biology. He was thunderstruck. "Here was this absolutely stunning phenomenology," he says. "Here you start with a fertilized egg, and the damn thing unfolds, and it gives rise to an ordered newborn and adult." Somehow, that single egg cell manages to divide and differentiate into nerve cells and muscle cells and liver cells—hundreds of different kinds. And it does so with the most astonishing precision. The strange thing isn't that birth defects happen, as tragic as they are; the strange thing is that most babies are born perfect and whole. "This still stands as one of the most beautiful
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