The Hypothetical Species: Variables of Human Evolution 9783030113186, 9783030113186

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The Hypothetical Species Michael Charles Tobias Jane Gray Morrison

Variables of Human Evolution

The Hypothetical Species

Michael Charles Tobias Jane Gray Morrison

The Hypothetical Species Variables of Human Evolution

Michael Charles Tobias Dancing Star Foundation Los Angeles, CA, USA

Jane Gray Morrison Dancing Star Foundation Los Angeles, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-11318-6    ISBN 978-3-030-11319-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11319-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931382 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Tamaulipas Rock Painting, ca. 4500 BCE, Mexico. © M.C.Tobias This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

At this very moment, in the name of taxonomy, literally thousands of people across the world are documenting, describing, sequencing, and analyzing more and more data using bigger and faster computers and storing it in the vastness of an enormous magical space called a cloud. If we turned back the clock to the Victorian era, we would find a scramble for demonstrating national pride by shooting, stuffing, mounting, and amassing the greatest number of specimens representing the world’s biodiversity in museum collections. All of the collecting and killing was in the name of producing a classification system for retrieving information from the rich biodiversity of colonies. Darwin and Audubon were personally conflicted between their ethics and methodologies. Today, we have technology and data analyses that present organisms to taxonomists as tiny tubes of nucleic acid to be subjected to sequencing and analysis. But such highly efficient modalities can too readily sever specialists from their very humanity by their goals to produce the most robust databases and run the most rigorous analyses. Now, more than ever, we need to embrace postmodern approaches to produce a new taxonomy that is not just predictive, allowing us to retrieve information, but is commensurate with the Anthropocene. The interdisciplinary approach showcased in The Hypothetical Species: Variables of Human Evolution by Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison illuminates the peril into which Homo sapiens places all species by maintaining obsolete philosophies in our pursuits of the “perfect” taxonomy. The authors remind scientists that our tenacious obsession with systematic excellence, at the expense of balance, is intended as a stark reminder that such endeavors have erected blinders. The scientific Royal We continues to overshadow and smother the miraculous inner lives of our kindred neighboring species. Tobias and Morrison explicitly and strongly encourage the reader to recognize that this emotional default position is destroying the world. As has been the case with their other tomes, Tobias and Morrison continue to emphasize that our future depends on a compassionate understanding of both ourselves and other species. We phylogenetically analyze data and elucidate the relationships organisms share as complex branching patterns. Somehow, we forget that our own lineage, the great apes, lacks the evolutionary potential to propel our clade into a wave of significant evolutionary diversity. You would think that one species, occupying one of the thinnest branches in the tree of life, would recognize how perilous its own position is. You would also think that we would have the greatest compassion for those Others we share a common ancestry with. That is not the case. Our activities are threatening approximately two-thirds of v

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nonhuman primates with extinction within 20 years. Can compassion tip the balance in saving primates, those Others closest to us? Dian Fossey was chided for being too compassionate and too close to her study subjects. However, her brand of “active conservation,” and the framework she established for monitoring and protecting mountain gorillas, has been practiced for more than 50  years. This year, mountain gorillas were removed from being “critically endangered” to “endangered.” Would that have happened had Fossey not crossed the imposed rules of science which emphatically opposed becoming empathetic and compassionate toward one’s study subject? Ironically, from the perches in the Virungas, in 1994, these apes were overlooking a genocide. Almost 25 years later, they are part of a thriving African nation being shaped, at least, to some degree, by the power of ethical suasion practiced by our species. The lives of Rwandans and mountain gorillas now form a binary orbiting realm of survival. One of the questions that Tobias and Morrison nudge the reader into pondering is whether we are a suicidal species. We are certainly potentially so, whereby the action of one individual, with the resources to push a button, can destroy our entire species and much of the biosphere. At the same time, we are also modifying the environment to the extent that we will actually push that button, unless we find the tipping point for compassion drift from our species to the Others. We are altering the environment and providing a new set of conditions for the next dominant species. And we have managed to decrease biodiversity to the extent that we may have killed off the very next species that could replace us. We know what carrying capacity is, and we adjust and play with it to increase our life expectancies and cram more carnivorously inclined individuals into larger and larger populations. No other organism has evolved this ability. As but one species, we exploit, and/or destroy countless other life forms while altering the earth’s landscape to increase our carrying capacity. It is most assuredly a no-win strategy. Noting the clear records of geological time, we should be aware of the fact that organisms committed evolutionary suicide by altering the entire atmosphere. Those primordial species that changed the Earth’s atmosphere developed photosynthesis to accommodate their energy needs. That resulted in the first mass extinction that was biologically triggered. Today, we are doing the same thing as a species, perpetuating our reliance on fossil fuels to meet our energy needs. As we continue down that road, we set the stage for another mass extinction. Is there hope for us to circumvent the Anthropocene? Hope is what fuels every environmental conservationist. Our understanding of evolution and ecology provides us with the ability to synthetically think about the way our planet operates: when microbes, plants, and animals function together as communities and intertwine with the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere to permit energy flow and nutrient cycling. In essence, our world depends on relationships more than any single entity. If we can shift our obsession with our own survival and well-being and, instead, focus on the rights of the earth’s functions not to be crippled by our actions, we might just discover our greatest hope for our own, and the Other’s, survival.

