Spore's poor

P Z Myers on dumbification.

P.S.: 'Gonzo scientist'

Flower

An article by James O'Donahuge on the origin of angiosperms (flowering plants) reminds that human origin and continued existence depends on them:

Our distant primate ancestors thrived in the ancient flowering forests, while early humans got their big break on the grassy savannahs of East Africa. More recently, human populations have exploded thanks to the cultivation of cereals, vegetables and fruit. Every step of the way, our own successes have depended on angiosperms.

In the sacred cycad forest, it is the job of the Rain Queen to protect much older plants.


Encephalartos transvenosus

Trilobite beetle of Laos

Hat tip, Grrlscientist

Intelligence

Overcoming Bias has been featuring a discussion about intelligence, including most recently this, this and this. A perspective from deep ecology/radical environmentalism (call it what you will) might feature, for example, W.S. Merwin:

To the beasts there must often appear to be little essential distinction between the force of human intelligence and other kinds of force.

Do not speak - unless it improves on silence

Sperm whales may take as much pleasure in singing well-timed duets as humans do. New underwater recordings have shown that the whales carefully coordinate their song to match the calls of their singing partner.

Report here. Duets here and here.


On threats to cetaceans in general, Nicolas Entrup wrote back in August that:

We need a classification system and political action that is based on respect towards individual animals and focuses on the protection of marine mammals within their social units and their habitats.

[Further reading includes ten books on whales recommended by Philip Hoare.]

The 'LPI'

The Living Planet Index, which is an attempt to measure the health of worldwide biodiversity, showed an average decline of about 30% from 1970 to 2005 in 3,309 populations of 1,235 species. An index for the tropics shows an average 51% decline over the same period in 1,333 populations of 585 species.

-- 'eco-crunch' (BBC, Guardian, an earlier post [but a brief search at FT.com comes up with nothing at all].)

Echidna not

Hugh Warwick celebrates a prickly affair. Apparently there are 600 carers registered with the British Hedgehog Preservation Society. The number of Jeremy Clarkson-alikes who would squash the animals for fun is not stated.

Pliny wrote, wrongly, that porcupines were a species of hedgehog:

when [a porcupine] stretches the skin, it discharges [its spines like] so many missiles. With these it pierces the mouths of the dogs which are pressing hard upon it, and even sends its darts to some distance further.

Echidnas are not hedgehogs either. The largest known species, Zaglossus hacketti, was about the size of a sheep.

Islands of the Mind

Will Self's foot blog from Shetland has nice touches, such as:

I like islands – and I suspect most novelists do – because they’re discrete and legible, just like stories.

I happened to read this on the same day as stumbling again on Kathleen Jamie's Findings from the Monach Islands:

[The sound recordist] could tell a bird by a mark, a piped note, an attitude in the air. When I marvelled at this, he said identifying a bird was similar to making a poem or a finished piece of work from the kind of notes I stopped to make in my book, crouched down out of the wind.

Evil air, a frost-making stillness

Roger Cohen reports that things are getting so tight for New York bankers that one advised another he may even have to shoot the horses on his hobby farm upstate. The poor dear.

Puts me in mind of a scene in Michael Clayton, in which the hero finds a moment of respite when he approaches some horses high on a hill. I always wondered if its writer/director, Tony Gilroy, knew this poem by Ted Hughes.

In the fictional film, the horses embody -- perhaps -- something honest and elemental which is forgotten in the 'unreal' world of the city. For Cohen's real banker, by contrast, the horses are now an overhead, a liability to be liquidated.

An imagined non-being

As Death watches the cellist drink, [José] Saramago writes that she looked at the water “and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed.”

-- from a review by James Wood of Death with Interruptions.

The new new nature writing

Gwyneth Lewis questions the distinction nature-good/humans bad which, she says, remains the assumption behind much contemporary nature writing. And she praises a piece by Kathleen Jamie in a recent collection of nature writing in Granta which she finds otherwise mostly to be "old hat".

