The Biology of Wonder: Finding the Human in Nature

"In this book, I describe a biology of the feeling self--a biology that has discovered subjective feeling as the fundamental moving force in all life, from the cellular level up to the complexity of the human organism. I also describe how this discovery turns our image of ourselves upside down. We have also understood human beings as biological machines that somehow and rather inexplicably entail some subjective x factor variously known as mind, spirit, or soul. But now biology is discovering subjectivity as a fundamental principle throughout nature. It finds that even the most simple living things--bacterial cells, fertilized eggs, nematodes in tidal flats--act according to values. Organisms value everything they encounter according to its meaning for the further coherence of their embodied self. Even the cells self-production, the continuous maintenance of a highly structured order, can only be understood if we perceive the cell as an actor that persistently follows a goal. I call this new viewpoint a 'poetic ecology.'" Andreas Weber shares more in this excerpt from his book, "The Biology of Wonder."

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