Foreword

Foreword

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Tobias and Morrison move us closer to that way of thinking in The Hypothetical Species: Variables of Human Evolution. This book is a followup to two of the authors’ previous works, Anthrozoology: Embracing ­ Co-existence in the Anthropocene, as well as The Theoretical Individual: Imagination, Ethics and the Future of Humanity. Our evolutionary self-­ confidence and lack of communion with the world around us has brought us to this juncture in geologic time. Do we continue to subject the Others, and the intricate web of connections present on Earth, to the same legacy we created for ourselves? This is the final question Tobias and Morrison want the reader to ponder after they close the book.

Florissantia quilchenensis (Mathewes & Brooke) Manchester. These 49 million year old flowers from Republic, WA, represent a member of the Sterculiaceae (Chocolate Family). This extinct genus was likely an understory species in the forests of British Columbia to Colorado during the Eocene-Oligocene. (Both images were taken by M.L. DeVore)

Foreword

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Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville, Georgia

Melanie L. DeVore

DeVore is a professor of Biological and Environmental Sciences at Georgia College and is adjunct at Arizona State University and New Jersey City University. She has a B.S. in Geology from the University of Wisconsin-­ Oshkosh and a Ph.D. in Plant Biology from the Ohio State University. DeVore has published primarily on the systematics of fossil plants and teaches evolutionary biology and botany. Outside the confines of a college campus, she has taught conservation and ecology at the Gerace Research Centre, San Salvador Island, Bahamas, serves on the board of San Salvador Island Living Jewels, and has volunteered and contributed to education programs by both the Bahamas National Trust and the Bahamian Reef Environmental Education Foundation. DeVore also is active as a science advisor to the Stonerose Interpretive Center, Republic, Washington, and is a research associate with the Burke Museum, University of Washington.

Contents

1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 When Philosophy Confronts Trillions of Particulars ������������������������    1 And There Is Linnaeus����������������������������������������������������������������������   10 Evolutionary Hybridism��������������������������������������������������������������������   11 Different Measures of the World��������������������������������������������������������   16 The Problem with Proofs ������������������������������������������������������������������   19 Something Else������������������������������������������������������������������������������   21 Differentiating Meaning Within the Anthropocene ��������������������������   22 2 Between the Theoretical and the Hypothetical������������������������������   25 Anthropic Individuals and Multiplicities ������������������������������������������   25 Pre-Socratic Fragments����������������������������������������������������������������������   27 The Paradox and Complexity of Species Definitions������������������������   28 Biosemiotic Variables������������������������������������������������������������������������   33 Life and Death������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   36 Contemporary Hieroglyphics������������������������������������������������������������   39 Biological Differentiations����������������������������������������������������������������   42 Libraries of Life ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   48 Cultural Transitions����������������������������������������������������������������������������   51 All the Rage ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   54 What Can We Glean of the Other?����������������������������������������������������   57 Altruism in the Biosphere������������������������������������������������������������������   59 The Jain Orientation to Ecology��������������������������������������������������������   62 Human Rights������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   68 Realms of the Ideal����������������������������������������������������������������������������   70 3 Taxonomic Uncertainties����������������������������������������������������������������   73 A Ghost in the Himalayas������������������������������������������������������������������   73 Legacies of Aristotle, Linnaeus, and Darwin������������������������������������   75 Zoological Multitudes������������������������������������������������������������������������   83 A United Natures ������������������������������������������������������������������������������   88 4 A Biosphere in Flux ������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 Hybrid Conceptualization������������������������������������������������������������������   93 What’s in a Name? ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   98 Re-evolution��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  103 Future Ancestors��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  106

