How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
[Gordon] had a sudden vision of this glassy palace as a wilderness of nucleic acids, responding to the dry brush of red wind outside. His NMR lab seemed silent and sterile by comparison. His experiments were insulated from the pulse of the world. For the biochemists, though, life cooperated in the study itself. Ramsey himself looked more vital, squinting and hovering and talking, an animal padding through the lanes of this chemical jungle. (29.8)
Like Renfrew's, Ramsey's lab also carries out experiments to determine natural truths. But since Ramsey is a biologist, the buffer between those experiments and nature as we see it everyday is significantly lessened.
Quote #8
The trees were sharp, precise, with the clarity of good ideas. [Markham] watched them flick past as the airplane became light, airy, a gossamer webbing of metal that fell with him, mute matter tugged by gravity's curved geometry. (31.23)
Markham's death is a tragedy, but one that ultimately shows nature's power over us. Notice the imagery employed: As the tool of the airplane breaks down around him, he is opened up to the natural world of trees and gravity's curve.
Quote #9
[Gordon] tramped through the city zoo; it was more or less along the way. Yellow canine eyes followed him, contemplating the results if the bars were suddenly lifted. Chimps swung in pendulum strokes on an unending circuit of their cramped universe. The natural world was a pocket here amid distant honks and looming, square profiles of sour brown brick. (46.2)
The imagery of caged nature here shows that—in the 1970s—people remain "in control" of nature. The contemplations of what would happen should the bars be lifted, though, shows just how much of this control is more illusion than anything.