Conclusion

Conclusion

page 377: mappa mundi. As Caleb Scharf writes in Gravity's Engines, “Our current map of the known universe contains a vast amount of information, yet it is barely a scrap of parchment compared to the full atlas.”

page 377: a gardener wants to...see into the future. “The trick is to live in the moment and in the future at the same time,” says Todd May. (We need to believe in life before death.)

page 379: never...finished. In the preface to his Dictionary (1755), Samuel Johnson wrote that:

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.”

page 379: fully human. David Deutsch says people or entities that are capable of creating new explanations are, ultimately, the most important thing in the universe. I would say that one of the most important things about humans is that we find or create meaning and value. 

page 379: Regarding Occupy Martin Sandbu writes:

...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.

Image of Milky Way Over Ghost Panel via APOD

This is the twenty-ninth 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. 

The 30 tonne primate

Chapter 27: Zebrafish

page 370: what we may...learn. Recent advances include visualizations of the activity of nearly every cell in the larval zebrafish brain and of live memory retrieval in the whole [adult] brain.

page 372: immortalist scenario. Todd May observes:

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.

page 373: rate and manner of consumption. The total energy usage of an average person in the U.S., Canada, the Eurozone or Japan is equivalent to the biological metabolic rate of a hypothetical 30-ton primate.

page 373: wiser with...technology, not subservient. Evgeny Mozorov quotes Michel Serres: “Neither information nor a drug fix ever gives any happiness when you have it, but they will make you miserable when you don’t.” Michael Lewis quips “The dystopia in which computers...come to rule mankind has actually happened in the world of finance.”  John Lanchester quotes T J Clark: “the essence of modernity, from the scripture-reading spice merchant to the Harvard iPod banker sweating in the gym, is a new kind of isolate obedient ‘individual’ with technical support to match.’ ” On the augmented awareness made possible by information technology, Tom Chatfield writes:

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.

page 376: continuous revelation.  Here's David Hinton on Lao Tzu:

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...

This is the twenty-eighth 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

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.

Strange world

Sea pig

Chapter 25: Xenophyophore

page 343: undersea mountains, abyssal plains. Deeper still are trenches, which teem with microscopic life forms.

page 344: seabed sediment also holds radioactive iron ejected by a supernova 2.2 million years ago and preserved in the fossilized remains of bacteria.

page 344:  Dali painting. See image above.

page 349: Julian Barbour [suggests] time does not flow like a stream.  Lee Smolin says we need a new starting point for explaining the directionality of time. A friendly critic responds here.

page 350: perhaps...it is matter itself that is truly astonishing.  John Gray writes:

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.

This is the twenty-sixth 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.

Owl at dusk

Horned owl

Chapter 24: Xenoglaux 

page 334: tipping point.  Some scientists say an Arctic thaw may be the first in a cascade.  "Perhaps the worst news of all is that there may be no warning of impending flips." But there is also push-back against the idea.

page 335: sixth extinction.  Today's extinctions, say some scientists, may be the result of damage humans did in the early 20th century; our own extinction legacy could ultimately be far worse.   There has been excitement this year about the possibilities of de-extinction (also here). Cooler heads point to ecological and other challenges.

page 336: the consequences of climate changes for species survival, abundance, distribution are hard to predict, and likely to be complex and variable. A short article on birds is here. Generally, about one third of animal species are predicted to be affected. And disruption can travel the other way:  "wiping out top predators like lions, wolves and sharks is tragic, bad for ecosystems – and can make climate change worse."

page 337: owls fascinate humans. A recent science-based reason being the discovery of how they are able to turn their heads through 270 degrees.

page 337: horned owl. According to David Abram, the great horned owl has long been regarded as the preeminent prophet or seer among birds.

page 339: protect and restore the beautiful...and create new possibilities for future flourishing.  A shift from trying to conserve individual species to protecting ecosystems as a whole (and making some hard choices about which to protect) is underway. Scientific paper here, press report here. about See also Feral by George Monbiot.


This is the twenty-fifth 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.

