Quviannikumut

Helen Silverman, whose graduate work included a study of the social organization and behavior of narwhals, describes as typical the following scene, from her observations in Lancaster Sound. "On one occasion a group of five narwhals consisting of two adult males, one adult female, one [calf] and one juvenile were moving west with the males in the lead. The group stopped and remained on the surface for about 30 [seconds]. One male turned, moved under the [calf], and lifted it out of the water twice. There was no apparent reaction from the mother. The male then touched the side of the female with the tip of its tusk and the group continued westward."

-- from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez (1986). I've had the good fortune to reread parts of this book over the last couple of days.

Moral Malthusianism

Not sure I agree with the framing or the assumptions of this, which is from the preface to Religion in Human Evolution by Robert Bellah, but it is worth considering:

We have proven to be enormously successful at adapting. We are now adapting so fast that we can hardly adapt to our own adaptations. Our technological progress is geometric. It would be hard to argue that our moral progress is even arithmetic. As one who has lived through one horrifying decade after another for eighty years, I confess that I cannot see much in the way of moral advance. There is an irony here, as moral sensitivity has grown steadily in the last hundred years. We are far more sensitive to the needs of whole categories of people that were previously despised or repressed. Yet our growing moral sensitivity seems to have occurred in a world of widespread and undiminished moral horror.

Books from life

Easing back into the online world after a couple of weeks away, here's something I wanted to note when I first read it in mid August:

Scientists have for the first time used DNA to encode the contents of a book. At 53,000 words, and including 11 images and a computer program, it is the largest amount of data yet stored artificially using the genetic material.

The researchers claim that the cost of DNA coding is dropping so quickly that within five to 10 years it could be cheaper to store information using this method than in conventional digital devices. One gram of DNA can store up to 455bn gigabytes: the contents of more than 100bn DVDs, making it the ultimate in compact storage media.

The cost of DNA synthesis and sequencing have been dropping at exponential rates of 5- and 12-fold per year, respectively – much faster than electronic media at 1.6-fold per year.

-- news report, article

"There are no Grotesques in nature"

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings will be published by Granta on 4 October. Here is advance praise.

This blog will be offline until September.

"There are no Groteques in nature": Thomas Browne.  Image: glass frog.

Easier for a camel to pass

Photo: Juan Cole

Barely Imagined at the Wilderness Festival

I will be talking at the Wilderness Festival this Saturday, 11 August. [1] Here's an outline:

Barely Imagined Beginnings: Nature in the 21st Century

Join Caspar Henderson, author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary, for an exploration of some of the world's strangest animals and what we can learn from them about the Anthropocene, extinction, human imagination and what comes next.

Endless forms

We have moved beyond a world of natural history into an era of what Richard Pell calls “postnatural history.” His new museum, the Center for PostNatural History, opened in Pittsburgh [in July 2012]. With it he endeavours to create a curiosity cabinet from the Anthropocene period - the age of man.

The only criteria for inclusion in Pell’s Wunderkammer are that the organisms have been intentionally altered by humans in a way that would be passed on through generations. Intentionality is the important bit, Pell says; after all, a museum of creatures changed by pollution, nuclear radiation or climate change would be endless.

--  from A museum of creatures re-engineered by humans

(Image: Guatemalan worry dolls constructed from cultured tissue, Oron Catts and Lonat Zurr)

Sea tales

The giant sea-serpent glides into view time and again, with a particular frequency in the Victorian period, although the beached and rotting "Animal of Stronsa" in the Orkneys was, according to the scientists, a basking shark. Detailed accounts are often from respectable folk such as the Reverend Donald Maclean, minister of Eigg, "quite a man to be believed" according to the Glenelg minister – who saw one himself in the Sound of Sleat.

Hitch-hiking decades ago in the Hebrides, I was picked up by a fishing-boat skipper who at one point confided his own sighting of a long serpent with a bristling, hideous face yards from his stern off the Angus coast. "We've most of us seen them," he said, quietly, "but we don't like to talk about it for fear of being laughed at."

-- from Adam Thorpe's review of The Fabled Coast by Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood

Guardian angel

...It turns out that after 4 billion years DNA can do a pretty good job of repairing itself. There's one gene in particular called the P53 gene, sometimes called the guardian of the genome, which looks for DNA damage wherever it can...