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5 “…As Far as the Microscope Reveals…”��������������������������������������  113 Darwinian Convolutions��������������������������������������������������������������������  113 Ecological Ideation����������������������������������������������������������������������������  126 A Proliferation of Syntheses��������������������������������������������������������������  140 Existential Import������������������������������������������������������������������������������  145 The Yasuni Effect ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  148 Ecological Benchmarks ��������������������������������������������������������������������  155 It’s Still All About People������������������������������������������������������������������  158 6 Human Contradictions���������������������������������������������������������������������� 163 Biological Fellowships and Falling-Outs������������������������������������������  163 For the Love of Birds ������������������������������������������������������������������������  171 Activist Exploration ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  178 Enduring Contradictions Within Natural History������������������������������  180 Epiphanies and Radical Shifts in the Human Organism��������������������  185 Hypothetical Biologies����������������������������������������������������������������������  195 Formulating the History of an Idea����������������������������������������������������  196 Compassion Probabilities������������������������������������������������������������������  199 The Third Act ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  205 Ethical Suasion: The Tipping Point for Compassion Drift from the Individual to the Species ����������������������������������������������������  207 7 The Varieties of Social Contracts������������������������������������������������������ 213 The Embrace of Individual and Collective Non-violence in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries��������������������������������������  213 Exile from the Garden of Eden����������������������������������������������������������  224 The Valuation of Human Nature��������������������������������������������������������  232 8 Biological Consensus Mechanisms: The Future of Coexistence���������������������������������������������������������������� 243 The Legacy of Bambi������������������������������������������������������������������������  243 At Home in the Wild��������������������������������������������������������������������������  249 A Human Ethical Commons��������������������������������������������������������������  254 The Future of Protection��������������������������������������������������������������������  258 A New Social Contract����������������������������������������������������������������������  262 Safeguarding the Biosphere ��������������������������������������������������������������  265 Emblematic Windows on Future Evolution ��������������������������������������  268 Vicissitudes and Pathways of Biological Security����������������������������  271 Biological Complexities of the Truth������������������������������������������������  278 “Some Third Species”������������������������������������������������������������������������  280 Collective Consensus: The Future of Coexistence����������������������������  297 Adaptation Versus Compensation: The Anthropocenic Double Bind ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  300 Future Species������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  303 Index���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 307

Contents

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Introduction

Abstract

In this chapter we examine the goal of confronting and elaborating upon the outlines of evolutionary theory within a framework that collaborates in the invention of an all-­inclusive construct, namely, the survival of a compassionate, sustainable humanity. Examples of its neural network and biological infrastructure are taken from some fundamental ecological case studies, such as the primordial mutualisms displayed by the tiny wasps and fig trees, as well as numbers theories and probability distribution concepts.

 hen Philosophy Confronts W Trillions of Particulars Immanuel Kant, in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic (1783), suggested that a transcendental apperception was the way in which nature could be manifested in human consciousness (and by implication, in the consciousness of nature herself: biodiversity as self-conscious) (Fig. 1.1). Starting from that parameter, all human sovereignty is ceded to an entirely Other focal point of biological content, a very different planet than that which we have always supposed. Reconciling the complex rules of such a dramatically liberated nature, liberated from us, as a human personage

might construe this elemental bifurcation, relying upon our most attenuated sensory experiences of the natural world, was the essence of what Kant called Understanding. What can it mean, amid so many travails expended in the act of trying to acquire knowledge, data, and predictability? Many qualifying layers accrete over time upon the exoskeleton of contemplations: deep understanding, cross-­fertilizing fruition, metanoia, speculative fructification, lasting epiphany, ecological shock, and transformative experience. From Gilgamesh to James Joyce (as but one random span of cognitive emblems), the wilderness symbology in our sciences strikes of a complete parallel to what is real. Those parallel data sets comprise a near infinity of personal baggage of the mind, minds that may well be monasteries teeming with fellow cenobites each exhibiting the mark of satori, revelation, and some manner of transcendence from A to B – from nowhere to nowhere else. These are, by other names, communities, cities, and human aggrandizement. Such connections are meant to serve as a prelude not to the mechanical but, rather, to metaphysics, a poetry of subjective cases which demonstrate distinct advantages over the natural sciences they cautiously analyze. Metaphysics, like poetry, are the soft tissue that eludes fossil evidence. This is philosophy that can envision a pure escape from the dictatorial present tense, whether according to the rubrics of historical Utopias or in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, The Hypothetical Species, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11319-3_1

