Impelled By Their Own Activities

… the rate of growth determines the microclimate, which determines the rate of growth.

This is from The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment by Richard Lewontin (2000, 1998):

… The light intensity, temperature, humidity, air movement, and gaseous composition of the atmosphere in a densely cultivated field or a forest all vary with height from the ground.

[line break added] The microclimate near the soil surface is quite different from that between two lower leaves of a maize plant, which is again quite different from the microclimate for leaves near the growing top of the plants. The zones change as the plant grows taller and as the leaves grow longer and touch the leaves of neighboring plants.

[line break added] These microclimatic variations play an extremely important role in growth and production because it is the intensity of solar radiation and the carbon dioxide concentration at the surface of the leaves that determine the rate of photosynthesis and thus the growth rate and productivity of the maize plant. So the rate of growth determines the microclimate, which determines the rate of growth.

Not only the rate of growth but the exact morphological pattern of leaves is an important variation. The spacing of leaves along the stem and their position around the stem, the shape of each leaf, its angle of repose against the stem, the hairiness of its surface determine how much light, moisture, and carbon dioxide reach the leaves and how rapidly oxygen produced by photosynthesis is carried away.

… when … redesigned plants, produced by selective breeding, are tested it turns out that the microclimatic conditions for which they were designed have now changed as a consequence of the new design. So the process must be carried out again, and again the redesign changes the conditions. The plant engineers are chasing not only a moving target but a target whose motion is impelled by their own activities.

My most recent previous post from Lewontin’s book is here.

-Julie

Until the Basket Is Full

… This, too, occurs during flight.

This is from Insects and Flowers: The Biology of a Partnership by Friedrich G. Barth (1991):

… After visiting a “pollen flower” a bee or bumblebee looks as though it has been wallowing in a tub of pollen. But as it is flying to the next flower it cleans the pollen up, using the hindlegs — which are specially equipped for the job — with the greatest agility.

[line break added] The first of the five segments of the foot (tarsus) of the hindleg is very wide, with several rows of bristles running perpendicular to the long axis of the leg on its inner surface. This is the “brush.” With the brushes on its two hindlegs, the worker bee gathers the pollen out of its hairy pelt while still in flight. Then a “comb” at the lower end of the hindleg tibia is used to comb the pollen out of the brush.

[line break added] Obviously this maneuver requires both hindlegs; the right comb works on the left brush and the left comb on the right. This, too, occurs during flight. So does the last part of this action, which finally brings the pollen into the “luggage compartment” known technically as the pollen basket. This is a hollow in the outer surface of the extra-wide tibia of the hindleg, a surface that is bare except for the sturdy bristles encircling the hollow.

[line break added] A spur juts out from the “heel” (the upper end of the first tarsal segment) of the hindleg, curving outward so that it can be pressed against the inside of the comb on this leg. As the comb scrapes downward, the pressure from this spur forces the pollen into the lower end of the basket. One load after another is pushed in, until the basket is full. A thick bristle helps to hold the mass in place.

[line break added] The middle legs beat and compress the pollen clump, which — depending on what the flowers had to offer and on the demand at home — can weigh as much as ten milligrams and contain as many as a million pollen grains. This solid mass is so firmly attached that it is not lost even though the flight to the hive may cover a mile or more. It helps, too, that while collecting the pollen the bee moistens it with some honey it has brought along.

My most recent previous post from Barth’s book is here.

-Julie

Molded To

… the user both wants and does not want the technology.

This is from ‘Human Technology Relations’ found in The Critical Ihde, edited by Robert Rosenberg (2023):

… within the realm of embodiment relations one can develop a quite specific set of qualities for design relating to attaining the requisite technological “withdrawal.”

[line break added] For example, in handling highly radioactive materials at a distance, the mechanical arms and hands which are designed to pick up and pour glass tubes inside the shielded enclosure have to “feed back” a delicate sense of touch to the operator. The closer to invisibility, transparency, and the extension of one’s own bodily sense this technology allows, the better.

[line break added] Note that the design perfection is not one related to the machine alone but to the combination of machine and human. The machine is perfected along a bodily vector, molded to the perceptions and actions of humans.

… The actual or material technology always carries with it only a partial or quasi-transparency, which is the price for the extension of magnification that technologies give. In extending bodily capacities, the technology also transforms them. In that sense, all technologies in use are non-neutral.

[line break added] They change the basic situation, however subtly, however minimally; but this is the other side of the desire. The desire is simultaneously a desire for a change in situation — to inhabit the earth, or even to go beyond the earth — while sometimes inconsistently and secretly wishing that this movement could be without the mediation of the technology.

… the user both wants and does not want the technology.

My most recent previous post from Ihde’s book is here.

-Julie

True Accounts

… You want to know your biggest fault?

This is from Anger, Mercy, Revenge by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, translated by Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum (2010):

… when you yourself have wound yourself up and come up with one reason after another to apply the spurs, your anger will depart all of its own, and time’s passing will sap its strength.

… some men have reasons to oppose us that aren’t only just but honorable. One man is looking out for his father, another for his brother, another for the fatherland, another for a friend. Yet we don’t forgive men for doing what we’d criticize them for neglecting — or rather, which is beyond belief, we often value the deed but condemn the doer.

… We grow angry even with the goods we have because another’s ahead of us, forgetting how much of humanity is behind us and what monstrous envy stalks the man who envies only a few. Still, people are so unreasonable that however much they’ve received, they count it an injury that they could have received more.

… Suppose many surpass you; consider how many more are behind you than ahead of you. You want to know your biggest fault? You don’t keep true accounts: you put a high value on what you’ve given, a low value on what you’ve received.

My most recent previous post from Seneca’s book is here.

-Julie

Create the Fact

… There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.