It's like a guardian angel embedded in our genes...and there are a lot of different ways DNA can get messed up...[and] when one of the two strands of DNA gets damaged this P53 gene it whistles over certain handyman proteins which come over cut the strand out... and pop in a new one because you know if you've got A and C on one side you need T and G on the other.

...other times both strands [of DNA] get snapped and that is an emergency for your body. When that happens this little guardian gene will force the cell to commit suicide because that cell will turn cancerous.

-- from Double Blasted at WNYC Radiolab, which tells the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, fathered two children and lived to the age of 95.

Dream bee

Anoche cuando dormía
soñé ¡bendita ilusión!
que una colmena tenía
dentro de mi corazón;
y las doradas abejas
iban fabricando en él,
con las amarguras viejas,
blanca cera y dulce miel.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Antonio Machado, quoted in Queen of the Sun

Moth

"How large does a butterfly have to be before anybody notices it is disappearing?"

-- The case of Alexandra's birdwing

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to visit (albeit for a ridiculously brief time) old growth forest in Sarawak. At night our field station attracted several Atlas moths.  This huge being is actually quite common but for those of us who had never seen it before the sight was beyond astonishing, like a dream that had emerged from the shadows into our tiny circle of light.

Geophony, biophony, anthrophony

What happens when [the animal] orchestra is disrupted by the anthrophony: chain saws, leaf blowers or highway traffic? If an indiscriminate sound like a loud motorcycle competes with the stridulation of an insect, the croak of a frog or the song of a bird, the affected animal may no longer be able to send its signal to mates or competitors. The voices of creatures in the choir may be drowned out. And mates and competitors will no longer be able to hear them. The integrity of the biophony is compromised...

...If you listen to a damaged soundscape — an expression of infirmity or extinction — the sense of desolation extends far beyond mere silence. The community has been altered, and organisms have been destroyed, lost their habitat or been left to re-establish their places in the spectrum. As a result, some voices are gone entirely, while others aggressively compete to establish a new place in the increasingly disjointed chorus.

-- from The Sound of a Damaged Habitat by Bernie Krause

Moral enhancement

Julian Savalescu and Ingmar Persson write:

Modern technology provides us with many means to cause our downfall, and our natural moral psychology does not provide us with the means to prevent it. The moral enhancement of humankind is necessary for there to be a way out of this predicament. If we are to avoid catastrophe by misguided employment of our power, we need to be morally motivated to a higher degree (as well as adequately informed about relevant facts). A stronger focus on moral education could go some way to achieving this, but as already remarked, this method has had only modest success during the last couple of millennia. Our growing knowledge of biology, especially genetics and neurobiology, could deliver additional moral enhancement, such as drugs or genetic modifications, or devices to augment moral education.

It's good to see this argument spelled out.  But even if (and I think it may be a big if) "our growing knowledge of biology, especially genetics and neurobiology" can deliver "additional moral enhancement" can they really do so faster than foreseeable breakthroughs in energy technology can (just perhaps) solve the energy/carbon challenge?
So, for example, Benjamin Strauss of Climate Central argues that "Our best hope is some kind of disruptive technology that takes off on its own, the way the Internet and the fax took off."

Note: two recent useful pieces relating relating to the psychology of climate change are Beth's We are all climate change idiots, which notes Robert Gifford analysis of habits of mind he calls the "dragons of inaction", and Atul Gawande's Something wicked this way comes, which is actually about health insurance in the US but notes Albert O. Hirschman's anatomy of reactionary argument in three basic forms: perversity, futility, and jeopardy.

(Image: melting ice on Greenland coast)

The Design and Construction of “Synthetic Species”

I merge the principles of synthetic biology and regulatory evolution to create a new species with a minimal set of known elements. Using preexisting transgenes and recessive mutations of Drosophila melanogaster, a transgenic population arises with small eyes and a different venation pattern that fulfils the criteria of a new species according to Mayr’s Biological Species Concept. The population described here is the first transgenic organism that cannot hybridize with the original wild type population but remains fertile when crossed with other identical transgenic animals. I therefore propose the term “synthetic species” to distinguish it from “natural species”, not only because it has been created by genetic manipulation, but also because it may never be able to survive outside the laboratory environment.

