Posts Tagged ‘Nature’
“The redwood is one of the few conifers that sprout from the stump and roots, and it declares itself willing to begin immediately to repair the damage of the lumberman and also that of the forest-burner”*…
Nature plans ahead: how redwoods survive fire…
When lightning ignited fires around California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park north of Santa Cruz in August 2020, the blaze spread quickly. Redwoods naturally resist burning, but this time flames shot through the canopies of 100-meter-tall trees, incinerating the needles. “It was shocking,” says Drew Peltier, a tree ecophysiologist at Northern Arizona University. “It really seemed like most of the trees were going to die.”
Yet many of them lived. In a paper published [in late November] in Nature Plants, Peltier and his colleagues help explain why: The charred survivors, despite being defoliated, mobilized long-held energy reserves—sugars that had been made from sunlight decades earlier—and poured them into buds that had been lying dormant under the bark for centuries.
“This is one of those papers that challenges our previous knowledge on tree growth,” says Adrian Rocha, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It is amazing to learn that carbon taken up decades ago can be used to sustain its growth into the future.” The findings suggest redwoods have the tools to cope with catastrophic fires driven by climate change, Rocha says. Still, it’s unclear whether the trees could withstand the regular infernos that might occur under a warmer climate regime.
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It’s not just the energy reserves that are old. The sprouts were emerging from buds that began forming centuries ago. Redwoods and other tree species create budlike tissue that remains under the bark. Scientists can trace the paths of these buds, like a worm burrowing outward. In samples taken from a large redwood that had fallen after the fire, Peltier and colleagues found that many of the buds, some of which had sprouted, extended back as much as 1000 years. “That was really surprising for me,” Peltier says. “As far as I know, these are the oldest ones that have been documented.”
Although the redwoods have sprouted new growth, Peltier and other forest experts wonder how the trees will cope with far less energy from photosynthesis, given that it will be years before they grow as many needles as they had before the fire. “They’re alive, but I would be a little concerned for them in the future.”
Another question is how the redwoods would cope if a second catastrophic fire strikes soon. Have they used up their emergency reserves? “The fact that the reserves used are so old indicates that they took a long time to build up,” says Susan Trumbore, a radiocarbon expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. “Redwoods are majestic organisms. One cannot help rooting for those resprouts to keep them alive in decades to come.”…
After a devastating conflagration, trees regrow using energy stored long ago: “Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds,” from @ScienceMagazine.
* John Muir
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As we learn from nature, we might spare a thought for Louis Agassiz; he died on this date in 1873. A biologist and geologist, he was an important early scholar of Earth’s natural history. After studying with Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt in Paris, Agassiz was appointed professor of natural history at the University of Neuchâtel. He emigrated to the United States in 1847 after visiting Harvard University and went on to become professor of zoology and geology at Harvard, to head its Lawrence Scientific School, and to found its Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Agassiz is known for observational data gathering and analysis. He made institutional and scientific contributions to zoology, geology, and related areas, including multivolume research books running to thousands of pages. He founded the field of glaciology.
His second wife, Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz (née Cary) collaborated with him on much of his work and went on to found Radcliffe College.
“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”*…
… and, Rachael Scarborough King and Seth Rudy argue, to serve a clear purpose…
Right now, many forms of knowledge production seem to be facing their end. The crisis of the humanities has reached a tipping point of financial and popular disinvestment, while technological advances such as new artificial intelligence programmes may outstrip human ingenuity. As news outlets disappear, extreme political movements question the concept of objectivity and the scientific process. Many of our systems for producing and certifying knowledge have ended or are ending.
We want to offer a new perspective by arguing that it is salutary – or even desirable – for knowledge projects to confront their ends. With humanities scholars, social scientists and natural scientists all forced to defend their work, from accusations of the ‘hoax’ of climate change to assumptions of the ‘uselessness’ of a humanities degree, knowledge producers within and without academia are challenged to articulate why they do what they do and, we suggest, when they might be done. The prospect of an artificially or externally imposed end can help clarify both the purpose and endpoint of our scholarship.
