Brave new world

As Kevin Kelly noted in February (Collapistarians), there has been no shortage of gloom this year. But this blog concludes 2009 with an unfashionable observation from Charles Darwin:

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may given him hope for a still higher destiny in future. [1]

Owen Flanagan echoes this after a fashion here:

The twenty-first century will give us naturalists our best chance so far at explaining what it means to be a human animal and how we might go forward guided by wisdom as we explore some of the promising futures among the multifarious psychopoetic spaces open to us. It is a gift, a matter of great cosmic contingency, that we are self-understanding animals, enchanted beings, who can understand and guide our lives to places and ways of being that are more truthful, beautiful, and good. [2]

Footnotes

[1] The Descent of Man (1872), quoted in Science, 2 Oct 2009

[2] from One enchanted being: neuroexistentialism and meaning (2009) by Owen Flanagan

Related post: Bounded in a nutshell

That was the year

The BBC notes wildlife discoveries and cleverest animals of the year.

Multitudes

The Foraminifera Sculpture Park in Guangzhou Province officially opened this month and is dedicated to large sculptures of these single-cell marine organisms. Marine geologist Bilal Haq of the National Science Foundation got the idea of a sculpture park a decade ago after seeing palm-sized models of foraminifera in the lab of marine biologist Zheng Shouyi at the Institute of Oceanology in Qingdao, China. Zheng persuaded local authorities to pursue the idea. The 114 sculptures were carved out of marble, granite, and sandstone.

-- a random sample in Science.

D'Arcy Thompson wrote of the Foraminifera:

In few other groups, perhaps only among the Radiolaria, do we seem to possess so nearly complete a picture of all the possible transitions between form and form, and of the whole branching system of the evolutionary tree: as though little or nothing of it had ever perished, and whole web of life, past and present, were as complete as ever.

He adds:

in days gone by I used to see the beach of a little Connemara bay bestrewn with millions upon millions of foraminiferal shells, simple Lagenae, less simple Nodosariae, more complex Rotiliae: all drifted by wave and gentle current from their sea-cradle to their sandy grave: all lying bleached and dead: one more delicate than another, but all (or vast multitudes of them) perfect and unbroken.

Image: Micropolitan

An inordinate fondness for microbes

By one rough estimate there may be 150 million species of microbes.

In years to come scientists hope to have genomes of about 1,500 analyzed for a new encyclopedia.

"It's a dent, but a small dent".

-- from Catologing the vast world of microbes.

Time has a wallet at his back

All of us are told, usually by someone who is just about to pick our pockets, that self-preservation is the first law of nature.

-- from The origin of death by George Wald.

Triage

Not one of the [more than 150?] nations signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity has fulfilled its pledge, according to a too-short report on Today.

The same report has Andrew Bounford championing the hotspot approach to protecting biodiversity and Partha Dasgupta just about having time to say that this approach risks missing the link between the erosion of biodiversity and poverty. Greater concentration at the local level of villages may be more important, says Dasgupta.

P.S. Jan '10, A new paper by Dasgupta: Nature's role in sustaining economic development.

Helter skelter

When we look at residence times for protected areas, which we define as the amount of time it will take current climate conditions to move across and out of a given protected area, only 8% of our current protected areas have residence times of more than 100 years.

--Healy Hamilton quoted in report on the study Climate change puts ecosystems on the run.

'The cranium is the space traveler's helmet...'

Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the ego.

-- from Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, quoted in Lit by Mary Karr.

Jaron Lanier suggests an advanced alien life form would see humans differently:

You know, this place is kind of touching, but mostly it’s just sad. You 
know these earthlings—they call themselves people. They are—you’re not 
going to believe this, and you might be grossed out, but here’s what they are 
like. They’re separated from each other in these sacks of skin. There are 
often many feet of air between them when they are communicating. Just atmosphere. Yet they are conscious, they form relationships, they think, they 
long for one another. But they aren’t connected. They can’t do mind melds 
like us. So what do they do—okay, here comes the gross part. Just hold on to 
your stomach and try not to get too grossed out. So there is an orifice and it’s 
an orifice that they eat with and they breathe with it and they can make 
these weird sounds out of this same orifice. Now I told you not to get sick, 
okay? Space exploration is a tough game, and you just have to deal with it, 
okay? If you can’t deal with it, get interested in something else. 



Then they have these other orifices, called ears, where sounds go in, 
and they have this code system and they communicate that way. It’s awkward 
and it’s weird and it’s disgusting, but it’s what they have. I mean, we can only sort of feel for them.

Sea pig

-- a holothurian among creatures studied by BAS (BBC highlights here)

Little wonders

Two of the stories in the news:

Microbes survive 30,000 years inside a salt crystal

Working as a team, bacteria spin gears

Towards the pebbled shore

As individuals, we blink on and off in the vortex of time with appalling evanescence, each of us, much like a firefly’s butt on a warm summer night. We come and go like waves on a beach...

-- from A Very Brief History of Eternity by Carlos Eire.