I agree that Jamie's piece is excellent (see, for example, my comments in Ghosts and shadows), and I agree that a binary good/bad frame, where it exists, is seldom useful [1].

But it's not enough, either, to say "cancer is as natural as a nightingale". Of course cancer is "natural"; but it is also a pathology, which birdsong is not [2].

Lewis also reports that a "seeming idealisation" of Inuit life by Gretel Ehrlich at a workshop she attended drew "savage protests" from other writers present. I wasn't there and don't want to pass judgement; but I think it's important not to be unreasonably sceptical of the remarkable qualities of many indigenous peoples, especially when witnessed by someone of Ehrlich's calibre. Sometimes, "savage protests" by those of us in rich societies are associated with projections of our own unease regarding the impacts of industrial civilisation (such as the ones described here) [3].

Elsewhere, Robert Butler calls for more careful thought on the "tricky relationship" between art and activism, and I second that.

I also like the passage Lewis quotes from Conemarra: Listening to the Wind by Tim Robinson, which she describes as nature writing of a high moral order:

Sometimes, I come back from...a walk [such as crossing Erisberg bog] with my head so empty it seems not a single thought or observation has passed through it all day and I feel I have truly seen things as they are when I'm not there to see them.

Footnotes:

[1] But I also think Lewis underrates many of the other articles in the Granta collection.

[2] Or at least often "natural". The dumping of carcinogens and other pollutants of kinds and at scales and rates unknown in the history of all known ecosystems is not a "natural" act (unless we decide to do away altogether with the distinction between human and non-human actions: a jettison that companies dumping toxic waste or pushing cigarettes on minors would be happy with). I do not mean to imply that all cancers are attributable to human activity. But some are, as are plenty of other human activities that disrupt and damage ecosystems that existed a long time before humans came along.

[3] That said, it is important not to sentimentalise: we need to listen when anthropologists and others tell us about the traits of peoples they work with that may seem less "attractive" in our eyes. A small example from the anthropologist Laura Rival. The Huaorani, she says, take a great interest in some animal species (such as some kinds of monkey), study them closely and treat them almost as kin. When they do kill them they talk of '"respectful killing". But there are other species in which they have no interest, treat without respect and kill without thought.

Image at top Tasmanian devil with face cancer.

The natural history of belief

An earlier post noted that religion appears to be one of six traits unique to humans. Among the contributing factors, suggests Pascal Boyer in a well balanced essay are that:

Humans are unique among animals in maintaining large, stable coalitions of unrelated individuals, strongly bonded by mutual trust.

and:

Unlike other social animals, humans are very good at establishing and maintaining relations with agents beyond their physical presence; social hierarchies and coalitions, for instance, include temporarily absent members.

I guess some primatologists will say Boyer underestimates the ability of some apes to maintain complex webs of relationship, and I'd add work by Scott Atran to his reading list.

P.S. Other comments on Boyer include this, this and this.

'Packs of robots will hunt down uncooperative humans'

It sounds like science fiction, but it's not:

What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.

We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.

P.S. In related news, SIAI reports on a meeting on Metrics for Human-Level AI sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

Little shop of hors d'oeuvres

by Banksy. More footage here.

By this part of the century few are left who believe
in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts
of them served on plates and the pleas from the slatted trucks
are sounds of shadows that possess no future
there is still game for the pleasure of killing
and there are pets for the children but the lives that followed
courses of their own other than ours and older
have been migrating before us...

-- from Green Fields by W.S. Merwin

De Rerum Originatione

Recent work has shown that the famous 1953 Miller-Urey experiment produced twenty-two amino acids, far more than originally thought (reports here, here and here).

Few, if any, other experiments using electricity to explore the origins and nature of life have yielded such striking results, and many have been way off. In 1836, for example (we were reminded by Pietro Corsi in a recent broadcast about vitalism), Andrew Crosse believed he had created living insects by 'electrocrystallization' [1].

