It is difficult to see whether the radical contraposition of ‘civilization’ and ‘nature’ is more than an expression of the tensions of the ‘civilized’ psyche itself, of a specific imbalance within psychic life produced in the recent stage of Western civilization. At any rate, the psychic life of ‘primitive’ peoples is no less historically (i.e., socially) stamped than that of ‘civilized’ peoples, even if the former are scarcely aware of their own history. There is no zero point in the historicity of human development, just as there is none in the sociality, the social interdependence among people. In both ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ peoples, there are socially induced prohibitions and restrictions, together with their psychological counterparts, socially induced anxieties, pleasure and displeasure, distaste and delight. It is, therefore, at least not entirely clear what is meant when the former standard, that of so-called ‘primitives’, is contrasted simply as ‘natural’ to the historical-social standard of ‘civilized’ people. So far as the psychological functions of humans are concerned, natural and historical processes work indissolubly together.
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Kuriositas has put together a great collection of images by macro photographer Kim Fleming for their post Slime Mold - Alien Landscapes On Earth. In it, they’ve coupled her beautiful photos with interesting information about slime mold. Beautiful and interesting are not words I would have expected to use for something called “slime mold”, so it’s definitely worth checking out even if the subject seems unappealing at first.
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False Idyll
The idea that nature is a bittersweet and sometimes forbidding place is not, as they say, currently trending. More prevalent is the view reflected in a recent caution from the Chicago Manual of Style editors that capital-N “Nature” is to be used only to denote “a goddess dressed in a flowing garment and flinging fruit and flowers everywhere.” The comment is tongue-in-cheek, but the point is well taken. The natural world is increasingly seen as a gentle and giving realm of the spirit. In some cases, this view is actively religious or quasireligious, whether we are speaking of the biosphere as the provident Earth Mother, the being-of-beings that is James Lovelock’s Gaia, or simply the handiwork of one or another god. But above all else, the actual experience of being in nature seems to affirm its essential holiness. The natural world feels like a spiritual respite: a literal sanctum, where we are safe to reconnect to what is larger than ourselves. Compared to the cosmic rhythms of mountain, sea, and sky, it is ordinary daily life—driving at rush hour, punching security codes, navigating a shape-shifting digital culture—that seems hostile.
Yet there is a serious problem with our idea of sacred nature, and that is that the idol is a false one. If we experience the natural world as a place of succor and comfort, it is in large part because we have made it so. Only 20 percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface is still home to all the large mammals it held five hundred years ago, and even across those refugia they are drastically reduced in abundance. The seas have lost an estimated 90 percent of their biggest fish. For decades there were almost no wolves, grizzly bears, or even bald eagles in the lower 48, and modern recovery projects have brought them back to only a small fraction of their former ranges. Scientists speak of an “ecology of fear” that once guided the movements and behavior of animals that shared land- and seascapes with toothy predators—an anxiety that humans once shared. In much of what’s left of the wild, that dread no longer applies even to deer or rabbits, let alone us. The sheer abundance and variety of the living world, its endless chaos of killing and starving and rutting and suffering, its routine horrors of mass death and infanticide and parasites and drought have faded from sight and mind. We have rendered nature an easy god to worship.
This modern love of the earth is ironic—it is a reaction against the destruction of nature, but is also a product of that destruction. Witness Great Britain, once home to deep forests, bears, wolves, wild boars, wild oxen. We celebrate England’s Romantic poets for seeing divinity in a landscape that others found dark and threatening. Yet the Romantics were only opening their eyes to a new reality: Almost every threat posed by that wild landscape had been vanquished. By the time of the Romantics, Britain was much as it is today—a deforested island, its fauna largely reduced to butterflies, birds, and hedgehogs.