We believe the time has come for scholars across fields to reorient their work around the question of ‘ends’. This need not mean acquiescence to the logics of either economic utilitarianism or partisan fealty that have already proved so damaging to 21st-century institutions. But avoiding the question will not solve the problem. If we want the university to remain a viable space for knowledge production, then scholars across disciplines must be able to identify the goal of their work – in part to advance the Enlightenment project of ‘useful knowledge’ and in part to defend themselves from public and political mischaracterisation.
Our volume The Ends of Knowledge: Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences (2023) asks how we should understand the ends of knowledge today. What is the relationship between an individual knowledge project – say, an experiment on a fruit fly, a reading of a poem, or the creation of a Large Language Model – and the aim of a discipline or field? In areas ranging from physics to literary studies to activism to climate science, we asked practitioners to consider the ends of their work – its purpose – as well as its end: the point at which it might be complete. The responses showed surprising points of commonality in identifying the ends of knowledge, as well as the value of having the end in sight…
Read on for a provocative case that academics need to think harder about the purpose of their disciplines and a consideration of whether some of those should come to an end: “The Ends of Knowledge,” in @aeonmag.
* Albert Einstein
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As we contemplate conclusions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1869 that the first issue of the journal Nature was published. Taking it’s title from a line of Wordsworth’s (“To the solid ground of nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye”), its aim was to “provide cultivated readers with an accessible forum for reading about advances in scientific knowledge.” It remains a weekly, international, interdisciplinary journal of science, one of the few remaining that publish across a wide array of fields. It is consistently ranked the world’s most cited scientific journal and is ascribed an impact factor of approximately 64.8, making it one of the world’s top academic journals.
“I don’t think academic writing ever was wonderful”*…
Academic writing is famously abstruse. But, Stefan Washietl, founder of Paperpile, reminds us, it isn’t always so. As Rob Beschizza observes…
Stefan Washietl collected the shortest scientific papers. Some are unvarnished mathematical proofs, some are humor to amusing or incisive ends, others are clever-dickery that shoves the conclusion into the abstract. All are wonderful!…
Accessible academia: treat yourself to “The Shortest Papers Ever Published,” from @washietl and @paperpile via @Beschizza in @BoingBoing.
* Stephen Jay Gould
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As we go for the gist, we might send voluminous birthday greetings to Constantine Samuel Rafinesque; he was born on this date in 1783. An autodidact naturalist, traveler, and writer who, in spite of work of variable reliability, substantially expanded knowledge via his extensive travels, collecting, cataloging, and naming huge numbers of plants and some animals. Among these are many new species he is credited with being the first to describe.
Years ahead of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Rafinesque conceived his own ideas. He thought that species had, even within the timeframe of a century, a continuing tendency for varieties to appear that would diverge in their characteristics to the point of forming new species. Accordingly, he was over-enthusiastic at distinguishing what he called new species.
Rafinesque wrote prolifically, and often self-published. His work varied from brilliant insightfulness to carelessness, and raised the eyebrows– and sometimes the ire– of his scientific contemporaries. Indeed, he so incensed John James Audubon with his belief that Audubon has included unnamed species in his sketches of birds, that Audubon pranked him, feeding him sketches of imaginary fish… which Rafinesque believed and included in his writings, where (for 50 years or so) they remained as part of the scientific record.
“Everything / is not itself”*…
Toward an ecology of mind: Nathan Gardels talks with Benjamin Bratton about his recent article, “Post-Anthropocene Humanism- Cultivating the ‘third space’ where nature, technology, and human autonomy meet“…
The reality we sense is not fixed or static, but, as Carlo Rovelli puts it, a “momentary get together on the sand.” For the quantum physicist, all reality is an ever-shifting interaction of manifold influences, each determining the other, which converge or dissolve under the conditions at a particular time and space that is always in flux…
The human, too, can be seen this way as a node of ever-changing interactions with the natural cosmos and the environment humans themselves have formed through technology and culture. What it means to be human, then, is not a constant, but continually constituted, altered and re-constituted through the recursive interface with an open and evolving world.