The actual origins of life remain obscure, of course (see, for example, Was life forged in a quantum crucible? and Did life begin on a radioactive beach?). But the late Richard Southwood suggested five steps:

1. concentration of biologically important molecules (‘monomers’);

2. joining together of a series of monomers to form biological polymers (such as starch, collagen and cellulose);

3. formation of an outer membrane to provide a microenvironment where the special chemistry of life can occur;

4. development of a mechanism to provide energy; and

5. information transfer to permit cell replication.

Let Lazarus rejoice with Torpedo, who chills the life of the assailant through his staff.

Footnote

[1] Corsi also said that Hans Berger believed that his electroencephalograph revealed where, via electricity, the soul entered the body - an idea going back in one form or other to at least Benjamin Franklin.

An end to suffering...

...but probably not as the Buddha meant it. David Pearce of BLTC does a Hedonistic Imperative spiel for H+ magazine which appears to hold that, contra Aristotle, happiness is a mental state and not an activity:

In maybe three or four decades or so, we’ll be choosing such traits as the average hedonic set point of our children. Over time, I think allelic combinations…that leave their bearers predisposed to unpleasant states of consciousness – unpleasant states that were genetically adaptive in our ancestral environment – will be weeded out of the gene pool. For a very different kind of selection pressure is at work when evolution is no longer ‘blind’ and ‘random’, i.e. when rational agents design the genetic makeup of their future offspring in anticipation of its likely effects. In that sense, we’re heading for a post-Darwinian transition – ultimately I believe to some form of paradise-engineering.

Ataraxia or Eudaimonia may not be illusory or wrong as goals, but how intelligent, compassionate and wise would the designers of this imagined world be? What about unpleasant states of consciousness that do not arise because of genetically adaptive responses shaped by ancestral environments? And how plausible is this?:

If we want to, we can use depot contraception, redesign the global ecosystem, and rewrite the vertebrate genome to get rid of suffering in the rest of the natural world too. For non-human animals don't need liberating; they need looking after... Just as we don't feed terrified live rodents to snakes in zoos - we recognize that's barbaric - will we really continue to permit cruelties in our terrestrial wildlife parks because they are "natural"?

So we contemplate a future in which (say) tigers and eagles are dosed with Meat 2.0 and no longer hunt? It's almost enough to send one back to the anecdote retold by Adam Phillips in Darwin's Worms. Asked "don't you think there's too much suffering in the world?", the composer John Cage answered, "No, I think there's just the right amount".


(photo from when eagles go bad...)

P.S. 22 Oct: I just learned via Andrew Sullivan that Brian Appleyard homes in on the same passage from David Pearce as I do and has even less time for the argument.

You, the living

We have so retreated into molecular biology that we no longer stop to consider what entire cells do. It's almost as if you were putting the notes of a musical score under the microscope without ever hearing the symphony.

-- Brian Ford plays the sound of signals inside cells.

At war with nature itself

Joe Romm on Sarah Palin's axis of evil.

(Actually, I'm glad she's standing up to those atheist, gay, Muslim, socialist, European Belugas. Sing, baby, sing.)

Otter tracks

The print version of William Dalrymple's review of three books on early medieval art contains a beautiful illumination from the late 12th century showing St Cutbert praying in the sea, 'with his feet subsequently dried by otters'. I haven't found a version of the picture online, but here is the view from Bamburgh beach from where he is thought to have waded in.

Dalrymple notes, incidentally, that the 'Celtic' wheel cross is Coptic in origin.

P.S. The eider duck, known in Northumberland as "Cuddy's" duck, is said to be the first bird in the world to have been given conservation protection, when St Cuthbert offered the eider duck sanctuary on the Farne Islands in the seventh century.

Croc chow

Koobi Fora crocodiles reached up to 7.5 metres long, bigger than any living crocodile. The australopithecines who lived in the area were smaller than the Olduvai hominids so they would have had less chance against the predators.

-- from Giant crocs preyed on our ancestors.

Would a lucky australopithecine survivor have had any tips for Val Plumwood?