The pattern repeated itself on the American shore. Thoreau wrote from a forest that had lost its capacity to instill fear in a young man’s heart. (Marsh could have detailed this history for him; Marsh’s childhood home near Woodstock, Vermont, had in his lifetime lost its moose, wolves, and mountain lions, and seen its spruce and hemlock forests replaced with European trees.) Annie Dillard’s pilgrimage to Tinker Creek plays out in a denuded Virginia, and even Edward Abbey, that singular voice of wildest America, went to his deathbed never having seen a free-living grizzly bear. Such versions of nature still inspire wonder—I held a wild hedgehog in my hands last year and was speechless with the thrill of it. In fact, one might argue that the works that have brought us closest to nature have depended on a more welcoming wilderness. But another truth should be foremost in mind: that what we call nature today is a kinder, gentler, more depauperate world than at any time since at least the late Paleozoic, some 300 million years ago. Nature is not a temple, but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same.
Patterned by Nature
Giant transparent monochrome display wraps around hallway of North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, displaying depictions of natural phenomena:
Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (naturalsciences.org) for the newly built Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The exhibit celebrates our abstraction of nature’s infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process, and through our perceptions. It brings to light the similarity of patterns in our universe, across all scales of space and time.
10 feet wide and 90 feet in length, this sculptural ribbon winds through the five story atrium of the museum and is made of 3600 tiles of LCD glass. It runs on roughly 75 watts, less power than a laptop computer. Animations are created by independently varying the transparency of each piece of glass.
The content cycles through twenty programs, ranging from clouds to rain drops to colonies of bacteria to flocking birds to geese to cuttlefish skin to pulsating black holes. The animations were created through a combination of algorithmic software modeling of natural phenomena and compositing of actual footage.
An eight channel soundtrack accompanies the animations on the ribbon, giving visitors clues to the identity of the pixelated movements. In addition, two screens show high resolution imagery and text revealing the content on the ribbon at any moment.
Highly recommended watching the video of it in action. More info can be found here
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My Life as a Hermit
For five years this man lived a life of blissful solitude. But then Neil Ansell discovered why we can’t live alone. Here he reveals why.
I first came to this cottage when I was 30 years old, and for five years it was my only home, through summer and winter, through sickness and health. There have been many books written about people moving to the countryside; they almost form a mini-genre of their own – back-to-nature writing, or escape-to-the-country. Some of them have been very good, and some… well, not so good. Almost all have the same narrative arc. A family abandons a successful career in the city to pursue their dream of a rural idyll. They buy a derelict farmhouse in a remote area and set about making a new life for themselves. There will be various obstacles to be faced, perhaps even some dark nights of the soul, but eventually they will overcome, or else presumably the book would never have been written. My situation was somewhat different. […] I think I saw it as a challenge; almost as an extension of the challenge of the kind of hardcore travelling I had been doing for years. I would learn to stay still, I would learn to be alone. Perhaps like Thoreau 150 years before me I wanted to know just how little I needed in order to lead a fulfilling life.
What I found was not what you might expect. You might think that such protracted solitude would lead to introspection, to self-examination, to a growing self-awareness. But not for me. What happened to me was that I began to forget myself, my focus shifted almost entirely outwards to the natural world outside my window. It was as if we gain our sense of self from our interaction with other people; from the reflection of ourselves we see in the eyes of another. Alone, there was no need for identity, for self-definition.
The process was a gradual one. During my years in the hills I kept a journal. For the first year it is a conventional diary; places I had gone, things I had done. By the second year it is little more than a nature journal; what birds I had seen that day, perhaps some notes on the weather. By the third year it is no more than an almanac, marking the turn of the seasons by the comings and goings of migrant birds and their nesting dates, interspersed by the occasional detailed depiction of a moment, perhaps the flight of a single bird. I am an absence, a void, I have disappeared from my own story.
K2 Climb: Danger and Desire on the Savage Mountain
K2 has a singular place in high-altitude mountaineering. Though 784 feet lower than Mount Everest, it has long been known as the mountaineer’s mountain. The sharp triangle of its silhouette and height above the surrounding terrain not only define the archetypal image of a mountain but, as a practical matter, also make K2 far more difficult and dangerous to climb. As of 2010 Everest had been summited 5,104 times; K2, just 302. Roughly one K2 climber has died for every four who’ve succeeded.
