Rights and persons

DotEarth notes that the new Ecuadorian constitution grants rights to nature -- making it a legal person, one presumes. Nature has "the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”

It's worth recalling, too, a precedent set in 1993 in the Philippine Supreme Court with regard to illegal logging (Minors Oposa v. Department of Environment and Natural Resources): Antonio Oposa established a right to sue on behalf of future generations.

Amazonian Manatee

P.S. 3 Oct: on a lighter note, the Ignobel Prize for Peace this year goes to the Swiss federal ethics committee on non-human biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland for acknowedging the dignity of plant life.

" 'Empty oceans' are here"

hat tip DotEarth

[See also Ocean "dead zones" spread]

It's like a jungle sometimes

"Don't push me 'cos I'm close to the edge", says Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis.

In Man's hands

"Orang-utans and lion latest victims of China milk scandal" -- report

'Rich Bitch'

Pet-lovers have engineered a quiet revolution in the law to allow nonhumans to, in effect, inherit and spend money. It is becoming routine for dogs to receive cash and real estate in the form of trusts, and there is already at least one major foundation devoted to helping dogs…

--Jeffrey Toobin reports.

Schopenhauer wrote, "Since compassion for animals is so intimately associated with goodness of character, it may be confidently asserted that whoever is cruel to animals cannot be a good man." Toobin quotes Elizabeth Harman, who teaches philosophy at Princeton:

What would make the [late Leona Helmsley's] dog happy is for a loving family to take it in. The dog doesn’t want the money. The money will just make everyone who deals with the dog strange.

Re-tuning the sphere

[Peter Brewer and colleagues] calculated how much [the drop in ocean pH by 0.12 during the 20th century] would affect the absorption of sound waves at 0.44 kHz – the note "A" used to tune an orchestra. They found that by the early 1990s, sound was being absorbed 15% less than in the late 19th century.

Some studies predict ocean pH could drop by an average of 0.3 before the end of this century...The team calculates that this would cause a 40% decrease in the absorption of sounds below 1 kHz. More...

Self-made Man

Not sure about this:

The most intriguing form of relaxed selection...occurs when an animal actively creates a shield against natural selection. This so-called Baldwinian evolution has played a particularly important role in the evolution of our own species. For example, the technological innovations of producing stone tools and cooking meant that our ancestors no longer had to chew tough vegetation and meat. This reshaped the way we look...[notably] a radical reduction in large flat molars, thick enamel, robust face and jaw structure and powerful jaw muscles...Then came agriculture, which made foods even more palatable, relaxing the selection pressures on our digestive system. As digestion became easier, more energy was available for other purposes, especially for building and running a larger brain. Our ancestors would have used this increased cognitive capacity, in turn, to devise more technological and cultural innovations to further shield them from the pressures of natural selection.

-- from Freedom from selection lets genes get creative by Christine Kenneally New Scientist, 28 Sep.

This is water

The problem is how to integrate the conscious mind [and subjective experience] with the physical brain—how to reveal a unity beneath this apparent diversity. That problem is very hard, and I do not believe anyone has any good ideas about how to solve it.

-- that's Colin McGinn, quoted by Steven Weinberg in a recent essay Without God.

But understanding of the neurological basis of consciousness seems to be increasing fast. (Listen, for example, to this overview by Barry C. Smith.) Scientists have recently recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory. All this may have some surprising consequences.

Writers and artists sometimes "illuminate the maze even if they cannot show the way out" (to use a phrase of A.O. Scott's in an appreciation of the late David Foster Wallace [1]).

Wallace would have disagreed with Weinberg's recommendation that "we should get out of the habit of worshipping anything". He wrote:

the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see [a given situation]. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship. Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping.[2]

Wallace may have been wrong about his capital T Truth. Some research indicates that free will may be an illusion at least some of the time (although we almost all seem to agree that it still makes sense to act as if we had free will, and so take responsibility for our actions). But Wallace's second truth -- "there is no such thing as not worshipping" -- looks like a good bet.

If humans cannot escape worship in one form or other, and if we may have at least some limited free will in some circumstances, then the urgent task is to work on enhancing awareness and understanding of natural laws and phenomena [3]. It's not a question of encouraging worship at some temple labeled 'Science'. It's about trying to help create circumstances for greater reverence for life itself, not the supernatural [4].

In Weinberg's account, scholars like al Ghazali objected to the idea of laws of nature because they would put God's hands in chains [5]. al Ghazali's inheritors today include holy warriors of many stripes, not least Christianists asserting their place in global politics [6] (in partnership with worshippers of war [7]). These people are a real danger, and it's too bad that David Foster Wallace, a most imaginative being, is no longer around to join the struggle against the darkness they want to bring [8].


Footnotes

[1] See also this longer piece by A.O. Scott from 2000, and Danny Postel on the Death of a Tennis Intellectual.

