People who fixate on deep space and other planets for inspirational organisms really haven't been paying enough attention closer to home. We already have the most bizarre life forms imaginable, right under our noses...
Plants.
"Plants? Plants are boring!" you say.
Or not. Here are 10 amazing things about plants that will break your disbelieving little brain. You can't make this stuff up:
Plants can swim! Some single-celled green algae (and other plants, like euglenids and dinoflagellates) have flagella they use to swim from place to place for their entire life, not just as gametes. How do they know where they want to go? Well...
Plants can see! Yep, that's what I said. Some plants have an eye spot that can perceive light and tell the flagellum to whip them to a better location. So much for the Creationist's "half an eye is no use" hypothesis.
Plants hunt! Many dinoflagellate species are photosynthetic, but most of those are actually mixotrophic--that is, they both make their own food, and eat prey. Noctiluca even eats fish eggs! And speaking of amazing dinoflagellates, these tiny plants are responsible for stunning bioluminescent tides.
Plants are made of glass! Diatoms are tiny golden-brown algae that consist of about 98% silicon: almost pure glass. These plants have a bit of squishy genetic material sandwiched
Naked Man orchid
between two nesting valves that look like glass petri dishes. Typically, they reproduce asexually, with the squishy stuff dividing, and each half taking one of the valves and regrowing the other. The problem is that they always regrow the nested valve, so some of the diatoms get smaller every generation until they finally have to have sex to reset the size. Billions of dead diatoms ultimately fall to the sea floor--forming layers up to hundreds of meters deep--and eventually become compressed into fine-grained stone called chert.
Plants have alternating generations! Okay, this one is hard to conceptualize. Imagine that you are human, but when you have a child, it will be a cheetah. And your parents were
Flying Egret orchid
earthworms. Your grandkids will be earthworms again. That's kind of how alternating generations work in some plants (well, ignoring that humans, cheetahs and earthworms don't have the same DNA). In many cases, they are so different that we thought for a long time that these stages were actually different species. The king of complex life histories is the wheat leaf rust, which goes through 5 different spores, living in 2 host plant species along the way.
Flowers and fruit invented beauty! Before flowers came along, plants reproduced many inefficient ways; sometimes with spores, like ferns and fungi do; or by broadcasting incredible volumes of pollen to the wind, like pine trees do. Either way, you're just kind of throwing a Hail Mary and hoping it hits something useful. Works, but it's pretty random; and you certainly don't need to advertise, explaining why mushrooms are so cryptic (and often toxic). Flowers and fruits figured out that if they looked
Hooker's lips
pretty enough (and tasted nice), they could lure unsuspecting animals into disseminating their genetic material for them. Clever. Which leads us to...
Some single-celled plants can work together to form larger creatures with specialized organs!Slime molds consist of perfectly functional single-celled protists that sometimes come together to get things done as a big, sticky puddle. For instance, and without any top-down management, some of these cells will choose to gang up to hunt (see #3), or to form fruiting bodies to produce spores.
Some single-celled plants can work together to process information...without a brain! Remember I just mentioned that slime molds can organize without anyone telling them what to do? Well, they can also problem-solve without a brain.
And last, but hardly least, Plants create chemical energy from sunlight, and build their bodies from air! If you didn't know this from almost your first memory, you would be
Flying Duck orchid
flabbergasted. That the solid body of a Giant Sequoia is built from little more than the same gaseous carbon dioxide you exhale with every breath is astounding. And that photosynthesis changes sunlight into sugar is mysterious alchemy of the highest order. It's so familiar that it's hard to understand just how bizarre and rare it actually is. In point of fact, only 5% or less of all species on Earth are autotrophs. Everybody else eats. And of those measly 5%, all of them use chlorophyll to accomplish their magic. Chlorophyll is found in the chloroplast, an organelle that probably originated as an independent unicellular blue-green algae that was co-opted by other cells for their own use. Other organelles are thought to have originated like this, too: the mitochondria, for instance, which is like a little power generator (we know this because these organelles have their own unique DNA, and cannot be made by their host cell, but must be inherited during cell division). So, life on earth is dependent upon the strange occurrence of an organism that figured out how to eat sunshine, and the fact that other organisms thought it was such a good idea that they adopted that other living organism into their own cell structure. This is weird. In evolution, a good idea usually pops up many times: even eyes evolved independently 50-100 times (depending on how you define "eye").