This is from ‘The Will to Believe’ found in William James: Writings 1878-1899 (1992):

… A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before anyone else backs him up.

[line break added] If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.

[line break added] And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, it would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the “lowest kind of immorality” into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic in which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives!

My most recent previous post from James’s book is here.

-Julie

The Space Between Two Persons

… the coronavirus has only accelerated a long-term process of eliminating and bracketing the body …

This is from Crowds: The Stadium as a Ritual of Intensity by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2021):

… I believe that crowds may serve as a core case in understanding a type of sociability that sociology, for complex historical reasons, has never concentrated upon: that is, a relationship among humans that integrates their bodies, their presence, and the space that both require, instead of being exclusively based on meanings and on the human mind.

… as Hannah Arendt stated, the space between two persons is not only occupied by a joint focus of two minds on a shared object of attention. Once they start constituting such an “intentional object” together, as Edmund Husserl called it, a more physical “in between” that consists of bodily gestures in their mutual dependence inevitably emerges.

… In coronavirus times we sense — however vaguely — that we increasingly miss this in-between and we thus hope to return to interactions without social distance. But we may also speculate that the coronavirus has only accelerated a long-term process of eliminating and bracketing the body from the social dimension of human existence and interaction, a process that has been going on since the emergence of early modern technology …

-Julie

Outside Meaning

… The presence of noise makes sense, makes meaning.

This is from Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics by Christopher Cox (2018):

… Noise is nonsense: the absence of sense, interference with sense, or the proliferation of sense beyond the point of intelligibility.

… [Jacques] Attali writes:

“A network can be destroyed by noises that attack and transform it if the codes in place are unable to normalize and repress them. Although the new order is not contained in the structure of the old, it is nonetheless not a product of chance. It is created by the substitution of new differences for the old differences. Noise is the source of these mutations in the structuring codes.

[line break added] “For despite the death it contains, noise carries order with itself; it carries new information. This may seem strange. But noise does in fact create meaning: first, because the interruption of a message signifies the interdiction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity; and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination.

[line break added] “The absence of meaning is, in this case, the presence of all meanings, absolute ambiguity, a construction outside meaning. The presence of noise makes sense, makes meaning. It makes possible the creation of a new order on another level of organization, of a new code in another network.”

My most recent previous post from Cox’s book is here.

-Julie

Organisms in Action

… that ecological niche was assumed to exist …

This is from The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment by Richard Lewontin (2000, 1998):

… There is a confusion between the correct assertion that there is a physical world outside of an organism that would continue to exist in the absence of the species, and the incorrect claim that environments exist without species.

… A practical example of the problem posed by arbitrarily defined ecological niches in the absence of organisms was given by the search for life on Mars.

… The designers of the Mars lander believed that ecological niches already exist in the absence of organisms, so that when the organisms evolved on Mars, they would come to occupy those empty niches. What could be more reasonable than to suppose that such a basic ecological niche as a carbon source for energy metabolism and some oxygen would be present on Mars? But that ecological niche was assumed to exist by the scientists on the basis of their knowledge of terrestrial life.

If niches do not preexist organisms but come into existence as a consequence of the nature of the organisms themselves, then we will not have the faintest idea of what Martian niches will be until we have seen some Martian organisms in action. For all we know, Martian life traps energy by an entirely different mechanism — or perhaps it is just allergic to sugar!

My most recent previous post from Lewontin’s book is here.

-Julie

The Ripe Pollen Grain

… This structure has the remarkable ability to digest its way through the cells of the style tissue in case there is no clear path …

This is from Insects and Flowers: The Biology of a Partnership by Friedrich G. Barth (1991):

… Is there any other plant product that serves so many sciences as the pollen grain? In the special construction of its nearly indestructible wall lies information of interest not only to the systematist but also to the paleobotanist, the archaeologist, the geologist in search of oil, the climatologist, the allergy researcher, the beekeeper.

[line break added] All of them make use of the pollen grain, learning from its form and surface structure something about the plants to which the pollen belongs — plants that inhabited the land in prehistoric times, plants that tell us about the climate in times past, plants with allergy-causing pollen, and plants at which the bees carry out the business of collecting.

… the pollen grain adheres to the stigma; the surface of the stigma is covered with hairlike papillae and is sticky in addition. The transfer or the male genetic material from the pollen grain to the egg cell in the ovary at the base of the pistil can begin. It takes place as follows:

First the so-called pollen tube grows out through a special pore in the pollen grain. This structure has the remarkable ability to digest its way through the cells of the style tissue in case there is no clear path; sometimes the style already has loose, easily penetrated tissue or even a hollow channel.

[line break added] The pollen tube grows very rapidly as much as one to three millimeters per hour. Even if the style is long, like that of the meadow saffron (15 mm), the goal — the opposite sex — is reached after only half a day.

The ripe pollen grain contains two or three nuclei. Within each are threadlike chromosomes, the male (in this case) genetic material. Having moved down the pollen tube to the ovary, one nuclei fuses with the egg cell.

My most recent previous post from Barth’s book is here.

-Julie

Relationality

… Technologies can be the means by which “consciousness itself” is mediated.

This is from ‘What Is Postphenomenology?’ found in The Critical Ihde, edited by Robert Rosenberg (2023):

… the human experience is to be found ontologically related to an environment or a world, but the interrelation is such that both are transformed within this relationality. In the Husserlian context, this is, of course, intentionality.

[line break added] In the context of his Ideas and Cartesian Meditations this is the famous “consciousness of ____,” or all consciousness is consciousness of “something.” I contend that the inclusion of technologies introduces something quite different into this relationality. Technologies can be the means by which “consciousness itself” is mediated. Technologies may occupy the “of” and not just be some object domain.

My most recent previous post from Ihde’s book is here.

-Julie