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My most influential college course began with an assignment from the Book of Genesis: we read the two different creation stories that coexist there. If we wanted a secondary source to explain life¿s existence, the professor said, we were free to spend extracurricular angst reconciling those conflicting reports. But hereafter in class, as scientists, we would look to life itself as primary source. As for the organisms in our purview, his credo was: It takes a superior mind to appreciate a plant. By ¿superior¿ I believe he meant ¿uncommonly patient.¿ Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It¿s just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.

THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS

By Elizabeth Gilbert

Illustrated. 501 pp. Viking. $28.95.

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Damon Winter/The New York Times

Elizabeth Gilbert