Metamorphosis: bifurcated being

The larva of Luidia sarsi is a semi-transparent diaphanous sprite that feeds on algae and grows to a remarkable 4 centimetres. Then something extraordinary happens. Instead of changing shape to become an adult, a cluster of cells lining the larva's internal cavity grows, like an alien invader, and out of these a starfish is born. Floating free from its other self, the adult form settles on the ocean floor, where it survives and grows by hunting down other starfish in the dark of night. Meanwhile, the larva continues its vegetarian existence, grazing the surface waters above.

-- from Evolution's freak factory, in which Frank Ryan suggests hybridisation played a role in Cambrian explosion.

See also: Hybrids, chimeras, trees and webs

P.S. In a highly critical review of Ryan's book Metamorphosis, Josh Trapani says that Ryan champions the views of Donald Williamson who postlated that interbreeding occurs between not just different species but different phuyla; for example, between ascidians (sea squirts) and echinoderms (sea urchins):

He postulates that this has happened repeatedly between different groups of widely divergent organisms. Moreover, he postulates that the hybrids look like one parental species as larvae and like the other as adults, rather than simply exhibiting a mix of characteristics, as most hybrids do. Not only is this hypothesis not supported by evidence, but plenty of evidence, including powerful molecular evidence, directly contradicts it.

Hybrids and nightmares

It is speculated that dragons and other monsters are hybrids produced in the human brain as a result of an embedded fear of snakes that pre-dates humanity but continues.

That may be. But on TV things get very weird. See: The Wasp, the Bat, the Gila Monster and the Tiger


But this one, Styrocosaurus, was produced by evolution, not human imagination

Photoshop bestiary

-- from 'Survival of the freakiest'

Hybrids, chimeras, trees and webs

Hybridisation may be a significant force in animal evolution:

The conventional explanation for metamorphosis is that it evolved gradually, with the juvenile form becoming specialised for feeding and the adult for mating, until they barely resembled each other. [Donald Williamson, formerly of the University of Liverpool] thinks otherwise. He points out that marine larvae have five basic forms and can be organised into a family tree based on shared characteristics. Yet this tree bears no relationship to the family tree of adults: near-identical larvae often give rise to adults from different lineages, while some closely related adults have utterly unrelated larvae...


...His star witness is the starfish Luidia sarsi, which starts life as a small larva with a tiny starfish inside. As the larva grows, the starfish migrates to the outside and when the larva settles on the seabed, they separate. This is perfectly normal for starfish, but in Luidia something remarkable then happens. Instead of degenerating, the larva swims off and lives for several months as an independent animal.

-- from Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life [1]

footnote:

[1] (added 23 Jan): Larry Moran suggests a better headline for the article would be: "More evidence that Charles Darwin didn't know everything there is to be known about evolution when he published his book in 1859." (Added 9 Feb) Carl Zimmer on Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life.

Stand still, yet make him run

On the equinox, two days after its unveiling, Barely Imagined Beings catches up with the grasshoper chronophage at my old college.

.
As another graduate of the college put it:

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.

[The grasshopper (locust?) on the clock is depicted as hybrid with, what (from the eyes), a dragon?]

P.S. Mapping the Marvellous contemplates similarities between automatons and insects, especially the mantis, and reflects on some work of Jean-Henri Fabre, Henri Bergson and Roger Callois.

P.P.S. See too 'La Machine' - giant spider in Liverpool



P.S. 12 Dec: a working model of the Antikythera mechanism.

Hopeful hybrids

"If Lévi-Strauss is right," wrote Lewis Thomas,"myths are constructed by a universal logic that, like language itself, is as characteristic for human beings as nest-building is for birds." [1]

"Our powerful story [today]," Thomas continued, "equivalent in its way to a universal myth, is evolution. Never mind that it is true whereas myths are not; it is filled with symbolism, and this is the way it has influenced the mind of society."

Medieval bestiaries, he observed, do not contain, as a rule, totally novel creatures of the imagination made up of parts we have never seen before. "On the contrary, they are made up of parts that are entirely familiar. What is novel, and startling, is that they are mixtures of species." [2]


Thomas went on to suggest a bestiary for our time would have to be a microbestiary, featuring the likes of Myxotricha paradoxa, Blepharisma and plant-animal combinations that mostly exist in the sea. Their "meaning", he suggested, would be "basically the same as the meaning of a medieval bestiary. There is a tendency for living things to join up, establish linkages, live inside each other, return to earlier arrangements, get along, wherever possible."

Evolution may be today's "powerful story" [3], at least for those who manage to limit their magical thinking to where it does little harm (or even, possibly, some good [4]). But it is not the only one. Twisted, dark stories seem to fascinate millions.

Hope may come in part from a broader "story" of science -- the systematic achievement of greater knowledge and understanding -- with global projects like the LHC reinforcing the point that the cosmos is more majestical golden fire than foul congregation of vapours.



Footnotes:

[1] from Some Biomythology published in The Lives of a Cell (1974). But there are several reasons for thinking that Lévi-Strauss explained less than he imagined. To take one example, he cited Sigmund Freud to bolster his case, and Freud was out to lunch on evolution (see, for example, Freud's Evolutionary Fantasy by Stephen Jay Gould) and much else. Still, Thomas's observation about bestiaries seems worth keeping in mind.