Humans are beings in time who are thrust into a world in which the first universal feature of being in time in the world is that you are an unfolding, not a thing in an unfolding, but an unfolding that is part of a greater unfolding.

-- from Buddhist Persons and Eudaimonia^Buddhist by Owen Flanagan.

If some sort of transcendence is achieved beyond today’s understanding of human nature, it will not be through some individual becoming a superman. In Jaron Lanier’s Prevail Scenario, transcendence is social, not solitary. The measure is the extent to which many transform together.

-- from Radical Evolution by Joel Gareau.

A mangled bank

Pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now.

-- from an interesting piece by Ross Douthat on Avatar and film culture. But he misses the point that although human life is often tragic there is not necessarily something tragic in vesting concern in the health of a whole ecosystem.

For example, Greg Carr's attempt to restore Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique (as reported by Philip Gourevitch) may fail but the tragedy would be not to try.

P.S. 13 Jan: Carlo Artieri on the Biology of Avatar, Ben Schott on the Na’vi language and George Monbiot on invisible genocides.

P.P.S 14 Jan: Tetrapod Zoology guide here.

The Gorgon Stare

Just in time for the spring offensives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Air Force should deliver the marvelously named Gorgon Stare sensor.

The first three Gorgon Stare pods, mounted on Reaper MQ-​​9s, will make to Afghanistan around March or April... Gorgon Stare uses five electro-​​optical and four infrared cameras to take pictures from different angles. Those are put together to build a larger picture. That provides more detail and more flexibility than the current cameras, but perhaps its biggest advantage will be the ability to provide 10 video images to 10 different operators at the same time.

--DoD Buzz via TomDispatch

Life on fire

At any moment a human body contains only about 10 grams of ATP but we consume and make our own body weight of the molecule each day.

-- from In the Beat of a Heart by John Whitefield (2006)

This fire stolen from heaven, this torch of Prometheus, does not only represent an ingenious and poetic idea. It is a faithful picture of the operations of nature, at least for animals that breath: one may therefore say with the ancients, that the torch of life is lighted at the moment the infant breathes for the first time, and is extinguished only on his death.

-- Antoine Lavoisier (1789)

It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.

-- Heraclitus (circa 535–475 BC)

A godwit's flight

The bar-tailed godwit flies 6,800 miles each year from Alaska to New Zealand without food, water or rest...and the semipalmated sandpiper, small enough to fit into a teacup, migrates between South America and the Arctic, “through gales and hurricanes, over mountains and ocean.”

-- Theodore Cross's Waterbirds


Bar-tailed godwits cover the distance in eight days, which means a continuous average speed of no less than 30mph, or about 50kmph.

The eel

...firebrand, whiplash, shot

bolt of the earth's desire,

aimed, by these dried-up gullies and river-beds,

at the dark paradise of her spawning;

she is the green spirit looking for life

in the tight jaw of drought and desolation,

she is the spark which says

that all begins where all appears to end,

here, with this charred, half-buried stick

the quick rainbow

a twin to your own bright eyes:

shining out

among a generation mired in mud -

can you not see

that she is your sister?

-- a passage from Robin Robertson's version from Eugenio Montale's poem. [1]

Apparently there are more than fifty translations of this poem in English. Some analysis and food for thought via The Imaginary Museum.

To make a pedantic and unpoetic point, Montale was wrong to write that eels in Italian waters come from the Baltic (L’anguilla, la sirena/dei mari freddi che lascia il Baltico/per giungere ai nostri mari...). They come from the Sargasso. If the poem was first published as late as 1956 he should have known that.

More importantly, after millennia of abundance the European eel is, as of 2008, critically endangered.


Footnote

[1] Swithering (2006). Robertson's next book is Leaving St Kilda.

Attention

A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a switch; its reflection suddenly materialized on the water upstream, flat and floating, so that I couldn’t see the creek bottom, or life in the water under the cloud. Downstream, away from the cloud on the water, water turtles smooth as beans were gliding down with the current in the series of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the moon. I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spider webs made invisible by the gathering dark, or to take a chance on seeing a carp, or scan the mudbank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying up-stream with their tails forked, so fast.

-- Annie Dillard (1974)

The living world

Peter Singer and Agata Sagan argue that the possession of emotions or consciousness should be a key concern when thinking about how to handle animals and increasingly sentient robots. [1]

But how far should the circle of concern extend? Should, for example, ecosystems -- the results of interactions between living and non-living systems -- have rights and not just instrumental value? In the epic of Gilgamesh the whole forest is sacred.

Footnote

[1] But, as noted in many places including here, robots still have a very long way to go.

(Related posts include Ghost and shadows, The age of criminal and compassionate machines, and A new kind of mind.)

The image, added on 15 Dec, is from here.

Cubozoa

"These eyes have some very peculiar features, and show that once again nature trumps the imaginations of science fiction artists," says P Z Myers.

"These are fantastic creatures with 24 eyes, four parallel brains and 60 arseholes," says Dan Nilsson.

Image from here.

A dextrous 'pus

Octopus snatches coconut and runs.


P.S. 15 Dec: a roundup of the blogs on this.