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1 Introduction

Fig. 1.1  Biodiversity as Self-Conscious: 5,000-Year Old Petroglyph, Werehpai Cave, Tiriyó Indian Territory, Southern Suriname. (© M.C.Tobias)

the very dialectics, converging fact and fiction in great works of art and in the euphoria’s attendant upon scientific breakthroughs. Our goal here henceforth is to understand that agency of great energy expenditure known as humanity, whose presence on Earth poses no less than a current nightmare requiring urgent understanding, reappraisal, and rectification in every possible realm where physical contact has resulted and will continue to inflict widespread biochemical damage. If we measure our alleged knowledge of the natural worlds in us and around us by way of some metric that has the added proof-positives of peer review, what we are really doing is fundamental confirmation bias, a practice that we will explore in-depth throughout this work. Confirming what we think we know simply drags out a battle between humble efforts and all-­expansive imperialism. To break up this sinister monopoly embodied in human evolution requires an insistence upon ignorance that tracks and correlates across every intellectual domain that has to date claimed knowledge for itself. But, in fact, our knowledge is a likely ruse developed over time to ceaselessly certify and codify our appetites. What we really know is plenty little. This is a certainty we can rely upon as we pay witness in this generation, and those before us, to one ecological crash after another. Let a first principle be established, albeit ensconced in as many approbations as misgivings. A closed rubric in the history of natural sci-

ence makes it the responsibility of a researcher to fill in the blanks. Humboldt, Jefferson, Buffon, Darwin, and Linnaeus before them had laid down a conceptual framework that for two centuries effectively rebutted challenge. The genius of the binomial nomenclature is its welcoming of anomalies, easily accommodated within the evolutionary theories we have been led to firmly believe encompass the description and understanding of each and every organism. If Latin is the most successful human language, at least until English speaking all but eclipsed it, so too the overall compendiums of evolution have stunned generations who seem to recognize in the Darwinian order something wholly a priori by nature, granting it the second nature acceptance that is tantamount to faith; maxims (however agnostic) that bind moral orders with an unflexing rationale enabling the assimilation of everything: trillions of particulars. We are interested in feeling the roots of humanity’s present ecological crisis, a compulsion (unrelenting masochism that mirrors our predicament) to grasp the peril in which our own kind has plunged the entire biosphere. There is nothing preordained or given in this treatise. Rather, we seek through the process of its many enquiries an unblushing series of elucidations. Through a rigorous interdisciplinary exploration, it is our goal to make meaningful acquaintances and connections, to encounter that which is known and unknown, and to posit possibilities

When Philosophy Confronts Trillions of Particulars

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Fig. 1.2  A way forward for a species: a young Bhutanese Monk. (© J.G.Morrison)

and assert certain commonalities of experience that suggest new interpretations. The title itself should suffice to incite some sense of both computational biology and evolutionary speculation, both at the heart of our goal, which is to see a way forward for a species that has invoked grave doubts as to its future (Fig. 1.2). By extrapolating data and illuminations from the history of astro-­ geophysics and cosmology, we hope to re-­ think and refresh perspectives whose ecological excesses may be evolutionarily tied to cellular clocks and seemingly implacable laws. This approach to human evolution and the Anthropocene is more than a little willing to concede that all of the traditional wagers, optics, mechanisms, calibrations, extrapolations, and the very numbers are far off base, let alone enshrining anything regular or established to offer, in the realms of either lateral or vertical experiment; linear or exponential computations of thought. The feverish dyad that concerns us most – raw exogenous data versus endogenous and intuitive familiarities  – underscores a mighty existential melancholy, on the one hand, namely, the scientific collapse before the sixth extinction spasm. Conversely, less draconian, steely machinations on an abacus, or simply in the abstractions of serious contemplation, yield a more favorable picture of human and associated other biological beings, as co-dependents within a marvelously petite and teeming trial, 4.1 billion years in the making.

