Flatworm

Chapter 6 Flatworm
 
page 87 various phyla of worms...among the phyla not mentioned in the book is Acanthocephala, the Thorny-headed worms.  Their spikes have inspired better sticky medical tape.

 page 91: parasites. See Carl Zimmer on Blood flukes (parasitic flatworms) and the fountain of youth.  A kind of parasitic flatworm, Ribeiroia, can cause a frog to grow debilitating extra legs.

page 93: death. philosophical tangles and reflections from Jeff McMahan and John Broome and Stephen Cave.  

This is the 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. 

Xenotropia

A Tibetan mystic saying goes: We are here to realize the illusion of our separateness. The spiritual sentiment has a biological cognate. Our xenotropic drive — to merge with what is not us, temporarily in sex, or permanently in symbiosis or cross-species hybrids — is more than a metaphor. But it also offers spiritual solace. When we hook up with another, in sex or love (or, more rarely, both) we prove that our isolation is not permanent. In the fullness of time, we may all be linked...

-- from Death and Sex by (Tyler Volk and) Dorion Sagan quoted by Maria Popova

Immortality

Can a jellyfish unlock the secret of immortality? asks Nathaniel Rich.

No, say Paul Raeburn and Jonathan Eisen.

Note: this post has been updated.

The Dead

Don Paterson's version of one of the Sonnets to Orpheus by Raine Maria Rilke:

The Dead

Our business is with fruit and leaf and bloom.
Though they speak with more than just the season's tongue –
the colours that they blaze from the dark loam
all have something of a jealous tang

of the dead about them. What do we know of their part
in this, those secret brothers of the harrow,
invigorating the soil – oiling the dirt
so liberally with their essence, their black marrow?

But here's the question: are the flower and fruit
held out to us in love, or merely thrust
up at us, their masters, like a fist?

Or are they lords, asleep among the roots,
granting to us in their great largesse
this hybrid thing – part brute force, part mute kiss?

Day of the dead

Thirteenth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 6: Flatworm

page 92: Everything that lives is holy. On occasion, Annie Dillard entertains a different view:

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives. Every glistening egg is a memento mori.

page 93: an attitude vaguely adequate in the face of [death].  Michel de Montaigne wrote:

To philosophize is to learn how to die: Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die, has unlearned to serve.  

In The Hit, a 1984 gangster film, Willie Parker (played by Terrence Stamp) seems to be living with this attitude (see this clip) but looses it in the end (see this clip).

page 96: spicy delights of the soil.  See, for example, My mushroom burial suit (TED talk) by Jae Rhim Lee.


P.S. A note from a year ago and some wise words from Christopher Hitchens

A state of ghosthood

Rilke's Orpheus:

is a book about death and the lyric, how we are a product of two realms: the here and the not-here, the temporal and the a-temporal (or the eternal) because we have foreknowledge of our own deaths. [1] So essentially we're in a state of ghosthood, which is unusual for a mammal so how do you deal with that? Well, the way we deal with it is by singing across the gap and listening to the echoes that come back from the realm.

-- Don Paterson in interview

Note

[1]  Scot Atran's phrase for this state is "the tragedy of cognition"

'Symmetrical as the fossilized imprint of a trilobite'

One day, Mother returned home from town with a preoccupied face.

'Look, Joseph,' she said, 'what a lucky coincidence. I caught him on the stairs, jumping from step to step --' and she lifted a handkerchief that covered something on a plate.  I recognized [Father] at once. The resemblance was striking, although now he was a crab or a large scorpion. Mother and I exchanged looks: in spite of the metamorphosis, the resemblance was incredible...

...She put the plate down, and leaning over him, we observed him closely. There was a hollow place between his numerous curved legs, which he was moving slightly. His uplifted pincers and feelers seemed to be listening. I tipped the place and Father moved cautiously and with a certain hesitation onto the floor. Upon touching the flat surface under him, he gave a sudden start with all of his legs, while his hard arthropod joints made a clacking sound...

-- from Father's Last Escape by Bruno Schulz. Nicole Kraus reads the story and discusses it with Deborah Treisman here.

A barely imagined state of being

Generally, we moderns follow Epicurus: "where death is, we are not." It is not possible to imagine what it is like to be dead because in death there is no imagining. [1]

We do, however, have a powerful sense of 'living death', a state of minimal existence in which agency/freedom is utterly absent. For this reason (and perhaps for others [2]), we sympathize with the 'dead' Achilles when Odysseus sees him in Hades:

By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man

some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive

than rule down here over all the breathless dead. [3]

So what to think about those who retain something like awareness in what had appeared to be a vegetative state?

One of the most difficult questions you might want to ask someone is whether they want to carry on living. But...the scientific, legal and ethical challenges for doctors asking such questions are formidable. "In purely practical terms, yes, it is possible...But it is a bigger step than one might immediately think."