-- Eduardo Moreno

Basilisk

Mike Dash notes various qualities attributed the basilisk, described in one late 16th century Polish account as having the head of a cock, the eyes of a toad, a crest like a crown, a warty and scaly skin “covered all over with the hue of venomous animals,” and a curved tail, bent over behind its body. On the one hand the beast was highly toxic:

The bodies were pulled out of the cellar with long poles that had iron hooks at the end, and Benedictus examined them closely. They presented a horrid appearance, being swollen like drums and with much-discoloured skin; the eyes “protruded from the sockets like the halves of hen’s eggs.” Benedictus, who had seen many things during his fifty years as a physician, at once pronounced the state of the corpses an infallible sign that they had been poisoned by a basilisk. When asked by the desperate senators how such a formidable beast could be destroyed, the knowledgeable old physician recommended that a man descend into the cellar to seize the basilisk with a rake and bring it out into the light. To protect his own life, this man had to wear a dress of leather, furnished with a covering of mirrors, facing in all directions.

 On the other hand it could be used in the creation of gold:   

basilisk powder, a substance supposedly made from the ground carcass of the king of snakes, was greatly coveted by alchemists, who... believed it was possible to make “Spanish gold” by treating copper with a mix of human blood, vinegar and the stuff.

'Trapped'

Adam Frank thinks humans are extremely unlikely to travel beyond the solar system for a very long time. The implication:

While our children’s children’s great-grandchildren will live with ever more powerful technology, they will also live ever more intimately with ever more billions of others in this, our corner of the cosmos. Looking back and forward, my bets are now on...human genius, ambition and hope to rise to the occasion. We will have no other choice.

Immortal beings, not of flesh or blood

The post-Civil War fourteenth amendment granted the rights of persons to former slaves, though mostly in theory. At the same time, it created a new category of persons with rights: corporations. In fact, almost all the cases brought to the courts under the fourteenth amendment had to do with corporate rights, and by a century ago, they had determined that these collectivist legal fictions, established and sustained by state power, had the full rights of persons of flesh and blood; in fact, far greater rights, thanks to their scale, immortality, and protections of limited liability. Their rights by now far transcend those of mere humans.

-- from The Great Charter, Its Fate, and Ours by Noam Chomsky

See also Angelic corporate beings

'We took apart a rat and rebuilt it as a jellyfish'

We took a jellyfish, and did a bunch of studies to understand how it activates its muscles. We studied its propulsion and we made a map of where every single cell was. We used a software programme that we had developed a few years ago, borrowed from law enforcement agencies for doing quantitative analysis of fingerprints, and we used it to analyse the protein networks inside the cells.

We found something very interesting right away: the electrical signals that the jellyfish uses to coordinate its pumping are exactly like that of the heart. In the heart, the action potential [electrical signal that travels along nerves – Ed] propagates as a wave through cardiac muscle. That’s how you get this nice, smooth contraction. The activation has to spread like when you drop a pebble in water. The same thing happens in the jellyfish, and I don’t think that’s by accident. My bet is that to get a muscular pump, the electrical activity has got to spread as a wavefront.

After we had the map of where every cell was, we took a rat apart and rebuilt it as a jellyfish.

-- Kit Parker in an interview with Ed Yong.  His team also hope to reverse-engineer other marine life forms. “We’ve got a whole tank of stuff in there, and an octopus on order.”

'After The Alphabets'

by W. S. Merwin:

I am trying to decipher the language of insects
they are the tongues of the future
their vocabularies describe buildings as food
they can instruct of dark water and the veins of trees
they can convey what they do not know
and what is known at a distance
and what nobody knows
they have terms for making music with the legs
they can recount changing in a sleep like death
they can sing with wings
the speakers are their own meaning in a grammar without horizons
they are wholly articulate
they are never important they are everything
 

(Kei Miller talks about this poem, and more.)

'An earthworm’s brain is more complicated than a lifeless galaxy'

...One cosmic possibility is, roughly, that every possible local world exists. This we can call the All Worlds Hypothesis. Another possibility, which might have obtained, is that nothing ever exists. This we can call the Null Possibility. In each of the remaining possibilities, the number of worlds that exist is between none and all. There are countless of these possibilities, since there are countless combinations of particular possible local worlds...

-- Derek Parfit 
 

Photo: CJ Kale and Nick Selway