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| A red-shouldered hawk sounds off on Whiskey Hill. |
I finished Nick Lane's book on the chemistry of life and started another book last night called How Life Works by Philip Ball. Naturally, I woke up this morning thinking about the Citric Acid Cycle (a.k.a. Krebs Cycle).
Thinking, Here I am, lying in bed doing nothing, while all the food and water I've consumed (along with the air I breathe) is being turned into fuel to power the 35 trillion or so cells in my body. And within each of those cells is a fuel-production assembly line running 24/7 that uses an ingenious proton pump to crank out as many as 10 million ATP molecules every second in an active muscle cell.
It's amazing what we take for granted. And indeed it has all been granted to us by the laws of nature (wherever the laws of nature came from). Consciousness itself is just the cherry on top of a universe whose vastness we can't really comprehend, and where on at least one little ball of space junk within that vastness, simple elements created by exploding stars have joined into complex molecules that somehow sparked into life, and it's been off to the races ever since.
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| Tree ferns existed before dinosaurs evolved from reptilian archosaurs, and now tree ferns in Golden Gate Park provide foraging habitat for birds which evolved from dinosaurs. |
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| Townsend's Warbler foraging in an oak on Whiskey Hill. |
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| Red-shouldered Rear-view |
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