Octopus

Chapter 15: Octopus

The New York Review of Books has published an excerpt from this chapter.

page 229: a bleached version of Marge Simpson. A photo of Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis here.

page 223: giant squid. It has been suggested that Architeuthis dux is actually as many as different 21 species.  Recent research indicates that it is one only one, with global distribution.

page 236: a lot to learn from the octopus.  Cuttlefish, too: they can generate their own patterns even on backgrounds they have never encountered before, and they can do this with lightning speed.

This is the sixteenth 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.

Nautilus

Chapter 14: Nautilus

page 213: nothing so odd will do long. More about Nipponites here.

page 222: Motion pictures...have enhanced and altered our sense of what it is to be.  In Street by James Nares, each six-second pan of a New York scene is distended to two minutes. It may, writes J. Hoberman, "suggest an updated version of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 Koyaanisqatsi...actually, it is quite the opposite." According to Nares himself, Street is intended "to give the dreamlike impression of floating through a city full of people frozen in time."

In 1926 Virginia Woolf wrote

[The moving pictures] become not more beautiful in the sense in which pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life?...Watching the boat sail and the wave break, we have time to open our minds wide to beauty and register on top of it the queer sensation — this beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether we behold it or not.

Roundhay Garden Scene, 1888.
This is fifteenth 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.

Flame-knee, Graysmoke, Hobo

Audax jumping spider. See page 200

Chapter 13: Mystaceus, a jumping spider

page 199 (marginal note): approximately 110 families of spiders. In Field Notes from a Hidden City, Esther Woolfson delights in the names given to various species:

Who could fail to be entranced by the Cloud-living, the Dew-drop, or the Garden-ghost spider? Who could resist the allure of the Flame-knee spider or the Fireleg, the Graysmoke, the Purple-bloom, the Red-bloom, the Filmydome, the Starburst or the Rose. Is there anyone who, on hreading the names of the Robber Baron Cave meshweaver, the Hobo, the Government Canyon Bat Cave meshweaver, the Tuscon recluse doesn't hear the score of a spaghetti western...?

Spiders are often among the first animals to colonise new habitats.

page 202: memory. Some scientists speculate that the way the brain records and remembers movement in space may be the basis of all memory.


This is fourteenth 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.

Leatherback

 

Chapter 12: Leatherback 

page 186: throat...lined with sharp...spikes. See photo here.  Jellyfish are bread and butter. See photos here.

page 191: A study published in January estimated that only about 500 Leatherbacks are now nesting at their last large site in the Pacific.

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Hanging on in there

For all the grandeur of rainforests, savannahs and coral reefs, deep life is probably a more persistent feature of our planet. 

-- Deep Life

Kìrìpʰá-kò and Tʰìk’ìlí-ko

Greater honeyguide

Chapter 11: Kìrìpʰá-kò and Tʰìk’ìlí-ko, Honey badger and Honeyguide

page 172 (marginal note): torture. The search for justice continues.

page 174: Crazy Nastyass Honeybadger. At the time of writing the video is approaching 60 million views.

page 176: A clip showing a Honeyguide interacting with humans (well-filmed but with clunky narration) is here.

page 180: roam the delusion of words comes from a translation by David Hinton of Wang Wei's Offhand Poem. Here is a poem titled Elder-Cliff Grove:

At the mouth of Elder-Cliff, a rebuilt home
among old trees, broken remnants of willow.

Those to come: who will they be, their grief
over someone's long-ago life here empty. 

See also Badger and bird

This is the twelfth 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.

Tyger

 ...Picking chrysanthemums
at my east fence, I see South Mountain

far off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flight

going home. All this means something

something absolute: whenever I start

to explain it, I forget words altogether.

-- from Drinking Wine by T'ao Ch'ien (365 – 427), who lived on Thatch-Hut mountain.

An etymological analysis of the pictograph for Thatch-Hut, writes David Hinton, reveals a simple roof at the top, a dish with a pedestal at the bottom, above it a kitchen vessel, and the symbol for something else:

And what dwells in this household [and within the pictograph representing it] shares the mountain's nature, for it too eludes our words and concepts. It's a tiger, which ancients revered for the spontaneous power of its movements, the clarity and immediacy of its mind. It's a tiger that lives in the everyday world of our human dwellings...

