¶ Animate and Inanimate Sequence (1)
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RBF Definitions
There seem to be phases where you and I automatically check in and say, ‘That’s a man.’ ‘I can see that’s a living organism.’ And another might say, ‘I can see that’s a crystal.’ But we’ve learned now that there’s no threshold between these two. They used to be called animate and inanimate, and then we found that that is not true. As we got into virology the distinction was no longer there. We found that all the descriptive attributes of the crystals permeate-- go right across the threshold-- so you’d have to call everything that is physical, just physical. Man used to think that he could identify life all within the physical. At one end of the physical was the thing we’ll call animate organisms; at the other end of the physical was something called inanimate. So, he called it that, and was kind of satisfied that these two qualities were all within physical.
It’s not just the chemists dealing in molecules, but the biologists and the physicists. All the lines have broken down, the instruments and everything. The investigator would take everybody right across all those borders, genetics, and so forth, DNA running through it, and getting down to virology where we discover DNA and RNA and all the design"
¶ Citations
- RBF to World Game, Jun-Jul’69
