I'm rereading The Origin and, geekishly, really enjoying this sort of thing (from Morphology, Chapter XIV):
Most physiologists believe that the bones of the skull are homologous with — that is, correspond in number and in relative connexion with—the elemental parts of a certain number of vertebræ. The anterior and posterior limbs in all the members of the vertebrate classes are plainly homologous. So it is with the wonderfully complex
jaws and legs of crustaceans. It is familiar to almost every one, that in a flower the relative position of the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils, as well as their intimate structure, are intelligible on the view that they consist of metamorphosed leaves, arranged in a spire. In monstrous plants, we often get direct evidence of the possibility of one organ being transformed into another; and we can actually see in
flowers during their early development, as well as in crustaceans and
many other animals during their embryonic states, that organs, which
when mature become extremely different, are at an early stage of growth
exactly alike.
Darwin asks questions such as: 'Why should the brain be enclosed in a box composed of such numerous and such extraordinarily shaped pieces of bone?' And then shows how natural selection is the necessary explanation.
New Scientistreports that 'dancing' Volvox algae can 'waltz' and 'minuet'. [1]
It's another reminder that while green, red and brown algae are often called 'plants', some of them have properties that are almost 'animal'-like. [2] Some dinoflagellates, for example, have simple eyes to hunt for food. [3]
And at a macro scale, kelp (which are brown algae) do remarkable things, as Charles Darwin saw:
The number of living creatures of all Orders, whose existence intimately depends on the kelp is wonderful.
A great volume might be written, describing the inhabitants of one of these beds of seaweed….I can only compare these great aquatic forests of the southern hemisphere, with the terrestrial ones in the inter-tropical regions. Yet if in any country a forest was destroyed, I do not believe nearly so many species of animals would perish as would from here, from the destruction of the kelp. [4]
[1] Dancing Volvox: Hydrodynamic Bound States of Swimming Algae by Knut Drescher, Kyriacos C. Leptos, Idan Tuval, Takuji Ishikawa, Timothy J. Pedley and Raymond E. Goldstein (pdf).
[2] Other 'simple' protists such as forams display remarkable properties too. Lynn Margulis is a microbiological William Blake in her vision of these creatures:
Large single-celled forams choose from brightly colored sand grains the correct ones with which to make shells. Aware of shape and color, they make choices and reproduce their kind. Awareness in some form has been naturally selected for at least 550 million years. For me, our spirituality and moral nature help perpetuate our living communities, just as similar attributes aided previous living communities whose evolution is chronicled in the fossil record.
[3] "By most definitions...the planktonic dinoflagellate, Erythropsidium, must have among the smallest of eyes, since the creature is only 50–70 μm in diameter." -- from You are what you eat by I R Shwab. Others with eyes include: Peridinium foliaceum and P. balticum. See Ultrastructure of Microalgae: nonphotosynthetic plastids.
Almost all the leaves, excepting those that float on the surface, are so thickly incrusted with corallines as to be of a white colour. We find exquisitely delicate structures, some inhabited by simple hydra-like polypi, others by more organised kinds, and beautiful compound Ascidiæ. On the leaves, also, various patelliform shells, Trochi, uncovered molluscs, and some bivalves are attached. Innumerable crustacea frequent every part of the plant. On shaking the great entangled roots, a pile of small fish, shells, cuttlefish, crabs of all orders, sea-eggs, starfish, beautiful Holothuriæ, Planariæ, and crawling nereidous animals of a multitude of forms, all fall out together. Often as I recurred to a branch of the kelp, I never failed to discover animals of new and curious structures.
Darwin was writing about kelp in cool southern waters. But kelp 'forests' have recently been discovered in deep tropical waters too. It's thought that these may act as refugia under some conditions of climate change.
Rather than being morally subversive, as his Christian critics claim, Darwin's achievement was morally grounded. Rather than being a dispassionate practice, his science had a humanitarian drive. It made brothers and sisters not only of all human races, but of all life.
[John] Lewis read his Bible and on Sundays tuned in to WRMA, the gospel station out of Montgomery, to hear the Soul Stirrers and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Lewis was a soulful, intelligent, and eccentric child. When religious feeling washed over him, he began visiting the henhouse out back to preach to the Dominiques and the Rhode Island Reds. The chickens composed his ministry: Lewis baptized new chicks; he raised and fed them; he buried the dead under a mound of wildflowers. As Lewis wrote many years later in his autobiography, “Walking with the Wind,” he was a lonely searcher learning compassion for God’s creatures.
Having proved men and brutes bodies on one type: almost superfluous to consider minds. [1]
Almost but not quite:
He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke. [2]
What, then, to make of the 'new, scientific' study of morality by the likes of Marc Hauser, which may point to something like this:
the science [sic] of morality may bring into doubt some of our most deeply ingrained cultural perceptions about right and wrong. We’ll have new, richer opportunities to examine our actions in the presence of consequences. We probably won’t like what we see. [But] those awkward realizations may be the greatest value of moral science. [3]
How far are we here from:
No man can ever attain to anywhere near a true conception of the subconscious of man who does not know primates under natural conditions. [4]
Carlo Fausto [5] quotes Friedrich Nietzsche:
Our body is, after all, only a society constructed out of many souls.
and Mia Couto:
In Lua-do-Chão, there is no word to say “poor.” One says “orphan.” This is true misery: to have no kin.