Monkeys with money and guns

Mandrill

Chapter 10 Japanese macaque

page 154: female assisted by a male to whom she grants privileges. In The Serpent's Promise, Steve Jones writes:

A male macaque was once observed to mate forty times in a day, which was more than the champion stud among thousands of men interviewed by Alfred Kinsey for his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male managed in a week.

page 162: More on The Descent of Man at Five Books. Frans de Waal develops the point. As a recent review puts it

Mr de Waal’s central concern is to attack the idea that what humans call morality stands apart from, and above, anything found in the “lower” animals. Most people, he notes, accept that their bodies evolved from those of man’s predecessors, but the conceits of religion and philosophy make it much harder to accept that the same is true of human minds and behaviour, no matter how good the evidence.

page 166: Machiavelli's own beliefs [may be] better reflected in his Discources on Livy. Would Isaiah Berlin agree? 

Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality—the hypocrisies of ordinary life—but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values...Yet he is, in spite of himself, one of the makers of pluralism, and of its—to him—perilous acceptance of toleration.

page 168: [a] book less amenable to sectarian interpretation. Sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing are central to the Hebrew bible, notes Stephen Pinker in chapter 1 of The Better Angels of Our Nature. [1] For example:

In Deuteronomy 20 and 21, God gives the Israelites a blanket policy for dealing with cities that don't accept them as overlords: smite the males with edge of the sword and abduct the cattle, women and children. Of course, a man with a beautiful new captive faces a problem: since he has just murdered her parents and brothers, she may not be in the mood for love. God anticipates this nuisance and offers the following solution: the captor should shave her head, pare her nails and imprison her in his house for a month while she cries her eyes out. Then he may go in and rape her.

page 164: a high value on...fairness. See monkeys stay away from mean people.

page 168: endangered species. A recent UNEP reports notes that nearly 3,000 chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans are illegally killed or stolen from the wild each year. A story today on the plus side: there may be more habitat for an endangered cao vit gibbon on the border of China and Vietnam than feared.


Footnote [1]. A reported fall in violent crime in Britain looks like data that supports Pinker's central thesis.

This is the eleventh 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.

Continual effort to enlarge the boundaries of imagination

In an article for The Chronicle for Higher Education I write:

We need to spend a lot more time and psychic energy imagining not just life in all its astonishing and disconcerting particularity, but also its dramatic beginnings. We should meditate on the period when, for thousands of years, molten rock rained out of the sky onto an ocean of magma, to the time, [hundreds of millions] of years later, when the tides of the newly made seas—buffeted by a Moon much closer than it is today, with an Earth rotating in just 18 hours—ebbed and flowed with stupendous force.

We should envision the places where life may have originated—either, perhaps, in shallow warm pools where proto-life pieced itself together from the precursors of RNA within lipid bubbles, or within tiny pores in rock extruding from alkaline vents on the deep-sea floor. We should dwell with life through all its stages, from the invention of photosynthesis around 3.4 billion years ago, through and beyond apparent "false starts" in the emergence of multicellular life such as the weird Ediacaran biota, to the sophistication that allows our evolved brains to mediate what we experience as consciousness.

See The numberless goings-on of life inaudible, as dreams.

Iridogorgia

Chapter 9: Iridogorgia 

page 134: symmetry. Mathematical forms too. Jason Padgett, a number theorist and artist with Acquired Savant Syndrome, says "I see bits and pieces of the Pythagorean theorem everywhere. Every single little curve, every single spiral, every tree is part of that equation."

page 140 the great variety of nature at play: magna ludentis naturae varietas. John Tyler Bonner writes:

All of evolutionary change is built on a foundation of randomness. It provides the necessary material for natural selection which then does indeed bring forth  the order our inner mind so actively craves.

page 143: three short texts into new bacterium. At the time Charlie Brooker called it the world's most pretentious bacterium. Less than three years later it looks quite feasible, and perhaps even useful, to store all of Shakespeare on DNA.

page 146: viruses... in seawater are the commonest thing on Earth. See also An infinity of viruses.

page 148: what is beauty and why does it matter? Reflecting on Neuroaesthetics and the Trouble with Beauty by Bevil R. Conway and Alexander Rehding, Philip Ball writes:

Equating an appreciation of art with an appreciation of beauty is misleading. A concept of beauty (not necessarily ours today) was certainly important for, say, Renaissance artists, but until recently it had almost vanished from the discourse of contemporary art. Those who like the works of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys or Robert Rauschenberg generally do not appreciate them for their beauty. Scientists as a whole have always had conservative artistic tastes; a quest for beauty betrays that little has changed. Even the narrower matter of aesthetics is not only about beauty. It has conventionally also concerned taste and judgement. Egalitarian scientists have a healthy scepticism of such potentially elitist ideas, and it is true that arbiters of taste may be blinkered and dogmatic: witness, for example, the blanket dismissal of jazz by Theodor Adorno, a champion of modernism. But the point is not whether aesthetes are right or wrong, but whether they can offer us stimulating and original ways of seeing, listening and experiencing.

