Money's Laws of Biology I: Life is chaos making sense of chaos. II: While there is a lot more to a human being than an amoeba, there is no more to being a cell in a human than being the cell of an amoeba. III: Being an animal is a nightmare ..read more

“What I have done . . . is to make a constructive contribution to the global conversation of science and to gain some measure of insight into that great mystery, the origin of life . . . The way of science is for the best of our achievements to endure in substance but lose their individuality, like raindrops falling into a pond. So let it be.” Frank Harold (2016) Click here for the tribute in full ..read more

A screenplay by Matthew R. Riffle and Zackary D. Hill and based on my 2017 novel, The Mycologist: The Diary of Bartholomew Leach, Professor of Natural History , was an official selection at the 2024 Ink & Cinema Adapted Story Showcase: https://www.inkandcinema.com/blogs/showcases/adapted-story-showcase Click here for a sample chapter from the novel ..read more

Hydras and the Roots of Depression British soldiers attending a popular science lecture in the nineteenth century were shown creatures in a drop of pond water projected onto a screen from an instrument called a lantern microscope. The soldiers “looked on with intense interest” when a water flea became entangled in the stinging arms of a Hydra , and “made the most violent efforts to escape, turning over and over, amid excited murmurs from the soldiers.” When the water flea “hurled itself free . . . every man in the room sprang to his feet and joined in a deafening cheer.” They had empathized ..read more

With news of R.F.K. Junior’s encounter with a parasitic worm, I invite you to sing along with me to the tune of “My Favorite Things”:   Roundworms in most guts and hookworms in plenty Segmented tapeworms that make you feel empty Many amoebas and pinworms like strings These were a few of our nightmarish things.   (From “Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines,” page 111)   ..read more

Species perform life cycles by transmitting distinctive collections of genes from one generation to the next. Individuals contribute to this process if they serve as biological parents, but there is no cycle for each of them, each of us, just a beginning and an end. Cells behaving as amoebas are conductors for the whole journey, sculpting the developing fetus, protecting the body from bacterial and fungal infection, repairing wounds, and removing worn out cells. Amoebas also destroy cancer cells until they turn cancerous themselves, spread tumors across the body, and extinguish one on six of ..read more

If Kafka makes you laugh, this is for you: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/nicholas-p-money ..read more

As Homo sapiens races toward extinction, there is solace in recognizing that the rest of nature will fee relief in our departure. Adapted from The Selfish Ape , published in 2019: If extraterrestrials had trained their microphones on Earth they would have detected a rise in the exclamations of animal life in recent millennia, building to a crescendo of moans and grunts from animals subjected to ritualized torture in stadia, bull rings and bear pits, augmented by the modern vivisection of rodents, cats and primates—terrified animals restrained in the lab and probed with instruments that would ..read more

In a Goldilocks mushroom, the gills are not too close, not too far apart, but just the right distance for the spores to be shot to the open midplane. The following figure from a forthcoming review article shows the reciprocal changes in gill separation and discharge distance that might have played out during mushroom evolution. (Too esoteric for a blog post? Yes.) Caption: Hypothetical evolutionary seesaw that matches gill separation to the distance of ballistospore discharge. In this diagram, a modification to the range of the spore discharge mechanism precedes an increase in gill spacing ..read more

Humans are on the fast track to extinction and the mess that we have made will take most of the larger animals with us. In our unenviable position as witnesses of the collapse of the biosphere, grace can be sought in the certainty of the peaceful afterlife of the planet. The death of the last human will mean the end of human anguish. Picking gorillas as an example of the nonhuman casualties, the death of the last one is also hopeful, because after two centuries of gorilla hunting and trapping, there will be no more of these beautiful creatures to be shot. Pick any species of animal and its ..read more