I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.
Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.
In many organisms, including man, the mechanical respiration and the circulation of the blood are 'regulated' so as to correspond to the demand of the moment.
By being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware.
As biologists, we contemplate with admiration and awe the wondrous array of sophisticated cell interactions and recognitions evolved in the T cell immune system, which must be a model for other similarly complex biological systems of highly differentiated organisms.
Neighborhoods and communities are complex organisms that will be resilient only if they are healthy along a number of interrelated dimensions, much as a human body cannot be healthy without adequate air, water, rest, and food.
Bacteria are single-celled organisms. Bacteria are the model organisms for everything that we know in higher organisms. There are 10 times more bacterial cells in you or on you than human cells.
Titan has no liquid water on its surface, and any liquid water beneath its surface is inaccessible to us, as far as we know. It has hydrocarbon lakes, but we don't know of any organisms that could live in those, not at the temperatures that we find on Titan. Any reference to possible life in lakes on the surface of Titan is pure speculation.
Even if the ocean on Enceladus starts out being as microbially poor as the pelagic ocean on Earth, which is the worst case, we still have a chance of seeing lots of organisms in the plumes.
Democrats pride themselves on their commitment to science. Citing climate change, they contend that they are the party of truth, while Republicans are 'denialists.' But with respect to genetically modified organisms, many Democrats seem indifferent to science, and to be practicing a denialism of their own - perhaps more so than Republicans.
