Homegoing

There are a lot of books out there these days that tell us we are only meat, meat with pretensions about what it is. The self-developed complexity of the meat supposedly (nay, definitely) informs the meat about the meat's environment.

Somehow though, this meat is tired of being meat. This meat feels that one day it should succumb to the laws of entropy and of caterpillarism, and die that it should be reborn elsewise.

In short, this tired meat wants to go home.

Reproduction Fail?

A recent paper by Goodman, Koupil and Lawson, Low fertility increases descendant socioeconomic position but reduces long-term fitness in a modern post-industrial society, in the 2012 Proceedings of the Royal Society (Biological Sciences), has basically affirmed the position many people are in denial about — that is, that the richer people get, the less they want to reproduce.

Why is this so? Well, this strategy essentially produces a limited pool of offspring, all with huge amounts of per capita resources in both human and economic capital. It makes them socioeconomically very competitive. The downside is that the species as a whole becomes less biologically competitive.

But this is not a new problem. Humans have been using technology to avoid the problems of simple biological competition for ages. We can compete with large predators (in fact, we've eliminated many of them or reduced them to zoological exhibits) by using weapons that vastly increase our sensory and attack range. We can compete with the environment by using engineering of all kinds. And we can mobilise energy quantitatively more effectively (although not more efficiently) than most other species. A smart human with high resource levels will out-compete a less-smart, less-resourced human — which is why you see dropping birthrates once a society gets freer access to technology.

In a city-state, where there are few natural threats, the main threat is socioeconomic, no matter what people moan and groan about. It thus makes perfect sense to see a drop in fertility levels in the vast majority of cities and city-states unless they have a large hinterland that is not urbanised.

However, there is always a bump in the implementation of such a strategy. This normally comes in the form of people moaning and groaning about low fertility as if they lived in an agricultural, low population density, high resource density environment. Ridiculous. We're not bacteria in a particularly rich chicken broth.

Fried Eggs

If all the eggs are fried, there will be neither birds nor fish. If they are fried earlier, neither will there be any other thing that creeps or crawls or walks. Reptiles, of course, are just birds with flattened feathers. And thus endeth the egg meditation of the week.

What We Now Know

We've tested the human frame for centuries now. We've used physics, chemistry and biology and everything in between. And the conclusions have multiplied, so that everyone has an opinion about everything.

What do we now know? We know that the body and its functions are complex. Those functions include mind, emotion, and a sense of self. They also include self-correcting mechanisms and all kinds of amazing metabolic powers.

But, as Paracelsus said, Alle Ding' sind Gift, und nichts ohn' Gift; allein die Dosis macht, daß ein Ding kein Gift ist. That is, "All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous."

There are only three general rules about the body, it seems: 1) use it often, do not spare it, but rest it when you can; 2) use it in many ways, but occasionally do specific things with intensity; 3) everything can be taken in small doses, and some in large doses, but if you feel full, that's bad.

This applies to every organ of the body, generally. The brain is probably the main exception to Rule One because it never really rests. But you can spare it from certain kinds of brain-cell destroying stress, like being hit in the head repeatedly or being exposed to extremely bright lights or loud sounds (see Rule Three).

So, what do we now know? We know a lot about specific things, but the big picture remains the same after many years. Paracelsus laughs at us.

The Nexus and the Orchid Plant

In the ecology of the tropical jungle, the orchid is an interesting and sometimes apparently parasitical plant. Orchids, sprouting aerial roots and tendrils of all kind, take in material from the entire network of water and minerals that semi-visibly permeates the jungle. And they bloom frenetically and gloriously, lie fallow for a while, and then bloom again. It depends on whether the conditions are right or not.

The orchid is not a tree, that mighty and mightily obvious pillar of the jungle. A single tree can sustain an entire ecology on its own, if it is big enough. Even an ecology that includes orchids. A tree is a nexus for comings and goings — for trade in nutrients and life, for cycling and recycling; it can sometimes act as a gateway for the mass movements of populations, or a base for sudden bursts of fecund creativity.

