FUTURE PRESENT

Here, I sought to feature every major group of organic life forms currently resident on planet Earth and their watery evolutionary origin as fluid expressions, not fixed products of genetic code. In carbon-based biological life, water takes on the role of receptive medium that space has universally. Extraordinarily varied patterns of structure, function and relationship emerge and co-evolve over nested scales of organization in living systems. These patterns recur in cells, individuals, species, and ecosystems. Their evolution depends on the generation and sustainability of diversity, not its progressive elimination in favor of what is specially privileged or advantaged. It truly does ‘take all kinds to make a world’, whether that world is an individual cell, an assemblage of cells, an assemblage of individuals, an assemblage of populations, an assemblage of communities or the limitless space of Nature everywhere, which includes all distinguishable localities of place and time.