Into The Thinking Kingdoms

I"ve made reference to this title before; it comes from a book by Alan Dean Foster (quick trivia question: what was the first Star Wars novel which was not a movie adaptation?) The title is an interesting one, and I'm going to take it out of context and use it for this post.

It came upon me tonight, as I scanned through the phylogenetic maps that humans have proposed over the years, that the students I teach cover the entire range of eukaryotes (well, some seem to be prokaryotic, but those are very rare). At one extreme are the plants, the viridaeplantae of all varieties, from the giant sequoia types which last forever to the grasses that Isaiah speaks of in the Bible. Some are fungi (or fungals), the fruiting bodies of which thrust their life into the unrequired and unrequited sunlight in order to transfer their memetic and genetic information. There are the singular and peculiar variants: poisonous rhodophyta, energetic and short-lived stramenopiles and alveolates.

Of course, the largest group are the metazoa, the animals of all shapes and sizes. Even at this level, the complexity varies: we have the porifera, which sit and sponge, happily filtering the ongoing flow of data fragments for the nuggets of nutrient knowledge; we also have the cridaria, some of which are dangerous predators who lack a spine (jellyfish, hydrae). And here is where it gets messy. We have begun to classify by geometry, for now we enter the realm of the bilateria, organisms with two distinct sides.

Some of the students I've met are worms. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it ensures survival with limited resources. Some are arthropods (mostly shells, segments, and stings, an old biology teacher once said). In this group are people who are crabby, some bottom-feeders with expensive flesh (lobster, anyone?) and some who weave webs and trap others. Some are insects, benign and malign.

But we are rising rapidly into the thinking kingdoms, the point at which neural clusters become neural webs, and neural webs become brains.

For the vast majority of my students are vertebrates with spinal cords; they are the chordata who are also craniata – there is a skull protecting those overdeveloped nerve clusters and networks. They are able to defend their thoughts and keep them private, able to marshal resistance to attacks on their concentrated intelligence. They are gnathostomata, organisms with jaws who can express themselves in complicated ways. And apart from the rare coelacanth, rhizodont or other organic post-Cretacean nightmares, they are terrestrial tetrapods, classic examples of what we think of as animals.

But the story does not end there. Sure, these are all capable of reasonably competent thoughts. By competence, we mean the ability of the organism to survive competition, to compete successfully at the execution of a task. And some of these are borderline competitors who aim to survive, and not much more – the cold-blooded and ambiguous amphibia.

We have to go higher, to the amniota, the reptiles (and birds) and mammals, before we see ambition, drive, and some level of creativity. And it is here that about 95% of my students find their true mode of existence. Yes, it might seem sad that some are still reptiles, and a few can be likened to birds. At this level though, all are creative survivors, and the larger portion of them is mammalian through and through – social, warm-blooded, with a high neurological turnover rate and complex environmental processing, with the ability to reflect and remember, and in some cases dream the dreams of the powerful and idealistic.

Here is where we are. We have entered into the Thinking Kingdoms, the world of warm hearts and minds. And the reason that I reflect on this is not only that I am a mammal myself, but because I've been looking through all the kind thoughts and reflections that my students have given me.

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Edit: For the Dancer, this link. Then again, anyone can have a look and learn something about the many awkward Latin terms in this biological post.