One problem is that while the brain scans do seem to establish consciousness, there is a lot they don't tell us. "Just because they can answer a yes/no question does not mean they have the capacity to make complex decisions"... [4]

Footnotes

[1] Some take a different view. For example, David Eagleman:

In the moment of transition between life and death only one thing changes: you lose the momentum of the biochemical cycles that keep the machinery running. In the moment before death you are still composed of the same thousand trillion, trillion atoms as in the moment after death. As you degrade, your atoms become incorporated into new constellations: the leaf of a staghorn fern, a speckled snail-shell, a kernel of maize, a beetle's mandible, a waxen bloodroot, a ptarmigan's tail feather. But it turns out your thousand trillion, trillion atoms were not an accidental collection, each was labelled as composing you, and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you're not gone, you're simply taking on different forms.

Instead of your gestures being the raising of an eyebrow or a blown kiss, now a gesture might consist of a rising gnat, a waving wheat stalk and the inhaling lung of a breaching beluga whale. Your manner of expressing joy might become a seaweed sheet playing on a lapping wave, a pendulous funnel dancing from a cumulo-nimbus, a flapping grunion birthing, a glossy river-pebble gliding around in eddy. From your present clumped point of view this afterlife may sound unnervingly distributed, but in fact it is wonderful. You can't imagine the pleasure of stretching your redefined body across vast territories, ruffling your grasses and bending your pine branch and flexing an egret's wing while pushing a crowd towards the surface through coruscating shafts of light...

[2] Few have the equanimity of Epicurus or Lucretius. For Philip Larkin, their poise was specious. Perhaps in the haze of terror attendant on two different conditions both of which we abhor -- actual death and 'living death' -- the distinction between the two is erased in the mind.

[3] Robert Fagles' translation  (The following added on 25 Jan 2011: In a review of All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, Susan Neiman remarks:

Achilles’ speech in Hades — the first poetry that Plato wanted to expunge from his ideal republic — is one key that suggests Homer’s heroes, like the rest of us, had a great deal of trouble with suffering and evil, those things that make the meaning of life problematic.

[4] from Giving the 'unconscious' a voice. P.S. 9 am: In report here, Helen Gill says that one person who had been in a locked-in state for eight years expressed not anger but frustration at not having been able to communicate. But this feeling may not be universal. Against the assumptions made in this post, could some in such a state actually be happy? Or could the question be irrelevant? In the same report, Colin Blakemore warns against jumping to the conclusion that people who show a degree of awareness in what had appeared to be VS are conscious in the way we normally think of it.

Image: David Octavius Hill with his daughter Charlotte, probably 1843

P.S. 23 Feb 11: Most locked-in people 'are happy.'

'Grieving animals?'

Dan Sperber asks a question.

Quietus

In A Long, Melancholy Roar, Olivia Judson reflects on the role of predation by other animals on Man has had on the human psyche, observes that Man is the greatest predator on Man, and that no animal besides Man commits suicide. Here is my comment:

I think I've read that some data indicates suicide rates fall during war time. If true, this is interesting, and may be significant.

There's a remarkable account by the late Australian philosopher Val Plumwood of being attacked and almost killed by a crocodile.

Another 'wild' animal that still kills humans is the elephant. The authorities in the Indian state of Orissa report 180 deaths by trampling in the last 5 years (humans had encroached on elephant territory with mining and other operations).

One commonly reads that fewer than a dozen people are killed each year by sharks. Humans, by contrast, slaughter tens of millions of sharks each year.

I'd add that some (e.g. Richard Barry) claim that dolphins have deliberately committed suicide because they are being held captive by humans in conditions that they find unbearable. (Dolphin 'suicides' such as these may be a distinct, perhaps involuntary, phenomenon.)


In The Ecocidal Moment, Rowan Williams notes that Alastair McIntosh speaks of:

"ecocidal" patterns of consumption as addictive and self-destructive. Living like this is living at a less than properly human level – McIntosh suggests we may need therapy, what he describes as a "cultural psychotherapy" to liberate us. That liberation may or may not be enough to avert disaster. But what we do know – or should know – is that we are living inhumanly.

Inhumanely, perhaps; but all too humanly.

Lazarus

This interview with Ray Kurzweil (whose Age of Spirital Machines I reviewed in '99) is fascinating. So much seems credible. [1] Then I get to the last paragraph and wonder, is he insane or joking in some way? Or am I missing something?


Another story imagines eternal life beginning not in 2045 or so, but at 'the Omega point' far in the future of the universe. As Marcus Chown introduces the idea:

You've had a long life but, finally, your time has come. If you were a wit like Oscar Wilde, you would say something amusing like: 'Either these curtains go or I do'. But you are suffused by such an awful tiredness that you can barely think, let alone speak...You draw one last breath...

