Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Scala naturae vel numerorum


Scarcely two things are more different  than an integer and a hamster.  Yet each of these partakes of a vaster pattern, whose slow uncovering has been the fruit of patient genius  operating over a period of millennia;  which patterns, once grasped, provide material for their own cross-comparisons;  and which, taken together, point towards something yet higher and more fundamental than themselves.
Structurally, truth to tell, neither mathematics nor biology is really like a ladder -- more like a lattice.  And that  is merely the skeleton.  The biosphere itself, like the noosphere,  is truly rounded out -- the very metaphor was better-chosen than we realized.

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