The orchid can be a nexus too, but a very much smaller one. If it is fortunate, its location will make it a more important micro-nexus. But the orchid, as earlier mentioned, is not a tree. And the tree is not merely an orchid writ large, but something altogether different because of its scale and deep resources. The tree props up the jungle, and the jungle props up the tree. The jungle might be a less glorious place without the orchid, but it will probably survive.

So too the small glory of Atlantis, and the larger lands of the New World.

Octopod

The party's over, the teams return from whence they came, the 2010 World Cup is done. Hovering behind the games is the image of the octopus named Paul, who predicted the correct outcome of eight matches and ensured himself a place in history.

It is a somewhat Cthulhoid idea, that in the whorled snarls of the octopus's tentacles there is a mysterious apparatus which transcends human senses and can plot, prophesy, scry, or see as through a glass darkly, the results of World Cup football matches. But it is a compelling and evocative picture.

After all, the octopus is the smartest of all invertebrates, the only one of that enormous array of life-forms to use tools. If we count in binary through our twofold surface symmetry, an octopus can count in octal; if we count in denary through our ten digits (thus making our hands both digital as well as analogue, denary as well as binary), an octopus can count in the most useful factors of its 240 suckers per arm.

To make matters more complicated, an octopus has 2/3 of its brains in its limbs, which are really outgrowths of its neck. Each of those tentacles is much smarter than our own limbs. They are not mere feet, as the word 'octopod' might imply.

An octopod drummer would have eight intelligent limbs, each capable of autonomous action, a veritable orchestra of musicians linked to a single conducting node. Think of the complexity of sound, of aural texture, of colour and echo!

Think of what feats of computation are available to an intelligent creature who has so many more combinations and permutations of 'digits' than we have. Is it any wonder that an otherwise undistinguished member of that species can predict the outcomes of World Cup matches? Would we be able to predict the outcomes of octopus sports?

Digestion

It occurs to me that the human organism cannot possibly be designed for large amounts of grain products. Where on earth are we supposed to digest it? The mouth is small, the saliva production capacity limited, and gluten is an abnormality to many of us. In fact, I doubt we were designed (or evolved) to drink non-human milk; the closest mammalian milks to human are whale and pig, in terms of content (although of course Romulus and Remus were supposedly suckled by a she-wolf).

So what then is a healthy human diet based on what apparatus we have?

I think that there must be a major role for meat and fat. Why else do we have this big meat-protein digestive unit called a stomach? And why the concentrated fat emulsifier called a gall-bladder? I suspect that based on such considerations, the typical human should be eating a diet based on meat and fruit. Relatively few people have allergies to meat and fruit, compared to those with allergies or disabilities with respect to gluten and lactose.

Put another way, if you walked around in the wild, without the supposedly civilising benefits of a good oven, what would you eat? Probably grasses and leaves, fungi, fruit and meat. Tubers perhaps. But not the current deluge of baked goods, high in sodium (yes, because baking uses sodium bicarbonate) and other additives designed to make stuff that feels nice to the mouth but is artificial as hell to the gut. You don't find bread growing on trees.

Maybe we should ignore the pithy daft wisdom of the food pyramid which says eat more starch than anything else. Maybe a diet that prolongs life for Mediterranean people or Ainu is one that would kill other people. Maybe the Chinese really are adapted to eat rice.

Most horrifying, humans are obviously evolving towards a bread-based diet. Eventually, the sufferers of coeliac disease and lactose intolerance will perish from the earth and everyone will drink the breast secretions of animals and eat the overcooked remnants of artificially-cultivated grains. I laugh when I see people protesting about 'Frankenfoods'. Your ancestors, dear children, and you yourselves, have made foods a thousand times more artificial than these.

I mean, think about it, we COOK our food. This doesn't happen in nature. It is terribly unnatural. Worse, we sit around chewing the cooked cud that we don't have the ruminant apparatus for digesting. That's just disgusting.