...and it is summer and you are young again. Your favourite dog -- the one that loved you so much as a child and thought you would never see again -- has knocked you to the ground and is licking your face furiously. Through tears of joy, you see your father and mother -- long dead -- standing over you. They are young -- just as they were when you were ten years old -- and they are laughing and stretching out their hands to you.

Footnote

[1] (Added 13 May): See, e.g., Will designer brains divide humanity?

The thing itself

Some London-folk continue to go about their business, thinking they are healthy and will be passed over. But secretly they have the plague in their blood: when the infection reaches their heart they fall dead upon the spot, so reports his man, as if struck by lightning. And this is a figure for life itself, the whole of life. Due preparation. We should make due preparation for death, or else be struck down where we stand. As he, Robinson, was made to see when of a sudden, on his island, he came one day upon the footprint of a man in the sand. It was a print, and therefore a sign: of a foot, of a man. But it was a sign of much else too. You are not alone, said the sign; and also, No matter how far you sail, no matter where you hide, you will be searched out.

-- J.M. Coetzee (2003)

Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

-- Fernando Pessoa.

Hope not abandoned

Edward Hoagland, now 77, writes[1] that he welcomes his own imminent death for two reasons: it will make him part the natural processes he loves, and it will mean he will not have to see future horrors:

I’ve widened my allegiances beyond socialism toward Creation as a larger whole; salamanders, beech trees, not just autoworkers...

...accepting death as a process of disassembly into humus, then brook and finally seawater demystifies it for me. I don’t mean that I comprehend bidding consciousness goodbye. But I love the rich smell of humus, of true woods soil, and of course the sea – love the rivulets and brooks, lying earthbound, on the ground. The question of decomposition is not pressing or frightening. From the top of the food chain I’ll re-enter at the bottom. [2]

…I’d rather be a goldfinch eating dandelion seeds than witness, even on a TV screen, some of the scenes in store. Dacca drowning; people eating processed algae. I won’t be, you won’t be, but rather than observing the gradual meltdown, wouldn’t you prefer incarnation as a blue-tailed skink hunting crickets on a pine-log?

…Because my concept of democracy as the right to live widens beyond Homo Sapiens, and because I knew an orangutan when I was young, the death of his whole life-form will seem such a particularly genocidal tragedy to me – like that of chimps, the great whales, elephants, and other megafauna I’ve been privileged to encounter on occasion – that I want my personal extinction to proceed theirs. It will anyway, but I don’t want to live in a world drained of elephants and sharks and whales, where my grief over how we’ve treated captive apes is dwarfed when the last carcasses are concealed under the loads on log trucks to be cooked as bushmeat in Kinshasa’s slums. Better to be already simmering in the soil myself.

The sentiment is genuine enough, but is Hoagland right to assume things will go so badly? [3] At one point he allows for a small hope. What if this is more on target?

It’s not far fetched to conceive...of a sea change in how we allocate pity and reverence in the years ahead.

Footnotes

1. Curtain calls: The fever of "living" is conquered at last, Harper's Magazine, March 2009. See also Endgame: Meditations on a diminishing world, June 2007.

2. The much younger and still vigorous George Monbiot expresses the same sentiment in a column in 2005:

As a gardener and ecologist, I find [disaggregation] oddly comforting. I like the idea of literal reincarnation: that the molecules of which I am composed will, once I have rotted, be incorporated into other organisms. Bits of me will be pushing through the growing tips of trees, will creep over them as caterpillars, will hunt those caterpillars as birds. When I die, I would like to be buried in a fashion which ensures that no part of me is wasted. Then I can claim to have been of some use after all.

I aspire to a similar state of mind, but wonder if in the event I will be more like Willie Parker, the character played by Terence Stamp in a gangster film called The Hit. Parker boasts equanimity in the face of death but when actually confronted with execution breaks down.

3. Grim as things are, we need to beware catastrophising. (David Hume would agree!)

image: the primary mirror for the Kepler telescope

All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, despair, law, chance hath slain

This is rather odd but worth a look.

Turning of the bones

...elaborate displays of apparent maternal grief [by a gorilla] may reveal less about our [human and gorilla] shared awareness of death than our shared impulse to act as though it didn’t exist...

-- writes Nathalie Angier in a well-balanced article about the reactions of various animals (including apes, elephants, lions and social insects) to death.

Many have argued that believing that (or acting as if) death is not what it seems is a key driver of religious behaviour in humans. The Malagasy practice of famadihana, the Turning of the Bones, may be only one of the more striking examples - an "an evocation of being together again, a transformation of sorts so that the dead can experience once more the joys of life [and] most importantly...an act of love", in the words of Maurice Bloch.

It's also a commonplace that one of the hardest things to look at directly is your own death. The 'true story of your death' may appear somewhere in a book in the Library of Babel. Or, it may hit you before you know what's happening like a Bullet in the Brain.