Floating in a most peculiar way

Chapter 23: Waterbear

page 322 A greater and more durable [human] presence in space. John Fallows looks at a future mining the Moon and living on Mars. John Quiggin has fun with the arithmetic of interstellar travel.

page 322: Tardigrades in space. Not only the adults but waterbear eggs can survive in space.

page 325: no [animal] apart from Waterbears.  But scientists have found a way of giving insects a coat of armour that may allow them to survive the vacuum of space

page 325: life elsewhere in the solar system.  And other solar systems? Well, not only do we live on an unusual planet but we also live in an unusual solar system.

See also Stranger things in heaven and earth.

Hurricane at Saturn's north pole

This is the twenty-fourth 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.

Conjuring with rainbow names and handfuls of sea-spray

Mnemiopsis leidyi

Chapter 22: Venus's Girdle

page 316: [Cteonophore] lineage is uncertain. A major for reason for this is that their DNA appears to be evolving extremely fast.

page 316 (marginal note): bioluminescent glow. A readable introduction to remarkable  bioluminescent creatures in the ocean here.  Another good resource here.

page 319: animal pleasure is not something from which the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has shied away. In the case of bonobos “the novelty and innovation never seems to end”:

“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.’ ”

This is the twenty-third 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.

Unicorns

Rhinoceros beetle

Chapter 21: Unicorn

page 307: Unicorn's horn was the Viagra of its day. Rhino horn is the "natural" Viagra of ours. In February it was reported that a rhinoceros has been killed every 11 minutes since the beginning of the year. In April the last 15 rhinos in a Mozambique park were killed by poachers.

 


page 308: An informative post on narwhals today at Why Evolution is True.

page 308: Sawfishes are arguably the most threatened family of marine fishes in the world. See: Exaltation to extinction.

page 311: humans...kill many tens of millions of sharks every year.  See this graphic.

page 311: obligate metaphorists. Robert Sapolsky elborates here. 


This is the twenty-second 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.

Thorny devil

Escher meets Ouroboros. Armadillo girdled lizard, southern Africa

Chapter 20: Thorny Devil

Page 297: analogous systems...in other arid places. Old growth forest in Tennessee is not exactly arid, but for some creatures there moisture is hard to find. In The Forest Unseen, David George Haskell notes:

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 is the twenty-first 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.

Sea butterfly

Chapter 19: Sea butterfly

page 285: the oceans have absorbed...much of the additional heat. See Missing heat found in oceans, global warming has accelerated in past 15 years

page 285: change in ocean acidity.  A recent report here. And Julia Whitty summarizes ten key findings.

page 286: in addition to cyanobacteria, most known species of bacterial plankton can be found everywhere. 

page 287: diatoms...years of study and appreciation.  Mary E. Harrington wrote a poem to Gonyaulax polyedra.

page 293: [apparent] reduction in the worldwide primary productivity of phytoplankton. Further research includes an ambitious new global survey.

page 293: plastic.  Plastic fragments are killing sperm whales and other species.

Image from Planktonology.

P.S. 14 May: Amazing sea butterflies are the ocean's canary in a coal mine.


This is the twentieth 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.

The burning archangels under the sea

Chapter 18: Right whale

page 270: Balaenidae.   The evolution of baleen whales may be linked to the freezing of Antarctica from about 34 million years ago 

page 271: Bowheads...have the biggest mouths on the planet. And inside the mouth is a 4 metre (12ft) brain-cooling penis-ish thing, which no one noticed until 2012 or 2013.

page 278: reduced noise. See recent news story Whale benefit from action on ocean noise.

P.S. a "world first" account of a Orcas attacking Sperm whales here.

This is the nineteenth 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.

Quetzalcoatlus

'Let us deliver mankind from the ancient, universal tyranny...of gravity!'

Chapter 17: Quetzalcoatlus

Choosing an animal beginning with Q was hard. The quokka would have been a happy choice.

page 248: the Great bustard may be heavy but ever year it migrates 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles).

page 249: California condors were brought to the brink of extinction, in part, because of lead poisoning, and lead poisoning remains a significant threat today. Recent research suggests that condors in California remain chronically exposed to harmful levels of lead.

page 256: Louise at Lulu's bookshelf notes that Objective Ministries is reported to be a fake. When I researched and wrote this chapter in 2008/9 I wasn't sure, and wrote tongue in cheek. In line with Poe's law, there are real beliefs which look equally absurd. See for example here and here.

page 259: balloonist. Seamus Perry reviews Richard Holmes's delightful history.

