one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to pursue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.page 378: predict with precision. Albert Hirschman coined the term possibilism -- to draw attention to “the discovery of paths, however narrow, leading to an outcome that appears to be foreclosed on the basis of probabilistic reasoning alone.”
...to the frustration of critics – even sympathetic ones – the movement never stated what it was for...[but] one can be indignant and constructive at the same time.
If you start imagining us as fundamentally different from who we are, then the question is, are we really talking about us anymore, or are we talking about creatures that share certain things with us but aren’t really us in the most significant ways?page 373: engineer...[micro-organisms], animals and plants. Scientists have created a transistor-like biological device. Dr Frankenstein needs his own Hippocratic oath, writes Luba Ostashevsky.
There’s a great deal of emphasis on how my information-poor perceptions might be enhanced by integration with the internet — and how all manner of errors and inefficiencies will be ironed out along the way. Yet there’s little sense of how my ability to think my own thoughts, explore my own feelings or enjoy my own space will be similarly served, enhanced or encouraged.page 374: a generous view of human nature. The sentiment is from Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature (1741). See also An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751):
[It] cannot be disputed that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent. Let these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak; let them be insufficient to move even a hand or finger of our body; they must still direct the determinations of our mind, and where every thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous.page 374: play. Here is an elephant playing. See Zeal for play may have propelled human evolution.
Cosmos is divided into two fundamental elements: Absence or Nonbeing and Presence or Being. Presence is simply the empirical universe, which the ancients described as the ten thousand living things in constant transformation; and Absence is the generative void from which this every changing realm of Presence perpetually emerges, although it should not be conceived in a spatial sense, as if there were a pool of emptiness somewhere in the universe. Within this framework, Tao (Way) can be understood as the generative process through which the ten thousand things appear out of Absence and disappear back into it...
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| Harlequin shrimp (page 357). Heaps of Yeti crabs here |
is about earth’s adventure as a whole...much of the news is abysmally sad. Should one be completely frank and insistent about this great tragedy, keep stressing the dimensions of what is being undone? Or will bright facts about the animal world, working indirectly, better aid the cause of action? Wisely, Henderson combines approaches. In that regard, he’s a bit like the honey badger [which] flourishes due to its insane strength and tenacity but also thanks to a fellow hive-seeking partner: a small bird, who lightly leads the way.
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| Sea pig |
Even if there are such things as laws of nature, there's no reason to think they must be accessible to the human mind. What science suggests is the opposite. If our minds evolved by natural selection as Darwin proposed, shaped more by a struggle for survival than by any search for truth, it's highly unlikely that we'll ever fully understand the universe. Almost certainly the world is a far stranger place than humans can possibly imagine.
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| Horned owl |
Spacefarers past living planetfall
on our ever-dive in bloom crystal:
when about our self kin selves appear,
slowing, rubber to pulp, we slack from spear,
flower anemone, re-clasp and hang, welling
while the design of play is jelling,
then enfolding space, jet
every way to posit some essential set
of life-streaks in the placeless,
or we commune parallel, rouge to cerulean
as odd proposals of shape and zip floresce
– till jig-maw apparition
spurts us apart into vague as our colours shrink,
leaving, of our culture, an ectoplasm of ink.
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| Hurricane at Saturn's north pole |
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| Mnemiopsis leidyi |
“Observations...indicate that there [is] no tendency toward ‘normalization’ of position or time of copulation.” Savage-Rumbaugh also chronicles the various sounds that the bonobos make while having sex. Chimps make one sound. The bonobos have a variety of cries (naturally), including one known as the “long modulated squeal.” With as much sobriety as Savage-Rumbaugh can muster, she writes, “It changes pitch and phonetic aspect at least once, sometimes twice, and is rather poorly represented as ‘we ee e.’ ”
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| Rhinoceros beetle |
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| Petroglyphs etched into desert varnish, Utah |
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| Escher meets Ouroboros. Armadillo girdled lizard, southern Africa |
Dehydration is the [lone star] tick's main foe during their quests [for blood]. Ticks sit in exposed locations for days, even weeks, waiting their hosts. The wind whisks away moisture, and the sun bakes their small leathery bodies. Wandering off in search of a drink would interrupt the quest and, in many habitats, there is no water to be found. So, ticks have evolved the ability to drink water from air. They secrete a special saliva into a grove near the mouth and, like the silica gel that we use to dry our electronic gadgets, their saliva draws water out of the air, the ticks then swallow the saliva, rehydrating themselves and continuing the quest.
This readable volume...will appeal to the serious reader with broad interests in science, mythology, folklore, and speculation on questions of the human condition.
Peony had arthritis and was very old, so she could barely move. She would try to climb into a climbing frame where a bunch of chimps were sitting and grooming each other. She wanted to join them, but she could barely get in there. The younger females would walk up to her, put their hands on her behind, and start pushing until she was up there with the rest. We’ve also seen cases where she started walking towards a water faucet, but, since it’s a very large enclosure and she walked with so much difficulty, a younger female would run ahead of her, take water in her own mouth, walk back to Peony, and then spit the water into her mouth so she wouldn’t need to walk all the way to the faucet.-- Frans de Waal
Human beings are caught...between two modes or ‘spheres’ of existence. The ‘aesthetic’ is the world of immediacy, of here and now. The ‘ethical’ is the transcendent, eternal world. We can’t live in both,but neither fulfils all our needs since ‘the self is composed of infinitude and finitude’, a perhaps hyperbolic way of saying that we exist across time, in the past and future, but we are also inescapably trapped in the present moment.(Earlier notes here and here)
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| 'Let us deliver mankind from the ancient, universal tyranny...of gravity!' |
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| Ocean sunfish |
A bull contents himself with one meadow, and a forest is enough for a thousand elephants; but the little body of a man devours more than all other creatures.
