This is the ChangeUnderground.
Jon Moore reporting!
This week begins with a piece from Iowa Learning Farms entitled: It’s alive! Scientists get closer to identifying what lives in our soil.
The importance of soil life cannot be overstated. That we know so little about this complex web of life is not surprising. Soil science has focused upon the most easily measured properties of soil, its chemistry and the physics involved in compaction, ploughing and so forth. Continue reading →
A step in thinking is required to move from Chemistry to Biology. Chemistry is a reductionist science, by and large. A big thing is interrogated and the smaller things making it up are discovered. Molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, quarks and things and if it ever finds a way to be tested experimentally, tiny little strings that are the basis of string theory.
Biology proceeds in a similar way from kingdom to phylum to class, order, family, genus and species. However, when biology is observed in an ecosystem, we find emergent properties. That is, things that only occur when species interact. Continue reading →