Life's Dynamic Vulnerability: A Paradigm Shift in Biology

This work offers new metaphors to understand our biological world, one more in accord with scientific evidence and more in harmony with preserving our planet and leading humans to a fuller life. First, it recognizes a "natural extravagance," that life often exceeds our expectation in terms of number, variety, beauty, and capacity for change. Our ability to understand and even to categorize life's many manifestations is often beyond our reach. Such extravagance is accompanied by an important second dimension, life's dynamic vulnerability. Life needs to take in outside energy to exist and is acutely sensitive to the environment with its many vagaries. This vulnerability is paradoxically linked to a dynamism which leads to evolutionary novelty. Rather than emphasizing the end state of evolution in terms of "fitness," this work focuses on the vulnerable process of evolution itself. In re-envisioning biology, more accurate to the onrush of discoveries, we offer a vision that better protects and preserves our world. The issue at hand is nothing less than our evolutionary future.