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.

Spark of thought

...albeit in the brain of a zebrafish:

At first glance it looks like an oddly shaped campfire: smoky grey shapes light up with red sparks and flashes. But the video actually represents a different sort of crackle — the activity of individual neurons across a larval fish brain. It is the first time that researchers have been able to image an entire vertebrate brain at the level of single cells.

More from Mo Costandi

Man is only wholly Man when he is playing

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

Chapter 27: Zebrafish

page 374: singularity. Gary Marcus critiques Ray Kurzweil's theory of mind and argues artificial intelligence has some way to go. Evan Goldstein has looked at the strange neuroscience of immortality in some depth.  Max Tegmark says:

[the singularity] could be the best or worst thing ever to happen to life as we know it, so if there's even a 1% chance that there'll be a singularity in our lifetime, I think a reasonable precaution would be to spend at least 1% of our GDP studying the issue and deciding what to do about it. Yet we largely ignore it, and are curiously complacent about life as we know it getting transformed. What we should be worried about is that we're not worried.

page 374: play. Attributed to Heraclitus:"We are most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of the child at play." In the final chapter of Religion in Human Evolution, Robert Bellah quotes from Friedrich Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man:

Certainly nature has given even to the creatures without reason more than the bare necessities of life, and cast a gleam of freedom over the darkness of animal existence. When a lion is not gnawed by hunger and no beast is challenging him to battle, his idle energy creates for itself an object; he fills the echoing desert with his high-spirited roaring, and his exuberant power enjoys itself in purposeless display...The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is the mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity.

Schiller -- notes Bellah -- contrasts “the sanction of need, or physical seriousness” with the “sanction of superfluity, or physical play,” but suggests that human play, though beginning in physical play, can move to a level of aesthetic play in which the full spiritual and cultural capacities of humans can be given free reign:

Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a Man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing.

Also of note is what Schiller says about play and time:

The sense impulse requires variation, requires time to have a content; the form impulse requires the extinction of time, and no variation, Therefore the impulse in which both are combined (allow me to call it provisionally the play impulse), this play impulse would aim at the extinction in time and the reconciliation of becoming with absolute being, of variation with identity.

(Added 30 Jan: Play not work brings us fully to life, says Mark Rowlands)

page 375: cell biology. Since I finished writing even more ambitious visualizations than those at molecularmovies.com have been created. Our Secret Universe includes some clips of an astonishing film broadcast by the BBC in October 2012.

Zebrafish

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

Chapter 27: Zebrafish

page 369: watching the development. Here is an example of time-lapse of the first 24 hours.

page 369: investigate anything... Zebrafish have recently been made to grow 'pre-hands' instead of fins. Here's an outline of why the zebrafish is many researchers' favourite animal. (Added 24 Jan: as mentioned in an earlier note, zebrafish are being trapped in a virtual world provide a window into complex brain connections.)

page 370: since this book was written Craig Venter and his colleagues have announced the development of the first software simulation of the lifecycle of an entire organism:

The simulation, which runs on a cluster of 128 computers, models the complete life span of the cell at the molecular level, charting the interactions of 28 categories of molecules — including DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules known as metabolites, which are generated by cell processes.

page 370: reprogramming the code of life. As one article puts it:

DNA is passé. Synthetic biologists have invented an array of new molecules called XNAs that boast all the talents of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA), as well as some special powers. XNAs could allow scientists to safely create life-forms in the laboratory that do not depend on DNA to survive and evolve.

page 371: some harbingers of change are considered artistic or creative.  See, for example, The unnatural art of synthetic biology, A museum of creatures re-engineered by humans, Bio-artists who tinker with tools of science. Here is a picture of Joris Laarman's Halflife Lamp, which is illuminated by hamster cells modified with firefly DNA.

 page 371: a sensational earlier life partly captured in the classic headline Now she has her pit bull cloned. But once she manacled a Mormon for sex.

page 373: reverse engineer dinosaurs which does, of course look like rather a mad thing to do, as does recreating Neanderthals.

page 373: scenarios for the future of humanity. Gary Marcus is a long way from addressing them all, but is pretty wise this far:

Edison certainly didn’t envision electric guitars, and even after the basic structure of the Internet had been in place for decades, few people foresaw Facebook or Twitter. It would be mistake for any of us to claim that we know exactly what a world full of robots, 3-D printers, biotech, and nanotechnology will bring. But, at the very least, we can take a long, hard look at our own cognitive limitations (in part through increased training in metacognition and rational decision-making), and significantly increase the currently modest amount of money we invest in research in how to keep our future generations safe from the risks of future technologies.

A virtual world

This may be the first case of an animal living entirely within a virtual reality system:

Florian Engert at Harvard University...has built one of the most sophisticated VR systems to date and his zebrafish larvae have spent all of their lives inside it.

-- report