Hey, I recognize that octopus illustration!
It’s an illustration of the “eight armed cuttle” from the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1871. It’s used on a new article on “The Octopus That Ruled London”, about the “cephalomania” that swept across the city when people were first able to get a close-up look at the majestic mollusc. It’s not a mania, though, if everyone is doing it. Then it just becomes a sign of a normal, balanced, healthy mental state.
The Australian Giant Cuttlefish aggregation is truly one of nature’s great events. Thousands of cuttlefish congregate in the shallow waters around the Spencer gulf in South Australia, to mate and perpetuate the species. The cuttlefish like alien beings, display an array of patterns, textures and colours to indicate their intentions. As male courts a female or wards off other males, and entourage of suiters stay poised for an opportunity to mate with the female. A visual delight and a rare glimpse of nature in all its glory. Scott Portelli
Lately, my genetics class has taken a turn, by intent. I start the semester with the basics: Mendel, simple crosses, learning the terminology, all of that simple stuff that most of them see as a review of high school biology. But then, once I’m reasonably confident they know the commonly understood rules, I start adding all the complications that Mendel knew nothing about, and then we start getting into epistasis and the complicated business of translating genotype into phenotype, and I essentially end up telling them that everything they learned before wasn’t exactly true, because real world heredity is a heck of a lot more complicated. You can’t usually reduce complex traits to one gene with alleles that are dominant or recessive.
So what do you know, the New Yorker comes out with an excellent article that highlights complexity and real world genetics: Runs in the Family, about the genetics of schizophrenia.
Have you ever gone to your car and discovered a parking ticket on the windshield? Relax. Here’s something much, much worse.
What do rattlesnakes do when they have the urge to punch someone?
I’m pretty sure the loser was slinking away at the end.
I’m sure you were all looking forward to it. He left an answer to my criticisms of his failed predictions
of evolution. He does not disappoint. It’s stupid.
We cannot defeat this density of inanity, but I will count it as a victory if he learns about these strange things called “paragraphs”.
Peter Watts has this short short story about a brain interface technology that allows people to merge their consciousness with other organisms — and in this one, “Colony Creature”, someone experiences what it is like to be an octopus, and is horrified by it.
“Those arms.” His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “Those fucking crawly arms. You know, that thing they call the brain— it’s nothing, really. Ring of neurons around the esophagus, basically just a router. Most of the nervous system’s in the arms, and those arms… every one of them is awake…”
It’s a good story, and I’m not knocking it. I think it’s also important to recognize that the experience of being a non-human organism is probably fundamentally different than being a human.
Imagine all the poor transhumanists who were born in the 19th century. They would have been fantasizing about all the rapid transformations in their society, and blithely extrapolating forward. Why, in a few years, we’ll all have steam boilers surgically implanted in our bellies, and our diet will include a daily lump of coal! Canals will be dug everywhere, and you’ll be able to commute to work in your very own personal battleship! There will be ubiquitous telegraphy, and we’ll have tin hats that you can plug into cords hanging from the ceiling in your local coffeeshop, and get Morse code tapped directly onto your skull!
Alas, they didn’t have a Ray Kurzweil or Aubrey deGray to con them with absurd exaggerations.
