Concluding remarks

Abstract

The natural world may be perceived from many viewpoints and appreciated because of very different qualities. Artists are taken by nature’s richness of colours in numerous shades and hues, whereas peasants often find nature a harsh environment thwarting their efforts to grow a decent crop. Primitive medicine men gathering healing plants and ritual herbs experience the ambience of a thick forest differently from city dwellers unfamiliar with the semidarkness of a jungle. Biologists also have their own perspective on nature, again unavoidably subjected to the bias imposed by their knowledge. Using a scientific approach they have unveiled an infinite richness of causal relationships in the living world. Intricate interactions between organisms belonging to different species, different classes, and different kingdoms are so common and so complex that the whole of the living world may even be considered as one indivisible organism. Biological science has shown the omnipresence of uniform principles which, to a naive viewer, are hidden under an endless variety in form and function. Green plants, for instance show an immense morphological diversity, but all of them synthesize from water, carbon dioxide and mineral salts, organic compounds which form the ultimate source of all nourishment to the rest of life on earth.