There is little rationale defending breakdown but every conceivable reason to focus upon breakthrough. Narrowing the intimations of those bifurcative words (breakdown/breakthrough) is a methodically grueling but essential element of paleotaxonomy. In an earlier work,1 the authors posed a possibility that is a matter of observed logic of plausibility borne out time and again: that the one might influence the many, from a worker bee to a malevolent powermonger to a great artist (Beethoven’s Ninth; the Ghent Altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers; Edison and the lightbulb; Susan B.  Anthony and her peers; Salk and the polio vaccine). Homer, Mahavira, Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, Leonardo, and Mahatma Gandhi, each impacts others the way a lone particle might theoretically be the one to tip the scales in favor of gravity, or strong interactions, of the weak or nuclear force or electromagnetism. As with each of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence,2 the incipient aphorism “every vote counts” brings into an assured confluence a testable plurality – from civic societies to quantum mechanics – which mirrors that collective of noumena (Imanuel Kant’s noumenon, something See The Theoretical Individual, by Michael Charles Tobias/Jane Gray Morrison, Springer, New York, 2017. 2  “Signers of the Declaration of Independence,” http:// www.ushistory.org/declaration/signers/index.html, Accessed August 29, 2018. 1 

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Fig. 1.3  The equivalent sub-atomic particles of biology: alpine meadow in the rockies. (© M.C.Tobias)

conceived)3 within the life sciences. Our goal is to search for those connected dots that might suggest a biologically sustainable quotient for an as yet biodiversity-rich planet and for the future of our species. The equivalent subatomic particles of biology (Fig. 1.3) – all the equivalent elementary building blocks of atoms, but viewed in larger configurations  – units, such as molecules, cells, and genes – leave original traces, an edifice given to philosophical probity; itineraries of mathematical probability about which this book, in part deals. That would encompass natural selection, hybridization, new and/or extinct species, and notions of re-evolution, atavism, all those twisting traits that inform their own hereditary substance, despite the odds, thereby nurturing novel mixtures of life, however cantankerous and soli“Kant: Sensibility, Intuition and Noumenon,” S.  C. Hickman, Southern Lights, September 12, 2015, https:// socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/kant-sensibility-intuition-and-noumenon, Accessed August 19, 2018. 3 

tary, at times, that excite the neural networks throughout the entire geography of sensate substance by way of ecosystem dynamics, some old, others concurrent, all imagined. This latter conceit presents a most tantalizing riddle: no one, whether an Aristotle or Shakespeare, knows what is actually happening throughout the myriad pathways of life. The concept, often phrased vacuously, that knowledge is power is simply not possible, because knowledge is a fiction that merely tempts the cusp of truth or, as Pope Inncent X is said to have uttered, when first viewing his completed portrait by Diego Velásquez (c. 1650, domiciled in a cosy nook at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome), too much truth. Those mystery units, measures, and the very definitions themselves connote different entities, presuppositions, and a holistic Weltanschauung of variables abetting and confounding evolution  – from many millennia before Darwin. These include all those aboriginal cosmologies, the Jain Jivas, the Hindu Atman, and soul or spirit, to all those countless ways by which our species has

When Philosophy Confronts Trillions of Particulars

attempted to classify and characterize both material presence and essence. We have done so as a function of self-definition – the perennial naming of names4 – but also because we are obsessed with weights and measures, distances and extents, peripheries, horizons, and reasons which, by one comparison after another, motivate us to live, to be ourselves, to share in the world of others, and, by hopeful implication, to become more empathetic. Numbers exert an astonishing array of nuances in our evolutionary self-interest and behavioral roles, because we relentlessly wonder and seek out simulacra, mirror images, in our quest to understand the world around us. Everyone knows this. But if we cross out the verb, know, what then? All of the components of denominated objects, subjects, ideas, and objective and subjective categories absorb our interest. Everything our senses grasp and involuntary nervous systems calibrate excites our consideration. The world in us and around us, so many of whose excitations, glints, fibers, and contents we have subjected to scrutiny: this is all the restive fodder for our future natures, about which  – it must be emphasized now, at the beginning – we know nothing. By analysis human beings prompt both philosophical and reflex actions. The meaning of a tree, of a particular kind of tree, will vary in every respect from culture to culture and throughout time. Geography dictates as much about the biology of a tree species, as does its interpreted utility to humans. And when we try to assess the tree’s meaning, we are at once confronted by the proliferation of floristic properties, other dependent species, relationships, and what the tree provides them, or us. Take one celebrated example, the Bodhi or peepal (pipal) tree in India (Fig.  1.4), one of that country’s five most sacred trees (or panca-vrksa).5 An Indian ethnobotanist describes it according to its Latin and Hindi names and assigns known curative properties, portions of the See The Naming Of Names – The Search For Order In The World Of Plants, by Anna Pavord, Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, N.Y., 2005, particularly Chapters I and XIV. 5  See https://www.esamskriti.com/e/Culture/IndianCulture/Sacred-Trees-Of-The-Hindus-1.aspx, Accessed July 22, 2018. 4 

