My range of interests is broad, bordering occasionally on universal, so I thought I'd share with you this bit of intellectual delicacy from the world of biology. The excerpt below comes from a fantastic collection of incisive and poetic biological-themed essays entitled The Lives of a Cell. The author is a man named Lewis Thomas.
"A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought." - Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell, Viking Press, 1974
