She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.–Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West
The Organization of Life
Living systems are self-sustaining, dynamic, adaptive, and economical. The adaptive fit of organisms to the environment has been marked by increasing complexity of structure and function, from single to multi-cellular organisms, from prokaryotic to eukaryotic organization, to the development and differentiation of a variety of meta-structural internal organs and scaffoldings, to arrays of sensory filters and motor effectors, to immense varieties of population dynamics, to the springs, gears, and pendulums of the mind. How do great (and repeated) proliferations and radiations of organisms reconcile their idiosyncratic, yet dynamic or adaptive ranges with an economy of biological organization? Does a principle of organization exist that scales from the level of the sub-cellular to entire populations, from milliseconds to years, even across great extinction events? You bet.