Lisa Randall, by contrast, says "the beauty of science - in the long run -- is its lack of subjectivity."

This is the tenth 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.

[Image of Malwiya minaret by Stuart Freedman]

Reviews

In an interview with Sharon Blackie in Issue 4 of Earthlines, Robert Macfarlane says:

Caspar Henderson's The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a marvelously inventive, witty, and ethically serious compendium-grimoire-spell book-dream vision, whose many virtues I can neither evoke nor exhaust here.

In a capsule review for the Boston Globe, Kate Tutle calls it a "strange and lovely book."

Hilary at Vulpes Libris says Beings is:

wonderful to dip into...There are many pleasures to take from this book. As well as being erudite and beautifully and thoughtfully written, it is a gorgeous piece of book production as well... I absolutely loved it.

Human

Chapter 8: Human
 
page 118: human hands have fine motor skills. They are also essential, in coordination with arms and shoulders, in accurate throwing:

Other primates can fling objects with force, but underarm and with a poor aim. Only humans can launch a projectile such as a spear or a rock from over the shoulder with power and precision. This ability depends on several unique anatomical features. The shoulder is more forward-facing than in other apes and is capable of freer rotation. The wrist, too, seems to be uniquely adapted for a throwing action.

...our accurate overarm throw [may have been] a key force in human evolution. As well as allowing hunting and scavenging for all-important protein, it has also been credited with driving brain changes involved in fine motor control, which underpin the evolution of language and technology.

page 119: Gary Marcus addresses the question what makes humans unique? here. Friedrich Nietszche wrote:

I fear that the animals see man as a being like them who in a most dangerous manner has lost his animal common sense -- as the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.

page 124: running keeps us...human.  An extreme case in The All Terrain Human.  My experience here. In his new book  Running with the Pack Mark Rowlands writes:

In the beating heart of the run, I hear an echo of what I once was and what I once knew. When the heartbeat of the run embraces me, holds me tight, I am returned to what I was before the fall. When the rhythm of the run holds me tight, I run in a field of joy...

page 129: Music is a channel for essential aspects of our existence -- "an exercise for your whole brain."

This is the ninth 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.

Seeing things

Chapter 7 Gonodactylus, the genital-fingered stomatopod

page 100:  mantis shrimp. The Oatmeal explains why these are his new favorite animal.

page 104: trilobite [eyes]...lenses...of calcite crystals. This is a fossil Erbenochile:

page 108: Loosejaw dragonfish shown here:

page 108:  humans. Diversity in these remarkable photographs.

page 113: only a tiny part of the [electromagnetic spectrum]. Represented in this image:

page 113: enhance vision. For example, researchers have found the visible in the invisible: “Once we amplify these small motions there is a whole new world you can look at.”

This is the 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. 

Flatworm

Chapter 6 Flatworm
 
page 87 various phyla of worms...among the phyla not mentioned in the book is Acanthocephala, the Thorny-headed worms.  Their spikes have inspired better sticky medical tape.

 page 91: parasites. See Carl Zimmer on Blood flukes (parasitic flatworms) and the fountain of youth.  A kind of parasitic flatworm, Ribeiroia, can cause a frog to grow debilitating extra legs.

page 93: death. philosophical tangles and reflections from Jeff McMahan and John Broome and Stephen Cave.  

This is the seventh 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. 

A cold origin

Brinicles, filmed forming in situ for the first time in 2011, were presented as fingers of death. But Julyan Cartwright and others observe that they create chemical gradients, electric potentials and membranes – that, is all the conditions necessary for the formation of life.

Brinicles, says a post via MIT Technology review, could be ubiquitous on ocean bearing planets and moons such as Europa, where they might play equally interesting roles.

Eel

Chapter 5: Eel

page 70 salmon. Research published earlier this year showed that sockeye salmon remember magnetic values of geographic locations. They imprint their birth location on this map when they leave their freshwater home for the sea, and use it as a compass during their journey back several years later, successfully returning home to spawn.

page 76 zombies...climate change Here's a comment: What zombies tell us about climate change.

This is the sixth 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. 
 
