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.

Xenophyophore

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

Chapter 25: Xenophyophore

page 342: Titan. See for example this report from NASA/JPL. Another candidate is Enceladus. Mars remains an enigma.

page 342: single-celled organisms. Charles Taylor says that it is not entirely appropriate to label Xenophyphores in this way. "Rather, [they] have a coenocytic or hyphal organisation, with numerous nuclei scattered throughout long branching cytoplasmic tubes."

page 344: Dali painting. The artist Rona Lee is among those who want to transform our feelings for the bottom of the sea. Neptune Canada has a Flickr stream of deep sea beasties.

page 346: Evidence for bilaterians dates back some 585 million years.

page 347: Rock is not the opposite of life but its essential partner. See, for example, a blog such as Written in the Rocks.

page 349: all stories originat[e] from a marvelous stone. In The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges, it is reported that "the Faithful who gather at the mosque of Amr, in Cairo, are acquainted with the fact that the entire universe lies inside one of the stone pillars that ring its central court." For an attempt at an explanation based in evolutionary theory see Brian Boyd's On the Origin of Stories.

page 350: perhaps consciousness is the least mysterious thing...and it is matter itself that is truly astonishing. “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Here is a note on consciousness and here's something on dreaming and reality.) 'It from bit', wrote John Archibald Wheeler. But what is 'bit'? James Gleick quotes Wheeler as follows:

“Deplore? No celebrate the absence of a clean clear definition of the term 'bit' as an elementary unit in the establishment of meaning...If and when we learn how to combine bits of fantastically large numbers to obtain what we call existence, we will know better what we mean by both bit and by existence.” This is the challenge that remains, and not just for scientists: the establishment of meaning.

Recent experiments suggest there is a way to go:

[Perhaps] 'particle' and 'wave' are concepts we latch on to because they seem to correspond to guises of matter in our familiar, classical world. But attempting to describe true quantum reality with these or any other black-or-white concepts is an enterprise doomed to failure.

It's a notion that takes us straight back into Plato's cave, says Radu Ionicioiu. In the... allegory, prisoners shackled in a cave see only shadows of objects cast onto a cave wall, never the object itself. A cylinder, for example, might be seen as a rectangle or a circle, or anything in between. Something similar is happening with the basic building blocks of reality. "Sometimes the photon looks like a wave, sometimes like a particle, or like anything in between," says Ionicioiu. In reality, though, it is none of these things. What it is, though, we do not have the words or the concepts to express.

Deep dive

I wrote in an earlier post that few creatures are as strange as the Ediacarian biota. One candidate may be Paleodictyon nodosum (perhaps a xenophyophore). The only known visible feature associated with this being:

consists of tiny holes arranged in six-sided patterns that look curiously like the hearts of Chinese checkers boards. [Peter A. Rona] has photographed thousands of the hexagons and found that large ones have 200 or 300 holes.


Dr Rona's inability to catch the creature itself means that even though scientists have given it the fossil’s name, they still vigorously debate what it is. The main question is whether the hexagonal patterns are burrows or body parts, vacant residences or animal remains.

-- from Diving deep for a living fossil.

A bearer of foreign bodies

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings was having trouble with beings beginning with X until Tom Goreau suggested the xenophyophores, giant single celled organisms that build structures from their own excrement.

Most of these rarely discussed and poorly understood organisms, including Syringammina fragilissima live on the seabed; but at least one species, Occultammina profunda, is infaunal, burying itself in the sediment.

Earlier this month Zoltan Sylvester, a skeptical geologist, blogged on trace fossils called graphoglyptids that may encode the tracks left by Paleodictyon, an ancient infaunal xenophyophore. These are almost perfect honeycomb-like hexagonal patterns:


The patterns are so striking, he says, that it wouldn't be surprising if the uninformed were to seize on them as 'crop circles of the deep sea'. But the most widely accepted idea in the scientific community is that they are 'farming traces':

In other words, these guys (whatever they might be, nobody really knows) create well aerated open burrow systems a few millimeters below the sea floor, with multiple openings to the sediment surface, so that chemosynthetic bacteria move in to get the necessary oxygen to oxidize methane and hydrogen sulphide, their favorite food.

Through idle free-association a long way from science, xenophyphores put me in mind of the Dowager Empress, driven (in W G Sebald's account) to absorb all, so obsessed by death that she swallowed powdered pearl every morning as an elixir of invulnerability, and stifled her empire by trying to hold all still. But the association is vague and the differences are huge. Not least, Xenophyophores thrive abundantly while the Empress died of dysentery after eating a double helping of her favourite crab apple with clotted cream pudding.