Word: lifeform
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...marginal example of millennial Kulturkampf - I cannot recall the last time I was tempted to violate the rights of a rat by eating it. Still, PETA's case works rather nicely from absurdity (rats?!) to essence (what exactly are the moral claims of life, however odious the lifeform?). You can get an argument going around that. A day or two ago, the Supreme Court decided that students in a public high school may not organize prayers at football games. The house divides bitterly on that one, of course. (Again, it seems to me that principle is getting itself worked...
...wall outside E.O. Wilson's office, on the fourth floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology Labs, the covers of his books, each displaying a lifeform he has studied, are tacked up--a tribute to science as natural wonder, science as art. If Professor Wilson's outlook were this simple--that the natural world should stand for itself and anyone who cannot see its grandiosity is insensitive and probably a Republican--then he would be a wonderful explicator, but not a pioneer. What Wilson does, though, in The Diversity of Life, is to create an argument for the preservation...
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