[2] Contemporary games with bestiary-type elements, notably Spore, are also limited in striking ways. See here.

[3] We'd probably say "narrative" instead these days.

[4] (added 17 Sep) Some say a different kind of magical thinking from the one embedded in abstracted monotheisms is precisely what's needed. From David Abrams on The ecology of magic:

When the animate presences with whom we have evolved over several million years are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth that gave birth to us is defined as a soulless or determinate object devoid of sensitivity and sentience, then that wild otherness with which human life had always been entwined must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself--the only allowable refuge, in this world, for what is ineffable and unfathomable.

Images: Topsell's History of Four-footed Beasts (1607), the Manticore, simulation of Higgs Boson experiment.

Humans, chimeras, humility

Many bioconservatives are addicted to a notion of humanness that is very specific to Judeo-Christianity. [But] when you look at India and Thailand, Japan, Korea and China, and you ask should parents be able to use biotechnology to make their children more virtuous or more intelligent?, the vast majority in those countries say yes. But in Europe and North America people are very pessimistic. And that’s largely because of the Judeo-Christian hangover that there's a certain humanness was created by God at the beginning of time, and by playing around with this you’re playing God. There are natural boundaries beyond which it’s hubris to go. And those are western problems, for the most part. In eastern cultures you don’t have that problem. You have chimeric gods in Hinduism which are half-human, half-animal. In Buddhism you have the implicitly notion that humans can become more than the gods, achieve greater states of mind and physical abilities than the gods.

--James Hughes in conversation [1] on existential threats at Buddhist Geeks.

Yes, but hubris (ὕβρις) predates Judeo-Christianity. The word comes from a culture that had no problem imagining chimeric beings and gods that could take animal forms but still thought Man could over reach with terrible consequences. [2]

Who are most humble? Those who most skillfully prepare for the deepest and most catastrophic errors in their own beliefs and plans.

-- from the Twelve Virtues of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Notes

1. this is a rough transcript, not verbatim.

2. In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams argues that the basic ethical ideas possessed by the ancient Greeks were "in better condition" than modern ones

Hybrids and 'Nature 2.0'

Einstein's 'God' may not play dice, but Man certainly does:

Genetic mixing between eastern wolves and coyotes [in Canada] began more than a century ago after settlers cut down forests to plant crops. Coyotes, which like open spaces, arrived in traditional wolf territory just as wolf populations were plummeting thanks to gun-toting settlers and deforestation. With so few of their own kind left to mate with, eastern wolves turned to the next best thing - coyotes.

More recent human-induced change is sure to create new hybrids too, as species change their habits in attempts to adapt. Some wildlife experts, for example, suggest that warmer temperatures in northern Canada could be prompting grizzlies to spend less time hibernating and more time roaming outside their traditional range, so coming into contact with polar bears more often. In April 2006, an American sports hunter shot the first documented cross of a polar bear and a grizzly in the Northwest Territories. Though bear hybrids are not nearly as common as wolf/coyote crosses, the discovery of this "grizzlar" has prompted discussion among members of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, who have to come up with a recommendation for dealing with hybrids...Marco Festa-Bianchet, a biologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, who heads the group, describes the task as "godawfully complicated". [Richard] Hobbs [a restoration ecologist in Western Australia] agrees, but adds: "To say you shouldn't think about it is like putting your head in the sand."

-- from Nature 2.0: Redefining Conservation by Sharon Oosthoek. It's a good article but can only go so far in the space available. What, for example, about the jack pines of the boreal forest, which are reported to lack the natural defences of the lodgepole pine?

The tropical forests, including Amazonia (see, for example Royal Society B: Climate change and the fate of the Amazon), probably present at least as large and complex a set of challenges as the boreal forests (and drylands) mentioned by Oosthoek.

In 1984, before ideas like 'Nature 2.0' or 'adaptive conservation' developed, things looked probably different. But it's unlikely that what E.O. Wilson wrote then is altogether irrelevant now:

The forest [in Suriname into which I had wandered] was a tangled bank tumbling down to the grassland's border. Inside it was like a living sea through which I moved like a diver groping across a littered floor. But I knew that all around me bit and pieces, the individual organisms and their populations, were working with extreme precision. A few of the species were locked together in forms of symbiosis so intricate that to pull out one would bring others spiraling to extinction. Such is the consequence of adaptation by coevolution, the reciprocal genetic change of species that interact with each other through many life cycles. Eliminate just one kind of tree out of hundreds in such a forest, and some of its pollinators, leaf eaters, and wood-borers will disappear with it, then various parasites and key predators, and perhaps a species of bat or bird that depends on its fruit -- and when will the reverberation end? Perhaps not until a large part of the diversity of the forest collapses like an arch crumbling as the keystone is pulled away. More likely the effect will remain local, ending with a minor shift in the overall pattern of abundance among the numerous living species. In either case the effects are beyond the power of present day ecologists to predict. It is enough to work on the assumption that all of the details matter in the end, in some unknown by vital way.