After the first attempts by British and Italian climbing teams in the early 1900s, American parties tackled K2 in 1938, 1939, and 1953. Charles Houston and Robert Bates titled their account of their 1953 expedition K2: The Savage Mountain. The characterization has been invoked so often over the years you’d think the moods of K2 reflected some personal antipathy toward mountaineers petitioning for its favor rather than the random dynamics of the physical world. In 1954 K2 was finally “conquered” by a large Italian expedition that put two men on the top via the now standard summit route on the Pakistani side of the mountain.
Just getting to K2 is an arduous journey in its own right, though far easier than it was when the first expeditions traveled for months to reach the peak. I had arranged to accompany the 2011 team to Advanced Base Camp. We all met in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashi, or Kashgar, in the far west of China, and then headed south on June 19 in three Toyota Land Cruisers followed by a truck overloaded with more than two tons of equipment in blue plastic barrels: tents, sleeping bags, stoves, parkas, ice screws, solar panels, batteries, computers, 9,000 feet of rope, 525 eggs, packages of freeze-dried pasta primavera, a bottle of Chivas Regal, a DVD of the movie Hall Pass.
Wolves to the Slaughter
The reintroduction of the gray wolf to the Northern Rockies was an ecological success story—until big money, old superstitions, and politics got in the way.
In April 2001, a U.S. government wildlife trapper named Carter Niemeyer choppered into the mountains of central Idaho to slaughter a pack of wolves whose alpha female was famed for her whiteness. He hung from the open door of the craft with a semiautomatic shotgun, the helicopter racing over the treetops. Then, in a clearing, Niemeyer caught a glimpse of her platinum fur. Among wolf lovers in Idaho, she was called Alabaster, and she was considered a marvel—most wolves are brown or black or gray. People all over the world had praised Alabaster, had written about her, had longed to see her in the flesh. Livestock ranchers in central Idaho, whose sheep and cows graze in wolf country, felt otherwise. They claimed Alabaster and her pack—known as the Whitehawks—threatened the survival of their herds, which in turn threatened the rural economy of the high country. She had to be exterminated.
When Alabaster appeared in Niemeyer’s sights, a hundred feet below the helicopter, her ears recoiled from the noise and the rotor wash, but she was not afraid. She labored slowly along a ridge, looking, Niemeyer says, “like something out of a fairy tale.”
Then he shot her. At the time, wolves were considered a rare species in Idaho and across the Northern Rockies, and they were protected under the Endangered Species Act. But they could be targeted for “lethal control” if they made trouble—if they threatened a human being, which almost never happened, or, more commonly, if they were implicated in attacking cattle and sheep. The Whitehawks allegedly had been enjoying a good number of cows and sheep that spring and were said to have killed at least one rancher’s guard dog.
As a trapper for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and later as a wolf expert for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Niemeyer was trained to control predators, mostly coyotes and foxes. In 26 years working for the government, he had killed thousands of coyotes. But wolves are a different kind of kill. As predators, they are exquisite. Niemeyer had taken a liking to wolves. He respected them.
There were four other members of the pack, scattered in the woods. The helicopter circled, flushing them out, and Niemeyer shot them as they ran. When he necropsied Alabaster at the kill site—gutting her, stripping her pelt—he found she was pregnant with nine pups that were two weeks from birth, almost fully formed. He buried each pup.
The “Declaration of the Rights of Man” was a crucial step in the French revolution. The document, drafted by the Marquis de Lafayette, marked a break with the political past by proposing that everyone, however humble his birth, had certain inalienable civil rights. These were liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression. Merely being a man conferred them.
These days, such rights extend to women as well. But what if you are not human? A session on cetaceans at the AAAS meeting discussed a proposal that whales and dolphins, too, should have rights. The suggestion of the speakers was that the protections these species are afforded by human laws should be extended and recognised not as an indulgence of the human aristocracy towards the bestial peasantry, but as a right as natural as those which humans now afford, in the more civilised parts of the world, to themselves.