This is the eighteenth 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.

Pufferfish

Ocean sunfish

Chapter 16: Pufferfish 

page 242: appetite...out of control: especially when food is painstakingly engineered to addict. "Salt+Fat²/Satisfying crunch + Pleasing mouth feel = A food designed to addict."

page 243: unholy and savage. Truth as metaphor here.  In Immoderate Greatness William Ophuls quotes Seneca:

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.

P.S. 6 May George Monbiot riffs on the pathology of the super rich and the damage it does.

This is the seventeenth 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.

Octopus

Chapter 15: Octopus

The New York Review of Books has published an excerpt from this chapter.

page 229: a bleached version of Marge Simpson. A photo of Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis here.

page 223: giant squid. It has been suggested that Architeuthis dux is actually as many as different 21 species.  Recent research indicates that it is one only one, with global distribution.

page 236: a lot to learn from the octopus.  Cuttlefish, too: they can generate their own patterns even on backgrounds they have never encountered before, and they can do this with lightning speed.

This is the sixteenth 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.

Nautilus

Chapter 14: Nautilus

page 213: nothing so odd will do long. More about Nipponites here.

page 222: Motion pictures...have enhanced and altered our sense of what it is to be.  In Street by James Nares, each six-second pan of a New York scene is distended to two minutes. It may, writes J. Hoberman, "suggest an updated version of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 Koyaanisqatsi...actually, it is quite the opposite." According to Nares himself, Street is intended "to give the dreamlike impression of floating through a city full of people frozen in time."

In 1926 Virginia Woolf wrote

[The moving pictures] become not more beautiful in the sense in which pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life?...Watching the boat sail and the wave break, we have time to open our minds wide to beauty and register on top of it the queer sensation — this beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether we behold it or not.

Roundhay Garden Scene, 1888.
This is fifteenth 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.

Flame-knee, Graysmoke, Hobo

Audax jumping spider. See page 200

Chapter 13: Mystaceus, a jumping spider

page 199 (marginal note): approximately 110 families of spiders. In Field Notes from a Hidden City, Esther Woolfson delights in the names given to various species:

Who could fail to be entranced by the Cloud-living, the Dew-drop, or the Garden-ghost spider? Who could resist the allure of the Flame-knee spider or the Fireleg, the Graysmoke, the Purple-bloom, the Red-bloom, the Filmydome, the Starburst or the Rose. Is there anyone who, on hreading the names of the Robber Baron Cave meshweaver, the Hobo, the Government Canyon Bat Cave meshweaver, the Tuscon recluse doesn't hear the score of a spaghetti western...?

Spiders are often among the first animals to colonise new habitats.

page 202: memory. Some scientists speculate that the way the brain records and remembers movement in space may be the basis of all memory.


This is fourteenth 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.

Leatherback

 

Chapter 12: Leatherback 

page 186: throat...lined with sharp...spikes. See photo here.  Jellyfish are bread and butter. See photos here.

page 191: A study published in January estimated that only about 500 Leatherbacks are now nesting at their last large site in the Pacific.

This is thirteenth 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.

Kìrìpʰá-kò and Tʰìk’ìlí-ko

Greater honeyguide

Chapter 11: Kìrìpʰá-kò and Tʰìk’ìlí-ko, Honey badger and Honeyguide

page 172 (marginal note): torture. The search for justice continues.

page 174: Crazy Nastyass Honeybadger. At the time of writing the video is approaching 60 million views.

page 176: A clip showing a Honeyguide interacting with humans (well-filmed but with clunky narration) is here.

page 180: roam the delusion of words comes from a translation by David Hinton of Wang Wei's Offhand Poem. Here is a poem titled Elder-Cliff Grove:

At the mouth of Elder-Cliff, a rebuilt home
among old trees, broken remnants of willow.

Those to come: who will they be, their grief
over someone's long-ago life here empty. 

See also Badger and bird

This is the twelfth 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.

