Amazonian Manatee
"Don't push me 'cos I'm close to the edge", says Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis.
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.
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.
[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...
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.
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.
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.
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.-- see State of the World's Birds 2008 Report.
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...
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?]
[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.
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."
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."
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.
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.
Octopuses have three hearts and copper instead of iron to carry oxygen in their blood.
Vacuum ? bah,P.S. 5 Dec: another kind of bear in space
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!!
From Congo, a BBC report of "the first official sighting" of an okapi [in the wild] in fifty years. 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.)
London Parakeets[P.S. 11 Sep: see also Honey, climate change is shrinking the species.]
[Abdulla Ahmed Ali] accused British people of showing more concern for animals than Muslims by organising anti-fox hunting demonstrations.(The Guardian)
Granta 102: The New Nature Writing contains much that is very fine. Pathologies by Kathleen Jamie, for example, is close to as good they come [1]. Robert Macfarlane's Ghost Species is also outstanding [2], but cracks for a moment here: Historically, the idea of ghosts has been confined to non-human kingdoms. But sitting in Eric's kitchen that day, it seemed clear that there were also human ghosts: types of place-faithful people who had been out-evolved by their environments - and whose future disappearance was almost assured.'Out-evolved' is a shard of social darwinism, probably accidental and certainly unfitting of an author who surely knows that the processes that have driven smallholders out of the fens has nothing to do with natural selection, and everything to do with economics, politics and history [3]. The displacement (and in many other cases slaughter) of large number of humans by other humans (who may or may not have altered the environment on a large scale) is not natural selection.
Despite some overenthusiastic prognostications in reviews—"Spore could be the greatest gaming tool ever created to disseminate Darwinistic ideas," says one critic—the game makes no room for random mutation, the real source of differentiation. And natural selection plays only a minor role.--says Luke O'Brien.
There are few personal notes in this sketchbook, but here's one. I am looking forward to The Magic Hour, an OCM event. We will even take our little daughter, Lara, whose perceptions may still be open in ways we don't quite understand. Cycles and circles enclose us. They are all fixed paths, closed circuits, and we have to live with what we've created within them. Beauty and pollution ride the same trails. The aurora is beaded with lead and cadmium. Snowbanks drift hard with heavy metals, rain is toxic, drift ice is radioactive, roaring rivers are pollution highways, the oceans are mercury sinks, the midnight-sun-filled days are cluttered with smoke and dust motes, and earth and its atmosphere are becoming a hot cauldron where disease and contamination are stirred.On first reading this I had doubts as to its cognitive precision. Do, for example, heavy metals like lead and cadmium released as a result of human activity really make it up into the ionosphere, more than 85km above the earth's surface? Well yes they do, if I understand this, this and this correctly.
...elaborate displays of apparent maternal grief [by a gorilla] may reveal less about our [human and gorilla] shared awareness of death than our shared impulse to act as though it didn’t exist...-- writes Nathalie Angier in a well-balanced article about the reactions of various animals (including apes, elephants, lions and social insects) to death.
The origin of a light sensitive nerve was almost certainly an early step in the evolution of animal eyes, and this was thought to have happened only once, some 600 million years ago...[1]To this:
...The eyes of a peregrine weigh approximately one ounce each; they are larger and heavier than human eyes. If our eyes were in the same proportion to our bodies as the peregrine's are to his, a twelve stone man would have eyes three inches across, weighing four pounds. The whole retina of a hawks eye records a resolution of distant objects that is twice as acute as that of the human retina. Where the lateral and binocular visions focus, there are deep pitted foveal areas; their numerous cells record a resolution eight times as great as ours. This means that a hawk, endlessly scanning the landscape with small movements of his head, will pick up any point of movement; by focussing upon it he can immediately make it flare up into larger, clearer view...
...Like the seafarer, the peregrine lives in a pouring-away world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes of land and water. We who are anchored and earthbound cannot envisage this freedom of the eye. The peregrine sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist: the neat squares of orchard and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields. He finds his way across the land by a succession of remembered symmetries. But what does he understand?...[2]
Another thing I have been practicing is wearing the wrong glasses. Now that I have three (or is it five?) different pairs, one for each and every focal distance, I almost always find that I am wearing the wrong glasses for whatever I think I am doing at any given time. This gives me countless opportunities to enjoy a psychedelic blur of the kind we used to seek in the 60s by chemical means, while walking into walls or stepping on my cat Hodge. [3]Footnotes:
...with interesting antecedents inspires a tatoo, a sculpted vault, and maybe even (via a universal phylogenetic tree) this:
origin of the Mimivirus
[The] diversity in the virosphere is also coming as a surprise. There are now thought to be around 100 million types of virus. They boast a more varied biochemistry than cellular life, storing their genetic information as both single and double-stranded DNA and RNA. Recent virus-hunting expeditions have uncovered one with a unique hybrid genome structure, part single-stranded and part double-stranded DNA, plus a menagerie of novel forms - bottle-shaped viruses, viruses with tails at both ends, viruses shaped like droplets and viruses that resemble stalk-like filaments. Most astonishing of all is the giant mimivirus, which is bigger than some bacteria. And we have only scratched the surface. "In terms of diversity, I don't think we even have an inkling yet what's out there," says [one] microbiologist.-- from Viruses: The unsung heroes of evolution by Garry Hamilton. See also:
...All in all, biologists are confronting what may be the biggest advance in evolutionary thinking since the discovery of the gene. Our emerging knowledge of viruses challenges many tenets of evolution, not least that it is driven by competition between selfish genes. Viruses provide a strong argument for the idea that evolution is also driven by fitness boosts gained through give and take.
Viruses have an important role in global biogeochemical cycles, in deep-sea metabolism and the overall functioning of the largest ecosystem of our biosphere.-- from Major viral impact on the functioning of benthic deep-sea ecosystems (doi:10.1038/nature07268).
