As a biologist, there are two things that I have come to see as the most wondrous aspects of living creatures. One is that no two are alike. It isn’t just that there are no two human beings — but that in itself is remarkable enough. Think about all the human beings that have ever been on the planet, billions, but no two alike. Not even identical twins are alike. There are subtleties that set them apart. Go beyond that, and think about all the other kinds of creatures that have ever been. There aren’t any two that are precisely, identically, exactly, molecularly — behavioral, or otherwise — exactly alike. Mosquitoes look alike to us, but there are no two that are identical. Every fish is different. I don’t mean just the 25,000 different species of fish — but every individual herring is different from every other one. So that is one aspect of life that is just stunning. The other part is the flip side of it: the common ground that all life has. We see basic physiological patterns repeated time and time again. The process of digestion: lobsters do it, horseshoe crabs do it, sharks do it, we do it, mosquitoes do it. Much of the chemistry is the same. Why else would our experiments with white mice be so relevant? They are mammals, but lift yourself out of mammals and look at birds. Lift yourself out of vertebrates, and look at other divisions in animals that are distinctively different, and you see patterns repeated over and over again. This is why, among other reasons, we ought to be concerned about pesticides. Things that aren’t good for living things are probably affecting us. They might not kill us, but it isn’t without some impact. We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called Planet Earth.