bark or even soil), but more importantly, they would break the most powerful of alimentary taboos and eat human flesh." pg 110
"Species are historical constructions, their defining traits a purely contingent collection assembled by means of selection pressures, which act as a genetic sorting process. In a very real sense, much as our bodies are temporary coagulations in the flow of biomass, they are also passing constructions in the flow of genetic materials." pg 111
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