“Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.” —From “The Temple of Nature; Or, the Origin of Society” by Erasmus Darwin (1802) “The planet doesn’t hate you,” Theo had once said. “But its intimacies are fatal.” —Excerpt from BIOS (1999) In microbiology, perhaps more so than other fields of biology, evolution

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