The proposition that whales have rights is founded on the idea that they have a high degree of intelligence, and also have self-awareness of the sort that humans do. That is a controversial suggestion, but there is evidence to support it. Lori Marino of Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia, reviewed this evidence.
One pertinent observation is that dolphins, whales and their kind have brains as anatomically complex as those of humans, and that these brains contain a particular type of nerve cell, known as a spindle cell, that in humans is associated with higher cognitive functions such as abstract reasoning. Cetacean brains are also, scaled appropriately for body size, almost as big as those of humans and significantly bigger than those of great apes, which are usually thought of as humanity’s closest intellectual cousins.
Whales and dolphins have complex cultures, too, which vary from group to group within a species. The way they hunt, the repertoire of vocal signals and even their use of tools differs from pod to pod. They also seem to have an awareness of themselves as individuals. At least some can, for example, recognise themselves in a mirror—a trick that humans, great apes and elephants can manage, but most other species cannot.
Whenever I give a talk about my book Parasite Rex, I try to gather together the creepiest images of parasites that I can. Every time, there’s one kind of parasite that summons an instant reaction: a mix of laughter, sucked-in breaths, and gasps of recognition. I speak, of course, of the parasites that eat your tongue.
I only mean you if you’re a fish. Some species of isopods (crustaceans related to the less creepy crabs and lobsters) will swim into the gill of a fish, make their way to its mouth, and devour its tongue. It will jam its legs into the gills to hold itself in place, facing forward, its eyes gazing out of the fish’s mouth, taking the very place of the tongue it just ate.
I was first introduced to these disturbing creatures by Matthew Gilligan, an invertebrate zoologist at Savannah State University. I had come across a disturbing picture of one of these parasitic isopods in a paper he published in 1983 and sent him an email, asking questions about it. I wondered what the isopods did once they were done devouring the tongue. As far as Gilligan could tell, they stopped eating the fish once they had made a place for themselves in its mouth. Perhaps afterwards, they fed on the animals that the fish itself caught. After all, the fish that Gilligan and others had caught with these isopods were still alive and seemed healthy. Gilligan’s response made me wonder if perhaps the fish simply used the hard-shelled back of the parasite as its own tongue.
Since then, a new generation of scientists have studied these mysterious parasites, and it looks as if their dealings with their hosts are not as peaceful as once thought. In 2003, for example, scientists studying isopods in a fish farm off the coast of Turkey found that sea bass with the parasites in their mouths had lower blood counts than ones that still had their tongues intact. It seems that the isopods act like blood-drinking mouth leeches.
A Skeptic's Take on the Public Misunderstanding of Darwin
On the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday two myths persist about evolution and natural selection.
On July 2, 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, wrote to Charles Darwin to lament how he had been “so repeatedly struck by the utter inability of numbers of intelligent persons to see clearly or at all, the self acting & necessary effects of Nat Selection, that I am led to conclude that the term itself & your mode of illustrating it, however clear & beautiful to many of us are yet not the best adapted to impress it on the general naturalist public.” The source of the misunderstanding, Wallace continued, was the name itself, in that it implies “the constant watching of an intelligent ‘chooser’ like man’s selection to which you so often compare it,” and that “thought and direction are essential to the action of ‘Natural Selection.’” Wallace suggested redacting the term and adopting Herbert Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest.”
Unfortunately, that is what happened, and it led to two myths about evolution that persist today: that there is a prescient directionality to evolution and that survival depends entirely on cutthroat competitive fitness.
Contrary to the first myth, natural selection is a description of a process, not a force. No one is “selecting” organisms for survival in the benign sense of pigeon breeders selecting for desirable traits in show breeds or for extinction in the malignant sense of Nazis selecting prisoners at death camps. Natural selection is nonprescient—it cannot look forward to anticipate what changes are going to be needed for survival. When my daughter was young, I tried explaining evolution to her by using polar bears as an example of a “transitional species” between land mammals and marine mammals, but that was wrong. Polar bears are not “on their way” to becoming marine mammals. They are well adapted for their arctic environment.
