A source of unending contemplation

Chapter 2: Barrel sponge

page 27 (marginal note): humans...tend to see the most symmetrical faces...as the most beautiful. As Christopher Hart notes in a review of Anatomies by Hugh Aldersey-Williams:

One of the most interesting things here is the material on human beauty. You would have thought this a complex and probably unanswerable mystery, but it seems that Sir Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, worked it out quite conclusively in 1908, and his findings have since been confirmed by American psychologists with the latest computer technology. (Galton also found that London had the prettiest women, Aberdeen the ugliest.) His method was brilliantly simple. Take any ordinarily attractive face and merge it photographically with another: the result will always be judged an improvement. Merge it again, at random, and you get the same result. The more you merge, the better. Human facial beauty is always about averages, the absence of any overly small or large features -- in other words blandness. It could even be defined as "something more sinister", says Aldersey-Williams, "the human face with the individuality washed out of it." It is a "crushingly unromantic" verdict, but at least the ladies of Aberdeen might find some consolation in it. They're not ugly, they're individual looking.

page 31: the great realm of single celled animals was first observed by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the 1670s but he had little idea what he was looking at.  Among the first people to examine the world of the very small, around fifty years earlier, had been Galileo Galilei. The microscope he used had less resolution than van Leeuwenhoek's -- it was able to bring a small insect but not a protist into focus.  Galileo's reaction charts the course that many of us still take on an encounter with the microscopic. He was,  as Philip Ball notes, both astonished and repelled:

I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration, among which the flea is quite horrible, the mosquito and the moth very beautiful… In short, the greatness of nature, and the subtle and unspeakable care with which she works is a source of unending contemplation.

In these words we can retrace a great scientist encountering realities that were new to him, reacting with a mix of repulsion (at a flea) and fascination (towards mosquito and butterfly), and moving towards a stance of wonder.

page 32: the Phanerozoic eon -- the age of visible life A recently discovered example of a very early "complex" creature is the Fuxhianhuiid, a 520-million-year-old arthropod with limbs under its head and a nervous system that extended past the head. Here is a slide show of the Weird youth of the animal kingdom.

page 34: Suilven See this movie.

page 34: microbes are the amazing performing fleas in the big top of life. The alga Galdieria sulphuraria does amazing tricks too.


This is the 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 which included Sponge and Slime and symphony and which appeared around UK publication. 


Image of spawning Barrel sponge: Mark Rosenstein

Slime and symphony

Eighth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
 
Chapter 2: Barrel Sponge

page 30: a sponge reef over an area from what is now Spain to Romania. See: glass reef.

page 31: Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold without a neuron, is able to memorize patterns of events. Ed Yong expands:

When we think about navigating the world, we might initially think of our own maps, or of the impressive migrations undertaken by familiar animals. But navigation can happen without much brainpower. Social insects like ants can create efficient trails linking their nests and sources of food, by laying down trails of pheromones in their wake. As more of them reach the food, they add their own pheromones, making the routes even more attractive to other ants. If the trails aren’t reinforced, the pheromones evaporate. That’s exactly like human hikers, whose collective feet trample effective trails into the landscape, while allowing boring or inefficient trails to overgrow.

page 32: Darwin's dilemma. In Chapter 10 of The Origin of Species Darwin concludes:

I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect. Of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved, and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing language, more or less different in the successive chapters, may represent the forms of life, which are entombed in our consecutive formations, and which falsely appear to have been abruptly introduced. On this view the difficulties above discussed are greatly diminished or even disappear.

A hundred and fifty years of further research and discovery have added more words and phrases, and abundantly confirmed Darwin's theory. See, inter alia, Martin Brasier (here and here). In a fine essay on Bristlecone pines, Ross Andersen writes:

To study geology is to be astonished at how hastily time reorders our planet’s surface, filling its craters, smoothing its mountains and covering its continents in seawater. Life is often the fastest to disintegrate in this constant churn of water and rock. The speed of biological decomposition ensures that only the most geologically fortunate of organisms freeze into stone and become fossils. The rest dissolve into sediment, leaving the thinnest of molecular traces behind.

page 33: Thea, a Mars-sized body. Recent research suggests different sizes for Theia: one smaller than Mars, and one four to five times bigger.

page 34: thinking about and feeling deep time. I was lucky to spend a couple of days earlier this week walking and exploring rocks and life in the relatively unspoiled Llyfnant river gorge (photo below).  As Robert Macfarlane and others who write so well about these issues rightly say, there are ways of knowing and experiencing/thoughts that only occur as a result of being on (in) the land.  Gnosis, adopted (rightly or wrongly) to mean knowledge experienced with all the bodily senses, is as important as episteme (taken to mean logically-derived knowledge).

page 35: tree of life. A schematic image with different emphases here.

Sponge

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

Chapter 2: Barrel sponge

At one point in City of God, Augustine envisages Creation as a sponge:

I visualized you, Lord, surrounding [creation] on all sides and permeating it but infinite in all directions, as if there were a sea everywhere and stretching through immense distances, a single sea which had within it a large but finite sponge, and the sponge was in every part filled from the immense sea. This is the kind of way in which I supposed your finite creation to be full of you, infinite as you are. [1]

page 26: Spongebob Squarepants is made-up but Spongiforma squarepantsii is real.

page 27: Proteus syndrome is a progressive condition. Children are usually born without any obvious deformities. Tumors of skin and bone growths appear as they age. The severity and locations of these various asymmetrical growths vary greatly but typically the skull, one or more limbs, and soles of the feet are affected.
     For those who curious as to some of the worst disorders that can occur to a human but who are not squeamish, there is Harlequin-type ichthyosis.  
     Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body by Armand Leroi is a good place to start learning about mutation and deformity.

Footnote

[1] The City of God VII iii (5) – (7)

Blobs of goo

Organisms rather like sponges may have been the first multicellular animals some 850 million years ago.


(see also: Sponge larvae: 'Your unlikely ancestors')

Glass reef

This glass sponge (class Hexactinellida) created dense reefs in ancient seas that were shallow and warm. "The delicate animals were thought to exist only as fossils", says an article about a new illustrated Atlas of the Oceans, "until explorers in the 1990s discovered large reefs of living relics." The Sponge Reef Project says:

Siliceous sponge reefs or mudmounds occur several times in Earth history and they culminate in the Late Jurassic where they formed a discontinuous deep-water reef belt extending more than 7000 km. This reef system was the largest biotic structure ever built on earth. The largest reef of today, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia (2000 km), is relatively small compared to the Jurassic sponge reef belt.