At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe. - Michael Crichton

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything — -evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing — -it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.

Plants evolve like every other form of life, and they’ve come up with their own forms of aggression, defense, and so on. In the nineteenth century, most theories concerned animals — nature red in tooth and claw, all that. But now scientists are thinking about nature green in root and stem. We realize that plants, in their ceaseless struggle to survive, have evolved everything from complex symbiosis with other animals, to signaling mechanisms to warn other plants, to outright chemical warfare.

"Hammond turned to Gennaro. "You know, of course, what Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler do. They are paleontologists. They dig up dinosaurs." And then he began to laugh, as if he found the idea very funny."