This is the view, at least, of Benjamin Bratton, a philosopher of technology who directs the Berggruen Institute’s Antikythera project to investigate the impact and potential of planetary-scale computation. To further explore the notion of “post-Anthropocene humanism” raised in a recent Noema essay, I asked him to weigh in on the nature of human being and becoming when anthropogenesis and technogenesis are one and the same process.
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“I can’t accept the essentially reactionary claim that modern science erases ‘the Human.’ Demystification is not erasure. It may destabilize some ideas that humans have about what humans are, yes. But I see it more as a disclosure of what ‘humans’ always have been but could not perceive as such. It’s not that some essence of the Human goes away, but that humans are now a bit less wrong about what humans are,” he argues.
Bratton goes on: “Instead of science and technology leading to some ‘post-human’ condition, perhaps it will lead to a slightly more human condition? The figure we associate with modern European Humanism may be a fragile, if also a productive, philosophical concept. But dismantling the concept does not make the reality go away. Rather, it redefines it in the broader context of new understanding. In fact, that reality is more perceivable because the concept is made to dissolve.”
How so? “The origins of human societies are revealed by archaeological pursuits. What is found is usually not the primal scene of some local cultural tradition but something much more alien and unsettling: human society as a physical process.
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All this would suggest, in Bratton’s view, “that cooperative social intelligence was not only the path to Anthropocene-scale agency for humans, but a reminder that the evolution of social intelligence literally shaped our bodies and biology, from the microbial ecologies inside of us to our tool-compatible phenotype. The Renaissance idea of Vitruvian Man, that we possess bodies and then engage the world through tools and intention, is somewhat backward. Instead, we possess bodies because of biotic and abiotic ‘technologization’ of us by the world, which we in turn accelerate through social cooperation.”
In short, one might say, it is not “I think therefore I am,” but, because the world is embedded in me, “thereby I am.”
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Bratton’s view has significant implications for how we see and approach the accelerating advances in science and technology.
A negative biopolitics, so to speak, would seek to limit the transformations underway in the name of a valued concept of the human born in a specific time and place on the continuum of human evolution. A positive bio-politics would embrace the artificiality of those transformations as part of the responsibility of human agency.
Bratton states: “Abstract intelligence is not some outside imposition from above. It emerged and evolved along with humans and other things that think. Therefore, I am equally suspicious of the sort of posthumanism that collapses sentience and sapience into an anti-rationalist, flat epistemology that seeks not to calibrate the relation between reason and world, but is instead a will to vegetablization: a dissolving of agency into flux and flow. Governance then, in the sense of steerage, is sacrificed.”
To mediate this creative tension, what is called for is a theory of governance that recognizes the promise while affirming the autonomy of humans, albeit reconfigured through a new awareness, by striving to shape what we now understand as anthropo-technogenesis.
In the political theory of checks and balances, government is the positive and constitutional rule is the negative. The one is the capacity to act, the other to amend or arrest action that could lead to harmful consequences — the “katechon” concept from Greek antiquity of “withholding from becoming,” which I have written about before.
An ecology of mind, in the term of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, would encompass both by re-casting human agency not as the master, but as a responsible co-creator with other intelligences in the reality we are making together…
“The Evolution of What It Means To Be Human,” from Nathan Gardels and @bratton in @NoemaMag. Both the conversation and the article on which it is based are eminently worth reading on full.
Pair with: “Artificial Intelligence and the Noosphere” (from Robert Wright; for which, a ToTH to friend MK): a very optimistic take on a possible future that could emerge from the dynamic that Bratton outlines. Worth reading and considering; his visions of the socioeconomic and spiritual bounties-to-come are certainly enticing.