So, if your life is lacking in awe, spend a few moments meditating on this...then go have a salad!
Apparently, it's just a simple bell-curve. Despite the miraculous sudden appearance of an avalanche of words out of the mouths of two-year-olds, toddler brains don't have magical powers.
Like filling a jar with jelly beans, we gotta hear a word a certain number of times before we own it, & the bigger the word, the more jelly beans it takes. Toddlers just have all the low-hanging fruit to learn first.
This is good news for adults trying to learn a new language :)
In a longer article, he compares the internet--& Google in particular--to time-&-motion studies that transformed productivity in the industrial revolution, becoming & remaining "the ethic of industrial manufacturing" at the cost of human job satisfaction. Carr provocatively suggests that Google's information management efforts are new oppressive time-&-motion algorithms for intellectual thought & knowledge work. He worries about the loss of deep thinking associated with the loss of deep reading in favor of the internet's hyperactive skimming.
But I wonder if all that deep reading wasn't at least partially because we were getting that information from a single author, & we needed to subconsciously assess the validity of the claims? We were also pretty much forced to wade through a lot of extraneous information to get to the meat of it, & then ultimately take or reject what we were given. Hopefully we could then tie what we kept to other reading, but no one can read everything--I think the last true "Renaissance Man" who actually held a good percentage of the knowledge of his time was probably Jefferson.
The internet helps resolve these issues, streamlining the process of information acquisition & interconnecting information to supporting & refuting arguments in a way no print source ever could. While much has been made of the dubious credibility of internet authors, is the situation really that different for printed authors, or are we assigning them more trust than perhaps we should due to the authority inherent in having access to esoteric means of distribution not available to everyone?
The internet--as all new technology tends to do--is certainly upsetting the applecart & redistributing power within society. Those who produce books seem to be one of the losers in this new arrangement.
So, is Nicholas Carr's fear grounded, or is he feeling powerless & seeing patterns where none exist?
Take a look at this guy. He represents our standard story about what early humans were like. But apparently, we're projecting again.
"Because many of the items that have endured over the millennia are things like arrowheads and spear points, archaeologists studying the Paleolithic era have generally focused on the ways and means of that noble savage, a-k-a Man the Hunter, to the exclusion of other members of the tribe."
"To this day, in Paleolithic studies we hear about Man the Hunter doing such bloody wonderful things as thrusting spears into woolly mammoths, or battling it out with other men," Dr. Adovasio said. "We've emphasized the activities of a small segment of the population—-healthy young men—-at the total absence of females, old people of either sex and children. We've glorified one aspect of Paleolithic life ways at the expense of all the other things that made that life way successful."
"We're reconstructing the past based on 5 percent of what was used."
So, it turns out that the invention of string was arguably more important to human development than stone tools, & truly a remarkable leap of imaginative spatial reasoning.
Think about it: with string, suddenly you are mobile since you can carry a baby or quantities of food & tools. You can make nets & snares to catch fish & game remotely, build a raft, constrain livestock, link varied materials into compound tools, twist a bow string for driving fire drills or arrows, magnify human physical power output by harnessing mechanical advantage...and weave elaborate clothing with targeted functional AND symbolic import.
Or would you rather have a sharp rock?
So how did they figure it out? Take a look at this girl's hat--ever noticed it before?...It's not an abstraction. It's a "radially sewn piece of headgear with vertical stem stitches" carved by someone who was very familiar with weaving.
So, if our mental mechanisms designed to navigate through the physical & social worlds are being hijacked by unscrupulous power-seekers, I have to ask if we need leaders at all?
But we're more important than slime molds & ants, so maybe there's a need for human leaders, right?
Well, even anarchy apologists like Robert Nozick can't find a way to deny that we absolutely have to have government. But that's more about arbitrating disputes than "leadership".