Photo via Real Monstrosities

Knowing increases amazement

The starling I knew personally was Max...I think of the years of he lived with us, of his excitements and irritations, his swearing (of the serious but not entirely discernible sort), his sotto voce mutterings, the instant connection be brought to me with a long-ago past. I think of the nature of his character, the exquisite sweetness of his evening solos as well as the extraordinary beauty of the bird, the gilded feathers, the neatness of wing as he flew around the house. After I got to know him, I'd like anew each evening at the cloud of swirling starlings, understanding that each of them was a Max was. Knowing increased my amazement at their individuality, at the magical coordination of their movement, the singular, transcendent beauty of this turning, sweeping cloud of birds. I used to wonder if they looked down from their elevated high-flying towards those of us watching from the pavement, and see only undifferentiated members of another species.

-- from Field Notes from a Hidden City by Esther Woolfson, who I joined yesterday in discussion with Stuart Kelly at Aye Write!

"The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it," writes Robert Sapolsky.

Dolphin

Chapter 4: Dolphin

page 52: direct experience. In his forthcoming book, The Sea Inside, Philip Hoare describes an encounter with a super-pod of more than two hundred dusky dolphins (one of the species I would most like to see for myself):

I see their shapes, exquisitely airbrushed black and white and pearl-grey, swimming beneath me. Steadily the fins begin to gather and steer towards me, more and more, till I'm in an eddying mass or swooping, diving cetaceans. Everywhere I look there are dolphins; I'm encircled by them. They shoot from a single source like a shower of meteorites, their two-metre bodies zipping past, in and out of focus...

Dolphins are breaching right by me, turning somersaults in the air. How about this? Can you do that? I reach out instinctively; they easily evade me. That's not part of the game...

I look round and see dozens of dolphins heading straight at me, like a herd of buffalo. for a moment I think they're going to swim right into me. A ridiculous notion. They, like the whales, register my every dimension, both inside and out, my density, my temperature, what I am, what I am not. A dolphin's sonar, which can fire off two thousand clicks a second, is able to discern something the thickness of a fingernail from thirty feet away. At the last minute the animals swerve aside, under my legs, by my side, past my head.

page 53: saved from drowning. It may be that dolphins are treating humans in distress as they would other dolphins in their pod. See, for example, Leave No Dolphin Behind: Dolphin Pod Carries Injured Member Until She Stops Breathing.

page 55: annual cull in Taiji. a supposedly more humane a new way of killing dolphins in drive hunts is, reportedly, no more so than the previous techniques.

page 60: every dolphin has its own characteristic whistle. See, for example Dolphin whistles reveal individual names.

page 56: 'non-human persons.' For some recent commentary see When is a Person Not a Human? When it’s a Dolphin, or Chimp, or…
 
This is the fifth 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. 

"Growing up in the Anthropocene"

Growing Up in the Anthropocene - my recommendations for Five Books

Ken Caldeira, who is mentioned in the piece, has this: How far can climate change go?

Subsidies: a paper from ODI says  that for 42 developing countries where data are available...the scale of fossil-fuel subsidies to consumers, at $396 billion in 2011, is 75 times higher than the average annual approved climate finance of $5 billion from 2010-2012

In this piece Christopher Shaw argues that the 2 degree "dangerous climate change" threshold I mention in the interview is a distraction.

Photo: Igor F. Petkovic

(P.S. As it happens, The Guardian has just published an interview with Jeremy Grantham, who stood beside Hansen and others at the Keystone XL protest. )

Crown of Thorns

Chapter 3: Crown of Thorns starfish

page 40: starfish. Smithsonian has recently published a pleasant overview of some amazing features of starfish with photographs by Alexander Semenov including the one above, which shows wafting papulae (breathing organs) interspersed with spiky spine on Crossaster papposus. The Crown of Thorns has 15 madreporites while many starfish have only one. Who knew?

page 40: sea cucumbers.  Deep Sea News reveals sea cucumbers breath through their butts, and more:

In adult sea cucumbers the cloaca (a cavity already doing double duty for the release of excrement and genital products) rhythmically pumps huge amounts of water in and out. It is already known that this pumping brings oxygen rich water across a highly branched respiratory tree.  Thus the cloaca is now pulling a function trifecta.  But what about quadfecta?...yes, sea cucumbers can eat through their anuses...

Below: frontpiece to a life of Joseph Pujol (also page 40). His stage act "consisted of disciplined, odorless flatulence, a talent learned during his military service."




This is the fourth 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.