That said, I’ll just suggest that, even if AI is ultimately as capable as many assume it can/will be– by no means a sure thing– unless we address the kinds of issues raised in last week’s (R)D on this same general subject (“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way”) we’ll never get to Bratton’s (and Wright’s) happy place… The same kinds of things that Bratton implicitly and Wright explicitly are mooting for AI (as a knitter of minds in a noosphere) could have been said— were said— for computer networking, then for the web, then for social media… in the event, they knit— but not so much so much in the interest of blissful, enabling sharing and growth; rather as the tools of rapacious commercial interests (c.f.: Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification”) and/or authoritarians (c.f., China or Russia or…). Seems to me that in the long run, if we can rein in capitalism and authoritarians: maybe. In the foreseeable future: if only…
* Rainer Maria Rilke
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As we contemplate collaboration, we might send mysterious birthday greetings to Alexius Meinong; he was born this date in 1853. A philosopher, he is known for his unique ontology and for contributions to the philosophy of mind and axiology– the theory of value.
Meinong’s ontology is notable for its belief in nonexistent objects. He distinguished several levels of reality among objects and facts about them: existent objects participate in actual (true) facts about the world; subsistent (real but non-existent) objects appear in possible (but false) facts; and objects that neither exist nor subsist can only belong to impossible facts. See his Gegenstandstheorie, or the Theory of Abstract Objects.
“Nature is full for us of seeming inconsistencies and glad surprises”*…
George Musser talks with biologist Michael Levin about his practice of uncovering the incredible, latent abilities of living things…
Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, has a knack for taking an unassuming organism and showing it’s capable of the darnedest things. He and his team once extracted skin cells from a frog embryo and cultivated them on their own. With no other cell types around, they were not “bullied,” as he put it, into forming skin tissue. Instead, they reassembled into a new organism of sorts, a “xenobot,” a coinage based on the Latin name of the frog species, Xenopus laevis. It zipped around like a paramecium in pond water. Sometimes it swept up loose skin cells and piled them until they formed their own xenobot—a type of self-replication. For Levin, it demonstrated how all living things have latent abilities. Having evolved to do one thing, they might do something completely different under the right circumstances.
Not long ago I met Levin at a workshop on science, technology, and Buddhism in Kathmandu. He hates flying but said this event was worth it. Even without the backdrop of the Himalayas, his scientific talk was one of the most captivating I’ve ever heard. Every slide introduced some bizarre new experiment. Butterflies retain memories from when they were caterpillars, even though their brains turned to mush in the chrysalis. Cut off the head and tail of a planarian, or flatworm, and it can grow two new heads; if you amputate again, the worm will regrow both heads. Levin argues the worm stores the new shape in its body as an electrical pattern. In fact, he thinks electrical signaling is pervasive in nature; it is not limited to neurons. Recently, Levin and colleagues found that some diseases might be cured by retraining the gene and protein networks as one might train a neural network. But when I sat down to talk to the audacious biologist on the hotel patio, I mostly wanted to hear about slime mold…
Read on for a fascinating conversation: “The Biologist Blowing Our Minds,” @drmichaellevin and @gmusser in @NautilusMag.
* Margaret E. Barber
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As we’re amazed, we might send tidy birthday greetings to Irwin Rose; he was born on this date in 1926. A biologist and biochemist, he shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.
Ubiquitin is a small protein molecule that attaches to other proteins, tagging them for removal, which are thus recognized by the cell’s proteasomes. These structures are the cell’s waste-disposal units, allowing the proteins to be broken down into tiny pieces for reuse; this ubiquitin-mediated process cleans up unwanted proteins resulting during cell division, and performs quality control on newly synthesized proteins… which matters, as faulty protein-breakdown processes lead to such conditions as cystic fibrosis, several neurodegenerative diseases, and certain types of cancer.
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