What is "Mind?"

Blood flow in the brain is a prime example. Blood travels through a network of vessels and can be re-routed to specific parts of the brain as needed.

Humans require a set of minerals obtained through a diet of plants and animals to maintain good health. Indeed, all the elements in organisms are ultimately sourced from the environment. The aim of our research is to show that it is the early chemical evolution of the environment that drives the evolution of organisms – based on geochemical and biochemical evidence – and that, in turn, organisms drive environmental evolution by releasing chemicals. In this article we reveal the interdependent evolution of the chemistry of life and the environment.

Being a person with a geology background, you might think about where soil comes from... the Earth didn't start with any.

A strong criticism of the focus on the gene's role in evolution is that the genes don't interact directly with the environment, the "phenes" do (genotype, phenotype). The environment, and all the other things living in it, produce a "fitness landscape," and it is where all this evolving takes place. This is an amazingly non-linear dynamical non-equilibrium system, the landscape changes due to this evolution.

On top of that, the landscape is literally changing through geological and cosmological (those pesky meteorites/comets, local supernovae, etc.) activity.

Are the formation of such bounding membranes and their spherical form "achievements" of the genome and natural selection?
To ask this question is to realize that many aspects of organismic form must reflect the natural properties of the building blocks from which organisms construct themselves. How much of what we see reflects such properties, and how does selection enter into the picture?'

Sheesh, Kauffman does not appear to have a good understanding of evolution at all,

Abstract

A fundamental question in evolutionary biology is how genetic novelty arises. De novo gene birth is a recently recognized mechanism, but the evolutionary process and function of putative de novo genes remain largely obscure. With a clear life-saving function, the diverse antifreeze proteins of polar fishes are exemplary adaptive innovations and models for investigating new gene evolution. Here, we report clear evidence and a detailed molecular mechanism for the de novo formation of the northern gadid (codfish) antifreeze glycoprotein (AFGP) gene from a minimal noncoding sequence. We constructed genomic DNA libraries for AFGP-bearing and AFGP-lacking species across the gadid phylogeny and performed fine-scale comparative analyses of the AFGP genomic loci and homologs. We identified the noncoding founder region and a nine-nucleotide (9-nt) element therein that supplied the codons for one Thr-Ala-Ala unit from which the extant repetitive AFGP-coding sequence (cds) arose through tandem duplications. The latent signal peptide (SP)-coding exons were fortuitous noncoding DNA sequence immediately upstream of the 9-nt element, which, when spliced, supplied a typical secretory signal. Through a 1-nt frameshift mutation, these two parts formed a single read-through open reading frame (ORF). It became functionalized when a putative translocation event conferred the essential cis promoter for transcriptional initiation. We experimentally proved that all genic components of the extant gadid AFGP originated from entirely nongenic DNA. The gadid AFGP evolutionary process also represents a rare example of the proto-ORF model of de novo gene birth where a fully formed ORF existed before the regulatory element to activate transcription was acquired.