Yeti crab

Harlequin shrimp (page 357). Heaps of Yeti crabs here

Chapter 26: Yeti Crab

NPR's On Point featured this chapter as an excerpt on the page for their show, Fantastic Creatures.

 page 355: An introduction to deep sea vents here.  The deepest discovered so far is 5000 metres down in the Cayman trough.

page 359: robot...nurturance...killer app.  See, for example, When are we going to learn to trust robots?, Robot warriors: Lethal machines coming of age,  Killer robots must be stopped, say campaigners and Wildlife that isn't alive.

page 362: Panspermia. Two geneticists have applied Moore's Law to life instead of computers, and says their data suggests that life could have preceded the earth's formation.

page 362 the building blocks of life...already present in space. These may have included pyrophosphite, a likely precursor for ATP. A "black rain" made from pulverised comets may have [also] seeded Jupiter's moons, including Europa, with the raw ingredients for life.


This is the twenty-seventh in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

Yeti crab

Thirty-fifth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 26: Yeti crab

page 355: (marginal note) Carl Woese died in December.  One overview of the man and his ideas here.  Last year, Prof. Woese kindly approved quotes from A New Biology for a New Century on page 140 and 376 of this book.

page 356: variations upon the crustacean body form. A striking example can be seen in these photos of a spider crab and a ghost shrimp. One of my favourites is the Harlequin shrimp:

page 359: robots and our attitudes towards them...the start of a mechanical Cambrian explosion.  The military is a major driver. See, for example, the DARPA robot challenge and AlphaDog. Debate on the use of drones, and what comes next is extensive. See here, here or here. In a recent overview Peter W. Singer suggests that:

the biggest ripple effect of the robot...is in reshaping the narrative in [the] realm of war. We are seeing a reordering of how we conceptualize war, how we talk about it, and how we report it.

Robert Ito details some of the quirks of interactions between humans and social robots.  Izabella Kaminska considers the robot economy and the new rentier class. Noah Smith has some suggestions as to how to fairly distribute income and wealth in the age of the robots.

page 360: the place where life emerged from non-life.  Previous posts on this topic are collected under the label Origin.  See also The beginnings of life: Chemistry’s grand question.  Jack Szostack suggests that somewhere on Earth, over 3.5 billion years ago, a bubble of fat spontaneously broke into smaller ones, giving rise to one of life's most fundamental properties - the ability to make copies of itself.

page 362: a stream of order. Vlatko Vidral makes a case for information as the surprise theory of everything.

page 364: travel to the bottom of the sea. The biggest driver for doing so is likely to be resource extraction. See A Gold Rush in the Abyss and this article arguing exploration is inevitable. More reports here and here.