one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to pursue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.page 378: predict with precision. Albert Hirschman coined the term possibilism -- to draw attention to “the discovery of paths, however narrow, leading to an outcome that appears to be foreclosed on the basis of probabilistic reasoning alone.”
...to the frustration of critics – even sympathetic ones – the movement never stated what it was for...[but] one can be indignant and constructive at the same time.
If you start imagining us as fundamentally different from who we are, then the question is, are we really talking about us anymore, or are we talking about creatures that share certain things with us but aren’t really us in the most significant ways?page 373: engineer...[micro-organisms], animals and plants. Scientists have created a transistor-like biological device. Dr Frankenstein needs his own Hippocratic oath, writes Luba Ostashevsky.
There’s a great deal of emphasis on how my information-poor perceptions might be enhanced by integration with the internet — and how all manner of errors and inefficiencies will be ironed out along the way. Yet there’s little sense of how my ability to think my own thoughts, explore my own feelings or enjoy my own space will be similarly served, enhanced or encouraged.page 374: a generous view of human nature. The sentiment is from Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature (1741). See also An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751):
[It] cannot be disputed that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent. Let these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak; let them be insufficient to move even a hand or finger of our body; they must still direct the determinations of our mind, and where every thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous.page 374: play. Here is an elephant playing. See Zeal for play may have propelled human evolution.
Cosmos is divided into two fundamental elements: Absence or Nonbeing and Presence or Being. Presence is simply the empirical universe, which the ancients described as the ten thousand living things in constant transformation; and Absence is the generative void from which this every changing realm of Presence perpetually emerges, although it should not be conceived in a spatial sense, as if there were a pool of emptiness somewhere in the universe. Within this framework, Tao (Way) can be understood as the generative process through which the ten thousand things appear out of Absence and disappear back into it...
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| Harlequin shrimp (page 357). Heaps of Yeti crabs here |
is about earth’s adventure as a whole...much of the news is abysmally sad. Should one be completely frank and insistent about this great tragedy, keep stressing the dimensions of what is being undone? Or will bright facts about the animal world, working indirectly, better aid the cause of action? Wisely, Henderson combines approaches. In that regard, he’s a bit like the honey badger [which] flourishes due to its insane strength and tenacity but also thanks to a fellow hive-seeking partner: a small bird, who lightly leads the way.
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| Sea pig |
Even if there are such things as laws of nature, there's no reason to think they must be accessible to the human mind. What science suggests is the opposite. If our minds evolved by natural selection as Darwin proposed, shaped more by a struggle for survival than by any search for truth, it's highly unlikely that we'll ever fully understand the universe. Almost certainly the world is a far stranger place than humans can possibly imagine.
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| Horned owl |
Spacefarers past living planetfall
on our ever-dive in bloom crystal:
when about our self kin selves appear,
slowing, rubber to pulp, we slack from spear,
flower anemone, re-clasp and hang, welling
while the design of play is jelling,
then enfolding space, jet
every way to posit some essential set
of life-streaks in the placeless,
or we commune parallel, rouge to cerulean
as odd proposals of shape and zip floresce
– till jig-maw apparition
spurts us apart into vague as our colours shrink,
leaving, of our culture, an ectoplasm of ink.
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| Hurricane at Saturn's north pole |
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| Mnemiopsis leidyi |
“Observations...indicate that there [is] no tendency toward ‘normalization’ of position or time of copulation.” Savage-Rumbaugh also chronicles the various sounds that the bonobos make while having sex. Chimps make one sound. The bonobos have a variety of cries (naturally), including one known as the “long modulated squeal.” With as much sobriety as Savage-Rumbaugh can muster, she writes, “It changes pitch and phonetic aspect at least once, sometimes twice, and is rather poorly represented as ‘we ee e.’ ”
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| Rhinoceros beetle |
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| Petroglyphs etched into desert varnish, Utah |
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| Escher meets Ouroboros. Armadillo girdled lizard, southern Africa |
Dehydration is the [lone star] tick's main foe during their quests [for blood]. Ticks sit in exposed locations for days, even weeks, waiting their hosts. The wind whisks away moisture, and the sun bakes their small leathery bodies. Wandering off in search of a drink would interrupt the quest and, in many habitats, there is no water to be found. So, ticks have evolved the ability to drink water from air. They secrete a special saliva into a grove near the mouth and, like the silica gel that we use to dry our electronic gadgets, their saliva draws water out of the air, the ticks then swallow the saliva, rehydrating themselves and continuing the quest.
This readable volume...will appeal to the serious reader with broad interests in science, mythology, folklore, and speculation on questions of the human condition.
Peony had arthritis and was very old, so she could barely move. She would try to climb into a climbing frame where a bunch of chimps were sitting and grooming each other. She wanted to join them, but she could barely get in there. The younger females would walk up to her, put their hands on her behind, and start pushing until she was up there with the rest. We’ve also seen cases where she started walking towards a water faucet, but, since it’s a very large enclosure and she walked with so much difficulty, a younger female would run ahead of her, take water in her own mouth, walk back to Peony, and then spit the water into her mouth so she wouldn’t need to walk all the way to the faucet.-- Frans de Waal
Human beings are caught...between two modes or ‘spheres’ of existence. The ‘aesthetic’ is the world of immediacy, of here and now. The ‘ethical’ is the transcendent, eternal world. We can’t live in both,but neither fulfils all our needs since ‘the self is composed of infinitude and finitude’, a perhaps hyperbolic way of saying that we exist across time, in the past and future, but we are also inescapably trapped in the present moment.(Earlier notes here and here)
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| 'Let us deliver mankind from the ancient, universal tyranny...of gravity!' |
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| Ocean sunfish |
A bull contents himself with one meadow, and a forest is enough for a thousand elephants; but the little body of a man devours more than all other creatures.
[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.
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| Audax jumping spider. See page 200 |
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.
For all the grandeur of rainforests, savannahs and coral reefs, deep life is probably a more persistent feature of our planet.-- Deep Life
.preview.jpg) |
| Greater honeyguide |
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.
...Picking chrysanthemums
at my east fence, I see South Mountainfar off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flightgoing home. All this means somethingsomething absolute: whenever I startto explain it, I forget words altogether.
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...
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| Mandrill |
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.
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.See The numberless goings-on of life inaudible, as dreams.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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.
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.page 119: Gary Marcus addresses the question what makes humans unique? here. Friedrich Nietszche wrote:
...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.
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."