Natural selection simply means that those individuals with variations better suited to their environment leave behind more offspring than individuals that are less well adapted. This outcome is known as “differential reproductive success.” It may be, as the second myth holds, that organisms that are bigger, stronger, faster and brutishly competitive will reproduce more successfully, but it is just as likely that organisms that are smaller, weaker, slower and socially cooperative will do so as well.
This second notion in particular makes evolution unpalatable for many people, because it covers the theory with a darkened patina reminiscent of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw.” Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s “bulldog” defender, promoted this “gladiatorial” view of life in a series of popular essays on nature “whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.” The myth persists. In his recent documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein linked Darwinism to Communism, Fascism and the Holocaust. Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling misread biologist Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene to mean that evolution is driven solely by ruthless competition, both between corporations and within Enron, leading to his infamous “rank and yank” employee evaluation system, which resulted in massive layoffs and competitive resentment.
This view of life need not have become the dominant one. In 1902 the Russian anarchist Petr Kropotkin published a rebuttal to Huxley and Spencer in his book Mutual Aid. Calling out Spencer by phrase, Kropotkin observed: “If we… ask Nature: ‘who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.” Since that time science has revealed that species practice both mutual struggle and mutual aid. Darwinism, properly understood, gives us a dual disposition of selfishness and selflessness, competitiveness and cooperativeness.
Guitar Zero: A Neuroscientist Debunks the Myth of “Music Instinct” and Learns to Play
Are musicians born or made? What is the line between skill and talent in any domain, and can we acquire either later in life? That’s exactly what neuroscientist Gary Marcus explores in Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning — a fascinating journey into the limits of human reinvention.
In an effort to reconcile his lifelong passion for music with his self-admitted chronic musical inaptitude, Marcus set out to debunk one of science’s longest-running theories about learning — that there are “critical periods” in which complex skills can be learned, and that they slam shut after adolescence.
If critical periods aren’t quite so firm as people once believed, a world of possibility emerges for the many adults who harbor secret dreams — whether to learn a language, to become a pastry chef, or to pilot a small plane. And quests like these, no matter how quixotic they may seem, and whether they succeed in the end or not, could bring unanticipated benefits, not just for their ultimate goals but of the journey itself. Exercising our brains helps maintain them, by preserving plasticity (the capacity of the nervous system to learn new thing), warding off degeneration, and literally keeping the blood flowing. Beyond the potential benefits for our brains, there are benefits for our emotional well-being, too. There may be no better way to achieve lasting happiness — as opposed to mere fleeting pleasure — than pursuing a goal that helps us broaden our horizons.“
To his astonishment, however, Marcus found a dearth of scientific literature and research on music learning in people of his age. The problem, it turned out, wasn’t lack of scientific interest but, rather, a lack of subjects — studying the outcomes of adults who put in 10,000 hours of practice proved difficult since most people of that age have life responsibilities that prevent them from putting in that time in the first place. So, Marcus decided to turn himself into the guinea pig.
For a glimmer of hope, he looked to a number of well-known musicians who arrived at their particular musical talent late in life — Patti Smith didn’t consider becoming a professional singer until she was in her mid-twenties, iconic jazz guitarist Pat Martino relearned to play after a brain aneurysm at the age of 35, and New Orleans keyboard legend Dr. John switched from guitar to piano when he was 21 after an injury, then won the first of his five Grammys at the age of 48. Having no such aspirations of grandeur, Marcus, aged 38 and with a documented lack of rhythm, still found himself desperately longing to learn to play the guitar. As he puts it, “Perhaps few people had less talent for music than I did, but few people wanted more badly to be able to play.” So he confronted the fundamental question:
Could persistence and a lifelong love of music overcome age and a lack of talent? And, for that matter, how did anyone of any age become musical?”