[2] From a commencement speech given to a graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio.

[3] The grandeur of existence as apprehended by many scientists from, e.g., Charles Darwin to (say) Martin Rees.

[4] This does not necessarily exclude all religion. See for example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. [P.S. 24 Sep: and throw in Reinhold Niebuhr of whom Barack Obama has said, "I take away [from Niebuhr's thought] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism."]

[5] Since the burning of scientific and medical texts by the Ulama of Cordoba in 1194, says Weinberg, there has been little significant contribution to global science from the Muslim world. Weinberg notes that in 2002 the periodical Nature found just three areas in which the Islamic world produced excellence in science, all three directed toward applications rather than basic science. They were desalination, falconry, and camel breeding. (Bob Lockner takes issue with Weinberg's description of Al-Ghazali's thought, and Weinberg replies in an exchange of letters here.)

[6] See, for example, Sarah Palin's holy war on nature by Chip Ward.

[7] See, for example, Worshiping the Indispensable Nation by Andrew Bacevich.

[8] On writing and mental illness, see also Shirley Dent. On suicide see, among other things, the entry in the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.

Langurs linger

See: It Takes Just One Village to Save a Species.

Carrion

The birds of the world are in serious trouble, and common species are in now decline all over the globe, a comprehensive new review suggests today.

From the turtle doves of Europe to the vultures of India, from the bobwhite quails of the US to the yellow cardinals of Argentina, from the eagles of Africa to the albatrosses of the Southern Ocean, the numbers of once-familiar birds are tumbling everywhere...

-- see State of the World's Birds 2008 Report.

Stand still, yet make him run

On the equinox, two days after its unveiling, Barely Imagined Beings catches up with the grasshoper chronophage at my old college.

.
As another graduate of the college put it:

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.

[The grasshopper (locust?) on the clock is depicted as hybrid with, what (from the eyes), a dragon?]

P.S. Mapping the Marvellous contemplates similarities between automatons and insects, especially the mantis, and reflects on some work of Jean-Henri Fabre, Henri Bergson and Roger Callois.

P.P.S. See too 'La Machine' - giant spider in Liverpool



P.S. 12 Dec: a working model of the Antikythera mechanism.

Trickster

Crows seem to be able to use causal reasoning to solve a problem, a feat previously undocumented in any other non-human animal, including chimps. They also rival primates in ability to deceive.

The storytellers would not be surprised:

[Raven] came to a place where many people were encamped fishing.... He entered a house and asked what they used for bait. They said, "Fat." Then he said, "Let me see you put enough on your hooks for bait," and he noticed carefully how they baited and handled their hooks. The next time they went out, he walked off behind a point and went underwater to get this bait. Now they got bites and pulled up quickly, but there was nothing on their hooks.

-- fragment of a Tlingit story as told by Lewis Hyde.

Ownership and collapse

Fisheries in which individuals (or groups of) fishermen have a right to a share can provide incentives for sustainable harvest that is less prone to collapse, says research based on a study of 11,135 fisheries from 1950 to 2003 [1]. But, warn the authors:

Despite the dramatic impact catch shares have had on fishery collapse, these results should not be taken as a carte blanche endorsement. First, we have restricted attention to one class of catch shares (ITQs). Second, only by appropriately matching institutional reform with ecological, economic, and social characteristics can maximal benefits be achieved.

On land, there may be almost no level of killing of some animals (such as great apes and other primates taken as bush meat in Africa) which allows a viable population to survive. Nevertheless, argues a report, the best way to reduce the slaughter is for hunting by local people to be legalised and regulated [2]. Also, it's suggested, new ways should be found of making endangered animals more valuable alive than dead, perhaps through government schemes to reward local villages financially if they preserve or increase populations. But, warns one conservationist, "People living in poverty are in for dire times, and both they and many species are heading for a train wreck."


Notes

[1] Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse? by Christopher Costello, Steven D. Gaines and John Lynham. DOI: 10.1126/science.1159478. [Peter Kareiva, Amy Chang and Michelle Marvier argue "the key to success in conservation is the development of market mechanisms and new sources of finance for conservation." (DOI: 10.1126/science.1162756) ]

[2] CBD Report 33 by Robert Nasi et al from CIFOR , discussed in Should we legalise hunting of endangered species? by Andy Coghlan, New Scientist, 18 Sep. "In central Africa, 1 million tonnes of bushmeat are harvested each year, supplying 80 per cent of the protein and fat that people in the region consume." (More photos of bush meat, some of them disturbing, can be found here.)

Urchins

Pohls sea urchins found off Lizard Island (see New species revealed on Great Barrier and Ningaloo reefs). "The researchers spotted about 300 soft coral species, up to half of which they think are new to science, as well as dozens of small crustacean species, likewise thought to be unknown."