Social norms do force us into specific roles, however, & finding ourselves in a group with a gap, we tend to fill it. High school social cliches appear everywhere the same: the jock, the stoner, the egghead, the prom queen, the B.M.O.C. Maybe the presence of the B.M.O.C. suggests we WANT a leader, whether or not we actually need one.
Jared Diamond implies in his book "Why is Sex Fun?" that "leadership" probably has more to do with the evolutionary strategies of males than it does with any good it provides to the society. Basically, more power = more access to resources = more reproductive opportunities. It certainly worked for Ghengis Khan.
That goes a long way toward explaining the male to female imbalance of elected representatives, actually. I think it was Feinstein who commented in the wake of yet another Capital Hill sex scandal, "I've noticed that 50-year-old Congresswomen don't have the same effect on their interns as 50-year-old Congressmen do."
America is lodged in a cultural battle that simply will not end: Religion vs. Science. There's some really fascinating science related to this conflict.
So, our rigid sense of right & wrong suggests that we have to choose, & we often have a really hard time seeing the forest through the trees. Why are we so belligerent, gullible & willfully stupid sometimes?
"Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old."
We see what we expect to see, what we have "primed" our brains to spot, even if those things are just mythical figments of our imaginations, like angels or UFOs. These pre-beliefs, if you will, affect our perceptions of other people: "In our minds, attractive people are better people — and apparently thinking makes it so."
It makes sense: if you are looking to unite a group of people to support your bid for personal power, you need to identify something that is similar about those people that can be used to wrestle power away from whoever currently appears to hold it.
With science sitting in the middle ground, New Age mysticism & Intelligent Design/Creation Science are two of the current tools used by the left & right wings respectively. They exploit our tendency toward perceptual errors & our fondness for anecdotal evidence to claim superiority for their in-group, calling into question the credibility & entire history of science in a blatant grab for power. While they do pick & choose, none of these people are seriously suggesting we give up ALL the benefits of science & go back to living in caves.
Here's a detailed rebuttal of many of the currently popular anti-science arguments. It includes staggering descriptions of some remarkable biological systems, like blood clotting, flagellum, & human-chimp chromosome comparison:
Nothing is more common than to hear someone hold forth about how we wimpy humans have no claws, teeth, venom or other killing gifts like virtually every other animal does...just our magnificent brains to help us catch food in the survival game.
The trick is our small, sweaty, more-or-less hairless bodies that make us significantly more efficient at blowing off heat than heavy masses of sprinting venison are. We just jog along, forcing large prey to keep running until it overheats & collapses after only about 10-15 km.
As evidence, human bodies come equipped with some interesting features that don't even fire up until we start running: like a thick neck-support ligament, disproportionately large butt muscles & long springy leg & foot tendons, for instance.
Corn = 18 gals. of oil/acre/year; Palm = 700-800 gals. of oil/acre/year; Algae = 20,000 gals. of oil/acre/year! And that's in a pond where light-penetration limits yield. You can increase the yields dramatically with thin, vertical greenhouse tanks. Apparently, they can even easily tailor the carbon chains to whatever type fuel you want to get out.
Although I must say, it kind of ruins it for me when Poindexters say things like "If we converted 1/10 of the state of New Mexico to greenhouse algae production, we could supply the entire nation's energy requirement."
How about putting it in all those urban wasteland re-development districts & butt-ugly suburbias?
This is a fantastic, scary story, brought about in part by that most-dangerous of 1960's era do-it-yourself children's manuals: The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments.
Before reading this, I would really not have thought it possible for a preternaturally determined Eagle Scout candidate to assemble the required nuclear material to build a semi-functional breeder reactor & kick off a Superfund nuclear waste clean-up.
Who knew? Here's an ironic quote from one of the seriously unexpected under-the-radar participants:
"“Reactors get hot, it’s just a fact,” Miller, a nervous, skinny twenty-two-year-old, said during an interview at a Burger King in Clinton Township where he worked as a cook."
In the annals of overturned conventional wisdom, this is a doozy.
Everybody KNOWS that lactic acid is the stuff that builds up in your muscles during exercise, slowing you down, making you burn now & ache later. Seeking faster runs, longer leaps & higher jumps, people have been tweaking their diets & training for decades in a desperate attempt to remove this offending substance.