Footnotes
1. Charles Darwin, Notebooks on transmutations of species.
4. Eugène Marais, in a letter from 1935, republished in an introduction to the The Soul of the Ape by Robert Ardrey. Ardrey was an advocate of the now unfashionable 'killer ape' hypothesis. More popular these days may be the 'kind ape' hypothesis. ('Twilight souls' is a term used by Marais to describe the Chacma baboons of the Waterberg. There is evidence that Australopithecus africanus and, later, Homo erectus lived in the Waterberg.)
5. Feasting on People: Eating Animals and Humans in Amazonia, 2007. DOI: 10.1086/518298
The brittlestar has an entire carapace pitted with optically tuned calcite crystals.[1]
The photo is featured in a Darwin 'special' in Nature. The editorial says:
An even more likely development [in the next 50 years than the discovery of life beyond Earth] is that life will be created de novo here on Earth. The first experiments in whole-organism synthetic biology, such as the synthetic mycoplasma being worked on at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, will cleave quite closely to the designs already developed by natural selection. But there are already schemes for going further — for using different genetic codes, for example. Although the synthesis of complex organisms might remain the stuff of fantasy for some time, new ways of building self-replicating, one-genome, one-cell organisms seem quite plausible. The development of creatures born from an idea, not an ancestor, will undoubtedly provide new insights into evolution, not least because the proclivities of such creatures to evolve will need to be kept in check.
...it is curiosity, scientific curiosity, that has delivered us genuine, testable knowledge of the world and contributed to our understanding of our place within it and of our nature and condition. This knowledge has a beauty of its own, and it can be terrifying. We are barely beginning to grasp the implications of what we have relatively recently learned.
Natural selection is a powerful, elegant, and economic explicator of life on earth in all its diversity, and perhaps it contains the seeds of a rival creation myth that would have the added power of being true - but it awaits its inspired synthesiser, its poet, its Milton.
But I don't think summoning Milton is helpful. It's not just that we have already had Darwin (who, if you have to stretch for a comparison, is more like natural selection's Homer) but that Darwin, his predecessors and successors, are part of an encounter, a conversation, a long argument for which the entrance requirement need be no more than, for example, stopping to listen, really listen, to birdsong -- plus a readiness to be open to where evidence leads.
Most real creatures that we think we know embody wonders we have hardly dreamed of. And there are other beings, equally real, which for most of human experience have been beyond imagining. As Zhuangzi wrote some 2,300 years ago, “all the creatures in this world have dimensions that cannot be calculated.”
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. misattributed to Bertrand Russell
Since we cannot predict how ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes. Derek Parfit
We are never 'at home': we are always outside ourselves. Michel de Montaigne
We are monkeys with money and guns. Tom Waits
All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike – and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
Albert Einstein
If you look into infinity what do you see? Your backside! Tristan Tzara
Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow.
Carl Woese
When you're young, all evolution lies before you...If you compare yourself with the limitations that came afterwards, if you think how one form excludes other forms, of the monotonous routine where you finally feel trapped, well, I don't mind saying, life was beautiful in those days. 'Qfwfq' 75 percent to 90 percent of all living species may remain unknown to science. IIES
Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Roger Revelle (1957)
The rate of change of ocean acidity is many times faster than anything experienced in the last 55 million years. EPOCA
One cannot reasonably compare the K/T extinction with the current human destruction of the biosphere. The first was a relatively minor setback.
J.C. Briggs
When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened.
The unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go here on earth and probably far beyond. Martin Rees
Our quest, as a civilisation [is] to answer the question, how do we save ourselves from ourselves without losing ourselves?
Jaron Lanier
If you yourself want to become really happy...I suggest you save the albatross from extinction. It can be done.
Margaret Atwood
There is just one real problem -- the problem of human relations.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
The amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty.
Joseph Conrad
"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
'The Walrus and the Carpenter'
We abandon our own language because we need extra words, for things we had never imagined; and because there are superfluous words in it, for things we cannot imagine any more.
'The Giant, O'Brien'
We take almost all of the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.
'Austerlitz'
Those were his first steps on a white sheet/Clutches of wriggling letters in black lead/Like tracks of worms on the Precambrian mud.
'Kaspar Hauser'
The mind does not err from the fact that it imagines.
Spinoza
We are as much automaton as mind. Blaise Pascal
Much that is intelligent in us is not specifically human. Alasdair MacIntyre
What knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?Herman Melville
There is no counting the possible ways to the Millennium and the route to it. Norman Cohn
By the time human beings start the global nuclear war that will destroy our civilization, there won’t be any great apes left for Earth to become the Planet of the Apes. But chances are there will still be plenty of rhesus macaques around. Dario Maestripieri
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. George Orwell
The astounding comes towards us, outrider of death and birth. John Berger
We are so far from denying there is any Unicorn at all, that we affirm there are many kinds thereof.
Thomas Browne
Even that old horse
is something to see
this snow-covered morning
Matsuo Basho
We cannot see the visible except with the invisible.
Eckhart von Hochheim
You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in the Book. Paul Erdős
If, as the poets say, life is a dream, I am sure in a voyage these are the visions which serve best to pass away the long night.
Charles Darwin
But only when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor's heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps, where they are most warn by the generations of pilgrims.
Jorge Luis Borges
The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Let Peter rejoice with the MOON FISH who keeps up the life in the waters by night. Let Andrew rejoice with the Whale, who is array'd in beauteous blue and is a combination of bulk and activity. Let James rejoice with the Skuttle-Fish, who foils his foe by the effusion of his ink. Let John rejoice with Nautilus who spreads his sail and plies his oar, and the Lord is his pilot. Let Philip rejoice with Boca, which is a fish that can speak.
Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed unto thee? The Book of Job
