Posts Tagged ‘naturalist’
“Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is”*…
Reality feels “stable” enough to talk about it– though all logic seems to point away from that possibility. Marco Giancotti unpacks what he suggests is the only line of reasoning that resolves that paradox…
What is the source of what we call order? Why do many things look too complex, too perfectly organized to arise unintentionally from chaos? How can something as special as a star or a flower even happen? And, for that matter, why do some natural phenomena seem designed for a purpose?
We live in a universe of forces eternally straining to crush things together or tear them apart. There is no physical law for “forming shapes”, no law for being separated from other things, no law for staying still.
Boundaries are in the eye of the beholder, not in the world out there. Out there is only tumult, clashing, and shuffling of everything with everything else.
And yet, our familiar world is filled with things stable and consistent enough for us to give them names—and to live our whole lives with.
In this essay we’ll tackle these questions at the very root. We need good questions to get good answers, so we’ll begin by clarifying the problem. It has to do with probabilities—we’ll see why those natural objects seem so utterly unlikely to happen by chance, and we’ll find the fundamental process that solves the dilemma.
This will take us most of the way, but we’ll have one final obstacle to overcome, a cognitive Last Boss: living things still feel a little magical in some way, imbued with a mysterious substance called “purpose” that feels qualitatively different from how inanimate things work. This kind of confusion runs very deep in our culture. To remove it, I’ll give a name to something that, as far as I know, hasn’t been named before: phenomena that I’ll be calling—enigmatically, for now—“Water Lilies.”…
Applying systems dynamics, complexity, and emergence to understanding reality itself: “Recursion, Tidy Stars, and Water Lilies,” from @marco_giancotti (the second in a trilogy of essays: part one here; subscribe to his newsletter for Part Three when it drops).
* Jorge Luis Borges, “The Zahir“
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As we explore existence, we might spare a thought for Francis Simpson; he died on this date in 2003. An English naturalist, conservationist, and chronicler of the countryside and wild flowers of his native Suffolk, he became a botanist at Ipswich Museum, where he worked until his retirement in 1977.
He published one of the most highly regarded county floras, simply entitled Simpson’s Flora of Suffolk, and in 1938 saved a small meadow, famous for its snakeshead fritillaries, from being drained and ploughed into farmland. Using donations amounting to £75, he was able to purchase the field, Mickfield Meadow, for the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves. Today, it is one of the oldest nature reserves in the country, protecting the meadow flowers now surrounded by farmland.
“We are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed”*…
There’s a variety of “preservation” that can blind us to the lack of genetic diversity and the threat of extinction…
The small salamander known as the axolotl, whose cartoonish face resembles a smiling emoji, is among the most widespread amphibians on Earth. You can buy them as pets online, collect them in the game Minecraft, and watch them perform on Instagram and TikTok. Often pink in color with feathery external gills, axolotls are also popular in laboratories: Scientists love studying them because they can regrow limbs, spinal cords, and even portions of their brains. Roughly 1 million are under human care worldwide, according to some experts.
Yet in their home country of Mexico, where they’re celebrated as cultural icons, axolotls are critically endangered and on the verge of extinction. The only place you can find them in the wild is in a watery borough of Mexico City, the second-largest city in the Western Hemisphere. There are fewer than three dozen per square kilometer here, down from 6,000 in the 1990s.
This paradox — that axolotls seem to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time — raises a vexing question. If an animal is thriving in labs and aquariums, should we worry that it’s dying in its native waters? Or, asked another way: How important is the “wild” in wildlife?…
Axolotls are among the most widespread amphibians on Earth. In the wild, they’re almost extinct: “The animal that’s everywhere and nowhere,” from Benji Jones (@BenjiSJones) in @voxdotcom.
* Elizabeth Kolbert
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As we back biodiversity, we might spare a thought for Gerald “Gerry” Malcolm Durrell; he died on this date in 1995. A British naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author, and television presenter, most of his work was rooted in his life as an animal collector and enthusiast… though he is probably most widely known for his autobiographical book My Family and Other Animals and its successors, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods... which have been made into television and radio mini-series many times, most recently as ITV’s/PBS’s The Durrells.
“What was scattered gathers. What was gathered blows away.”*…
One of the most ubiquitous assumptions in Western thinking is a metaphysics of substance. This way of seeing the world is so deeply embedded in the unthought wilderness at the back of our minds that it rarely occurs to us to even consider it. Whatever else we may come to blows about, we almost all feel justified in leaning on the idea that our world fundamentally consists of “things”, objects that exist, solid entities that have an identity, possess properties, fill space and so on. All of us, apart from one small minority that thinks differently: the valiant tradition of process philosophers.
Process philosophy holds that the world consists not of objects but of processes, that the fundamental mode of things is not being but doing, that the nature of a thing consists not in what it is but in what is does. Traditionally, we see events as being done by things; there are objects, and acts are predicated of them (the bird flies, the fish swims, the sun shines). Process philosophers see the doing as primary: not that the bird flies, but that there is one might say a “birding” which throughout a certain duration “is birding flying-ly”.
At this point many readers will begin reeling back with discomfort. Here we see that the very way our language structures our thinking makes it difficult to even comprehend a processual point of view. And the next step in this repulsion is to ask “why bother?”. After all, ostensibly there are such things as birds, and they do appear to fly, so why bother with such eccentric semi-nonsense as “birding flying-ly” when saying “the bird flies” perfectly communicates a perception of reality that nearly everyone can acknowledge without dispute?
Because if it is true, as process philosophers claim, that the way we habitually think and talk about our world merely biases us towards a certain way of conceptualising it, then this bias will spread outward beyond metaphysics to every other discipline that concerns the world (i.e. all of them). Process ontology is not merely a more eccentric way of describing the world, but a tool that helps us uncover truths and practice effective strategies we otherwise would never have envisaged…
Thinking differently: “A Cosmos of Flux: The Case for Process Philosophy.”
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As we go with the flow, we might send adventurous birthday greetings to Gerald “Gerry” Malcolm Durrell; he was born on this date in 1925. A British naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author, and television presenter, most of his work was rooted in his life as an animal collector and enthusiast… though he is probably most widely known for his autobiographical book My Family and Other Animals and its successors, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods... which have been made into television and radio mini-series many times, most recently as ITV’s/PBS’s The Durrells.
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