Sign in with Facebook
theblackphilosopher
https://linktr.ee/theblackphilosopher
“It is in our collective behavior that we are the most mysterious. We won't be able to construct machines like ourselves until we've understood this, and we're not even close. All we know is the phenomenon: we spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives. By the time we reach the end, each of us has taken in a staggering store, enough to exhaust any computer, much of it incomprehensible, and we generally manage to put out even more than we take in. Information is our source of energy; we are driven by it. It has become a tremendous enterprise, a kind of energy system on its own. All 3 billion of us are being connected by telephones, radios, television sets, airplanes, satellites, harangues on public-address systems, newspapers, magazines, leaflets dropped from great heights, words got in edgewise. We are becoming a grid, a circuitry around the earth.”
― The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
― The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
“The beauty myth posited to women a false choice: Which will I be, sexual or serious? We must reject that false and forced dilemma. Men’s sexuality is taken to be enhanced by their seriousness; to be at the same time a serious person and a sexual being is to be fully human. Let’s turn on those who offer this devil’s bargain and refuse to believe that in choosing one aspect of the self we must thereby forfeit the other. In a world in which women have real choices, the choices we make about our appearance will be taken at last for what they really are: no big deal.”
― The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women—a Feminist Critique on Society's Obsession with Flawless Women
― The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women—a Feminist Critique on Society's Obsession with Flawless Women
“It is hard to feel affection for something as totally impersonal as the atmosphere, and yet there it is, as much a part and product of life as wine and bread. Taken all in al, the sky is a miraculous achievement. It works, and for what it is designed to accomplish it is as infallible as anything in nature. I doubt whether any of us could think of a way to improve on it, beyond maybe shifting a local cloud from here to there on occasion. The word 'chance' does not serve to account well for structures of such magnificence...
We should credit it for what it is: for sheer size and perfection of function, it is far and away the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature.
It breathes for us, and it does another thing for our pleasure. Each day, millions of meteorites fall against the outer limits of the membrane and are burned to nothing by the friction. Without this shelter, our surface would long since have become the pounded powder of the moon. Even though our receptors are not sensitive enough to hear it, there is comfort in knowing the sound is there overhead, like the random noise of rain on the roof at night.”
― The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
We should credit it for what it is: for sheer size and perfection of function, it is far and away the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature.
It breathes for us, and it does another thing for our pleasure. Each day, millions of meteorites fall against the outer limits of the membrane and are burned to nothing by the friction. Without this shelter, our surface would long since have become the pounded powder of the moon. Even though our receptors are not sensitive enough to hear it, there is comfort in knowing the sound is there overhead, like the random noise of rain on the roof at night.”
― The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
“Not all social animals are social with the same degree of commitment. In some species, the members are so tied to each other and interdependent as to seem the loosely conjoined cells of a tissue. The social insects are like this; they move, and live all their lives, in a mass; a beehive is a spherical animal. In other species, less compulsively social, the members make their homes together, pool resources, travel in packs or schools, and share the food, but any single one can survive solitary, detached from the rest. Others are social only in the sense of being more or less congenial, meeting from time to time in committees, using social gatherings as ad hoc occasions for feeding and breeding. Some animals simply nod at each other in passing, never reaching even a first-name relationship.”
― The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
― The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
“Perhaps it is in this respect that language differs most sharply from other biologic systems for communication. Ambiguity seems to be an essential, indispensable element for the transfer of information from one place to another by words, where matters of real importance are concerned. It is often necessary, for meaning to come through, that there be an almost vague sense of strangeness and askewness. Speechless animals and cells cannot do this. The specifically locked-on antigen at the surface of a lymphocyte does not send the cell off in search of something totally different; when a bee is tracking sugar by polarized light, observing the sun as though consulting his watch, he does not veer away to discover an unimaginable marvel of a flower. Only the human mind is designed to work in this way, programmed to drift away in the presence of locked-on information, straying from each point in a hunt for a better, different point.
If it were not for the capacity for ambiguity, for the sensing of strangeness, the words in all languages provide, we would have no way of recognizing the layers of counterpoint in meaning, and we might be spending all our time sitting on stone fences, staring into the sun. To be sure, we would always have had some everyday use to make of the alphabet, and we might have reached the same capacity for small talk, but it is unlikely that we would have been able to evolve from words to Bach. The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.”
― The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
If it were not for the capacity for ambiguity, for the sensing of strangeness, the words in all languages provide, we would have no way of recognizing the layers of counterpoint in meaning, and we might be spending all our time sitting on stone fences, staring into the sun. To be sure, we would always have had some everyday use to make of the alphabet, and we might have reached the same capacity for small talk, but it is unlikely that we would have been able to evolve from words to Bach. The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.”
― The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
Literature & Film
— 274 members
— last activity Aug 23, 2016 03:11PM
For those with a love/hate relationship to seeing their favorite books on film.
Reading Classics, Chronologically Through the Ages
— 470 members
— last activity May 20, 2026 06:42PM
This group began with a book called The Well-Educated Mind (TWEM) by Susan Wise Bauer, which is a wonderful guide to “The Great Books.” TWEM presents ...more
Literary Fiction by People of Color
— 13435 members
— last activity Jun 20, 2026 08:45AM
This can include genre fiction that is literary (e.g. speculative fiction, historical fiction, etc.), as long as it's written by a person of color (Af ...more
St. John's College & The Great Books
— 53 members
— last activity Apr 09, 2023 09:23AM
As the third oldest college in the United States, St. John's College has campuses located in Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM. At the heart of St. John’ ...more
theblackphilosopher’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at theblackphilosopher’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
76 books
|
23 friends
307 books
|
112 friends
67 books
|
169 friends
22 books
|
33 friends
35 books
|
3,986 friends
1,811 books
|
191 friends
907 books
|
114 friends
0 books
|
4,415 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Adult Fiction, African American, Art, Biography, Book Club, Business, Children's, Christian, Classics, Comics, Contemporary, Cookbooks, Crime, Fantasy, Fiction, Gay and Lesbian, Graphic novels, Historical fiction, History, Horror, Humor and Comedy, Manga, Memoir, Music, Mystery, Non-fiction, Paranormal, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Romance, Science, Science fiction, Self help, Suspense, Spirituality, Sports, Thriller, Travel, Young-adult, and Contemporary World Fiction
Polls voted on by theblackphilosopher
Lists liked by theblackphilosopher