Curiously, one of the most influential experiments on critical periods comes from barn owls who, like bats, rely heavily on sound to navigate; but, unlike bats, they see better than bats do, and one of the first things they do after hatching is calibrating their ears with their eyes, attuning what they hear to what they see. But because this navigational mapping of auditory information depends on the exact distance between their eyes and ears, which changes as the owl grows, it can’t be hardwired at birth.
To study how the owls calibrate their visual and auditory worlds, Stanford biologist Eric Knudsen devised a clever experiment, in which he raised owls in a kind of virtual reality world where prisms shifted everything by 23 degrees, forcing the owl to adjust its internal map of the world. Knudsen found that young owls learned to compensate for the distortion easily, and older owls could not — at least not in one go. But as soon as the 23 degrees were broken down in chunks — a few weeks at 6 degrees, another few at 11, and so forth — the adult owls were able to make the adjustment.
Christian Brincourt is an adventurer in the truest sense of the word. For most of us, reaching the top of a mountain is more adventure than we’ll ever see, but for Brincourt mountain climbing is how he spends his time when he’s not doing his day job as a war correspondent or hanging out with celebrity friends like Brigitte Bardot. Lucky for us, he carries a camera with him wherever he goes and has captured places many of us less adventurous types will probably never see for ourselves. His images are currently on display through March 17 at Gallery Photo12.
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Three Challenges For Environmental Philosophy
The recent development of the branch of philosophy called ‘environmental philosophy’, or as it is sometimes referred to, ‘environmental ethics’, has been characterized by a variety of theoretical disputes about the best way to provide a philosophical basis for engagement with the environmental problems facing us, now and in the future. Many of the early writers hoped that a new environmental ethics would emerge, embodying a set of principles that could help us deal with our relation to animals and the natural world in a way that traditional ethical theories seemed to have overlooked.
One of the early contributors to this project was Aldo Leopold, who was not a philosopher but a professor of forestry and land management. His famous essay ‘The Land Ethic’, found in his 1949 book The Sand County Almanac, has stimulated a great deal of discussion about the kind of principles we need to guide us on environmental issues. Leopold argued for the extension of what we see as worthy of our respect from the human community to include animals and the natural world, or what he referred to as ‘the biotic community’. His famous principle, briefly expressed, was, ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’.
Leopold carried forward a discussion by nineteenth century conservationists about whether nature should be preserved only because of its economic and practical benefits for humans or because it provides value beyond merely supplying natural resources. He mentioned the songs of birds and the beauty of flowers as being part of nature’s bounty. He also brought into focus the importance of the interconnection of things in nature, defending the kind of holistic perspective which has since played such a crucial role in scientific ecology. He insisted that environmental ethics should focus on systems and not just on individual things. Our human dependence on nature cannot be understood without a deep ecological study of the interconnectedness of life. Rachel Carson’s famous 1962 book Silent Spring, which was so important in stimulating environmental awareness, is a good example of this approach to conservation.
Since Leopold’s early contributions, the field of environmental philosophy has expanded, with many new voices entering the debate about where we stand in relation to nature, and what metaphysical and ethical principles should shape our thinking. Some thinkers, such as J. Baird Callicott and Holmes Rolston III, have tried to develop and clarify Leopold’s insights, whereas others, such as Bryan Norton and Paul Taylor, have put forward their own approaches. I want to highlight three challenges faced by environmental philosophy which have emerged from recent debates. The first is the struggle to overcome an anthropocentric view of nature – the view which sees all of nature as serving human interests, and overlooks what has been called the ‘intrinsic value’ of nature. The second challenge is the question of how to define the place of humans in nature; are we to be regarded as equal to other natural beings, with no special privileges or rights, or do we have a higher role in shaping and managing nature? The final challenge is saying on what basis we should assign moral status, or what is sometimes called moral considerability, to animals and natural objects.
Hello. I'm Kevin. I'm French and I currently live in Montreal where I study Business and Environmental Science at Concordia University. You'll find here some of the things that I read and find interesting. 