A beagle escaped

Pimping the shark

Damien Hirst sells The Kingdom for £9.6m. Peter Conrad thinks this is cool. Eat your art out, Piero Manzoni.

(Meanwhile, a call for a clampdown on finning. See too Sharks short shock.)

P.S. 18 Sep: Clive Crook gets it.

P.S. 20 Oct: this.

Shark fins, probably heading for East Asian stomachs. About 100 million sharks are slaughtered every year. About thirty million of those are finned for soups etc. Photo: Oceana.

Hopeful hybrids

"If Lévi-Strauss is right," wrote Lewis Thomas,"myths are constructed by a universal logic that, like language itself, is as characteristic for human beings as nest-building is for birds." [1]

"Our powerful story [today]," Thomas continued, "equivalent in its way to a universal myth, is evolution. Never mind that it is true whereas myths are not; it is filled with symbolism, and this is the way it has influenced the mind of society."

Medieval bestiaries, he observed, do not contain, as a rule, totally novel creatures of the imagination made up of parts we have never seen before. "On the contrary, they are made up of parts that are entirely familiar. What is novel, and startling, is that they are mixtures of species." [2]


Thomas went on to suggest a bestiary for our time would have to be a microbestiary, featuring the likes of Myxotricha paradoxa, Blepharisma and plant-animal combinations that mostly exist in the sea. Their "meaning", he suggested, would be "basically the same as the meaning of a medieval bestiary. There is a tendency for living things to join up, establish linkages, live inside each other, return to earlier arrangements, get along, wherever possible."

Evolution may be today's "powerful story" [3], at least for those who manage to limit their magical thinking to where it does little harm (or even, possibly, some good [4]). But it is not the only one. Twisted, dark stories seem to fascinate millions.

Hope may come in part from a broader "story" of science -- the systematic achievement of greater knowledge and understanding -- with global projects like the LHC reinforcing the point that the cosmos is more majestical golden fire than foul congregation of vapours.



Footnotes:

[1] from Some Biomythology published in The Lives of a Cell (1974). But there are several reasons for thinking that Lévi-Strauss explained less than he imagined. To take one example, he cited Sigmund Freud to bolster his case, and Freud was out to lunch on evolution (see, for example, Freud's Evolutionary Fantasy by Stephen Jay Gould) and much else. Still, Thomas's observation about bestiaries seems worth keeping in mind.

[2] Contemporary games with bestiary-type elements, notably Spore, are also limited in striking ways. See here.

[3] We'd probably say "narrative" instead these days.

[4] (added 17 Sep) Some say a different kind of magical thinking from the one embedded in abstracted monotheisms is precisely what's needed. From David Abrams on The ecology of magic:

When the animate presences with whom we have evolved over several million years are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth that gave birth to us is defined as a soulless or determinate object devoid of sensitivity and sentience, then that wild otherness with which human life had always been entwined must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself--the only allowable refuge, in this world, for what is ineffable and unfathomable.

Images: Topsell's History of Four-footed Beasts (1607), the Manticore, simulation of Higgs Boson experiment.

High octane

Pharyngula, a fount of delight and instruction on the brains of octopuses and much else, has long featured a Friday cephalpod (like this).

Once you start to pay attention there is no end to wonders. Here are some more September cephs, gratuitous pictures of Ocythoe tuberculata also known as the football octopus (above and below this text)...


...and Argonauta argo, or paper nautilus

Octopuses have three hearts and copper instead of iron to carry oxygen in their blood.

Bears in space

My other blog has long and proudly carried a link to Tardigrades in Space. Now, the refereed paper is in (Tardigrades survive exposure to space in low Earth orbit; see also news report).


One small step for a waterbear. A giant leap for waterbearkind!

(Space emissary from another bear here.)

P.S. The Other 95% has this covered:

Vacuum ? bah,
Freezing ? Ho-hum
Dessication? So what!
Uh, oh cosmic radiation?!
Nope got that covered too.
Cosmic radiation plus direct solar radiation?
Ok, that one hurts.
But still enough of us will survive and quickly start up again!!

P.S. 5 Dec: another kind of bear in space

Forest music

From Congo, a BBC report of "the first official sighting" of an okapi [in the wild] in fifty years.

It's striking from this old photo how large the animal is, even taking into account that the man, who was perhaps Mbuti or Twa, may have been less than five feet tall.

In a recently rebroadcast radio show about the origin of music, Jerome Lewis suggests that one of the purposes of the music of the forest peoples -- in which 3, [8?], 9 and 12 beat songs merge in polyphony -- may be to connect with the "music" of the forest itself: a "technology of enchantment" such that you lose your sense of self and become aware of greater reality.

Lewis Thomas, whose intuitions seem so often to have proven right, wrote (some time before 1974, in The Music of This Sphere):

The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.

(P.S. 12 Sep: Greg Laden.)

(P.S. 15 Sep: A reminder of the music of the seas in jeopardy. )