Monkeys with money and guns

Mandrill

Chapter 10 Japanese macaque

page 154: female assisted by a male to whom she grants privileges. In The Serpent's Promise, Steve Jones writes:

A male macaque was once observed to mate forty times in a day, which was more than the champion stud among thousands of men interviewed by Alfred Kinsey for his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male managed in a week.

page 162: More on The Descent of Man at Five Books. Frans de Waal develops the point. As a recent review puts it

Mr de Waal’s central concern is to attack the idea that what humans call morality stands apart from, and above, anything found in the “lower” animals. Most people, he notes, accept that their bodies evolved from those of man’s predecessors, but the conceits of religion and philosophy make it much harder to accept that the same is true of human minds and behaviour, no matter how good the evidence.

page 166: Machiavelli's own beliefs [may be] better reflected in his Discources on Livy. Would Isaiah Berlin agree? 

Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality—the hypocrisies of ordinary life—but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values...Yet he is, in spite of himself, one of the makers of pluralism, and of its—to him—perilous acceptance of toleration.

page 168: [a] book less amenable to sectarian interpretation. Sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing are central to the Hebrew bible, notes Stephen Pinker in chapter 1 of The Better Angels of Our Nature. [1] For example:

In Deuteronomy 20 and 21, God gives the Israelites a blanket policy for dealing with cities that don't accept them as overlords: smite the males with edge of the sword and abduct the cattle, women and children. Of course, a man with a beautiful new captive faces a problem: since he has just murdered her parents and brothers, she may not be in the mood for love. God anticipates this nuisance and offers the following solution: the captor should shave her head, pare her nails and imprison her in his house for a month while she cries her eyes out. Then he may go in and rape her.

page 164: a high value on...fairness. See monkeys stay away from mean people.

page 168: endangered species. A recent UNEP reports notes that nearly 3,000 chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans are illegally killed or stolen from the wild each year. A story today on the plus side: there may be more habitat for an endangered cao vit gibbon on the border of China and Vietnam than feared.


Footnote [1]. A reported fall in violent crime in Britain looks like data that supports Pinker's central thesis.

This is the eleventh 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.

Iridogorgia

Chapter 9: Iridogorgia 

page 134: symmetry. Mathematical forms too. Jason Padgett, a number theorist and artist with Acquired Savant Syndrome, says "I see bits and pieces of the Pythagorean theorem everywhere. Every single little curve, every single spiral, every tree is part of that equation."

page 140 the great variety of nature at play: magna ludentis naturae varietas. John Tyler Bonner writes:

All of evolutionary change is built on a foundation of randomness. It provides the necessary material for natural selection which then does indeed bring forth  the order our inner mind so actively craves.

page 143: three short texts into new bacterium. At the time Charlie Brooker called it the world's most pretentious bacterium. Less than three years later it looks quite feasible, and perhaps even useful, to store all of Shakespeare on DNA.

page 146: viruses... in seawater are the commonest thing on Earth. See also An infinity of viruses.

page 148: what is beauty and why does it matter? Reflecting on Neuroaesthetics and the Trouble with Beauty by Bevil R. Conway and Alexander Rehding, Philip Ball writes:

Equating an appreciation of art with an appreciation of beauty is misleading. A concept of beauty (not necessarily ours today) was certainly important for, say, Renaissance artists, but until recently it had almost vanished from the discourse of contemporary art. Those who like the works of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys or Robert Rauschenberg generally do not appreciate them for their beauty. Scientists as a whole have always had conservative artistic tastes; a quest for beauty betrays that little has changed. Even the narrower matter of aesthetics is not only about beauty. It has conventionally also concerned taste and judgement. Egalitarian scientists have a healthy scepticism of such potentially elitist ideas, and it is true that arbiters of taste may be blinkered and dogmatic: witness, for example, the blanket dismissal of jazz by Theodor Adorno, a champion of modernism. But the point is not whether aesthetes are right or wrong, but whether they can offer us stimulating and original ways of seeing, listening and experiencing.

Lisa Randall, by contrast, says "the beauty of science - in the long run -- is its lack of subjectivity."

This is the tenth 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.

[Image of Malwiya minaret by Stuart Freedman]