Anonymous Seeds

In my recounting of the days, I realise that I cannot merely number them off as if they were racehorses. Rather, I must insert, here and there, like the raisins in a pudding, a few nuggets of immortal factuality. And so, here is one such.

The plants that I nurture, that I cultivate crudely in lieu of my missing sibling, are most peculiar in their reproductive process. The Orchidaceae (or 'plants that look like testicles') are particular in this respect; they spawn uncountable numbers of minuscule seeds, spore-like in appearance and almost spore-like in their proclivities.

But unlike the spore, that merely seeks water, the seed of the orchid seeks a fungus. Not just any fungus, but one into which in can enter into some sort of carnal connection. For the juxtaposition of orchid seed with mycorrhizal basidiomyceteous fungus will produce a plant, where the seed alone will not.

You see, Nature has played the poor orchid a sad little trick. The seeds of the testiculiform Orchidaceae do not contain endosperm, and hence have no fuel for their green fuse. And, as that bard of Wales once wrote:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer...

The sad orchid must perforce draw upon the vitality of the gross fungus to fuel its future endeavours and its incipient beauty. It is a partnership that one might think is forged in Hell, but no, no, it is forged in Nature, which is (I assure you most seriously) probably worse.

So what can we do to help the orchid along? Why, we can provide artificially natural seed-cultivating media. All it takes is an agar matrix, in which we suspend the sterile (oh, what irony) but tasty extracts of some fleshy sugar-fruit (papaya perhaps, or coconut, or banana, or peach), and voila, we have created that in which the seed can grow!

Poor anonymous seeds! But now, with the medium provided by the deaths of their distant relatives, they can thrive and blossom! And who knows, perhaps some day they too will have their own names, and their own faces...

The Dragon Waxing

Scaly and golden, the dragon grew. In the damp, hot weather, it accumulated mass and concomitant weight. In the cave of its birth, its hardening amber armour gave it strength and confidence. It wondered when it would see the light of day again. It stirred briefly, and the cave moved around it.

In the outside world, its stirrings were eventually felt. For days, the guardian of the cave felt discomfort, almost pain. He prepared a lance, and oiled it with care.

The dragon woke in the body, and began to stretch wings, fine and delicate webs of dragon-stuff. Those webs also became thicker with time and hot weather.

The guardian felt a buzzing. For a moment, he felt disoriented. Then he knew. And he prepared to search the cave.

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An hour later, it was done. Sir Wolff withdrew his lance, examining it critically with an experienced eye. The container was full of dark brown and amber fragments. "Wax!" he muttered to himself. "Thank God I can hear properly again."

Bone

It is the most mysterious scaffolding of what we are. All we see are the outlying cousins of these deep monsters, teeth and nails, who have some kinship, but not enough. What we are is bred in the bone. Like the battlefields at Ypres and Verdun, the integument covers the carnage beneath. Skin and muscles, fat and gristle hide the stark elegance of the ivory infrastructure. When this elegance is naked and exposed, it inspires horror and shock – we fear the naked skeleton. A break is unthinkable, a crack nigh intolerable; the comminution of a fracture into spikes and shards brings visceral terror.

For we like our bones, smooth and white, full of marrow and living cells, minerals, an ecology all its own. We like them attached and nurtured by the web of blood and fibre that guards them like a wetsuit. We fondle them and carress them without noticing; we rely on them to make our point and firm our actions. Typing would be impossible without out dactylic infrastructure; locomotion would be sluglike and inefficient. The much maligned knee-joint is the compromise solution for a race that walks so much; many have suggested better alternatives, but never one so easily maintained (except in the face of extreme incidents such as non-contact sports made into contact sports).

We are articulate because we are articulated. We are dancers and singers and musicians, magicians and authors and poets, scientists and engineers and technicians, only because the bony frame supports our sloppy organs and the conduits which keep them functional and alive. The bone is the frame from which our tapestry depends, and when all else is gone, it is the last to bid farewell.

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.