Chimeras are not everything

Abstract

The uniting thread of the book is an attempt at an integrated view of the evolution of sensory systems, life, and its consciousness. To accomplish this, the book fuses opinions from different fields of science, and just like the greek mythical fire-breathing chimera, the result is strong, but also impossible. The book starts out with prototypes of life, and their complex beginnings and interactions. Viruses are introduced as harbingers of selves, as regulators of life and creators of novel genetic combinations. This is followed by an argument for the simultaneous nature of growth processes and early life, contrasting it to the galvanism of the primordial soup theory. Bacterial signaling and sensing is treated as the forerunner of community forming and interaction.