5

tree that may be utilized by humans, and basic botanical qualities, as such: “A medium sized, glabrous tree. Leaves: 10–15 × 10–12 cm, ovate-­ round, entire, coriaceous, shining, apex long tailed. Fruit: receptacles sessile, paired, smooth, depressed, globose, dark purple when ripe.”6 The genus Ficus contains over 2000 species, though some botanists disagree, suggesting more like 600 species. A first hint at vast discrepancies that continue throughout the human descriptions of the biological world, a maze of definitions, and species uncertainties. The family Moraceae, also known as the mulberry family, contains at least 38 genera. That number, as well, is not absolute.7 But then, the overall number of tree species in the world is only estimated at “60,065”8 of which pantropical species alone vary between “~40,000 and ~53,000.”9 Every one of these estimated three trillion individual living trees10 has (we all appreciate from varied experiences) a distinctive personality; life history; on average 200,000 leaves; at least, on average, half-million 50-micron-wide See Ethnobotanical Leaflets: 10: 329–335. 2006, Abstract, “Panca Ksira Vrksa (Ficus Species Used in Ayurvedic Medicine),” by Dr. Amrit Pal Singh, BAMS; PGDMB; MD (Alternative Medicine), Herbal Consultant, India –Swift Ltd., Chandigarh, December 19, 2006, https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer= https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1243&c ontext=ebl, Accessed July 22, 2018. 7  See The Oxford Encyclopedia Of Trees Of The World, Consultant Editor: Bayard Hora, Oxford University Press, New York, 1981, pp. 155–157. 8  “How many tree species are there in the world?” April 4, 2017, n.a., https://www.bgci.org/news-and-events/ news/1400, Accessed July 22, 2018. 9  See “An estimate of the number of tropical tree species,” J.  W. Ferry Slik, Víctor Arroyo-Rodríguez, Shin-Ichiro Aiba, Patricia Alvarez-Loayza, et.al., PNAS June 16, 2015. 112 (24) 7472–7477, June 1, 2015. https://doi. org/10.1073/pnas.1423147112, Edited by James H. Brown, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, and approved April 10, 2015 (received for review December 6, 2014, PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, http://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7472, Accessed July 22, 2018. 10  *Science & Environment, “Earth’s trees number ‘three trillion’,” By Jonathan Amos, BBC Science Correspondent, 3 September 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/scienceenvironment-34134366, Accessed July 23, 2018. 6 

1 Introduction

6

Fig. 1.4  A small temple beneath the Bodhi Tree, Bodh Gaya, c. 1810. (© British Library)

cells beneath the bark; and other co-dependents whose numbers cannot adequately be ascertained, given the worlds-within-worlds that make a single tree, a shrub, and a flower. And the same would go for deadwood. The trillions of fungi that utilize and live with trees are equally astonishing. A single 1500-year-old Armillaria bulbosa fungus discovered by James Anderson in 1992  in Michigan is thought to weigh “22,000 pounds” and covers “15 hectares,” making it one of the largest organisms on the planet.11 At the time of the Armillaria discovery, there were an estimated 1.5 million species of fungi on Earth. But by 2011, the number had been reversed by 11  https://nature.berkeley.edu/garbelotto/downloads/ humongousfungus1992.pdf; See “The Secrets of the ‘Humongous Fungus,’” by Sarah Zhang, October 30, 2017, The Atlantic, Science, https://www.theatlantic.com/ s c i e n c e / a r c h iv e / 2 0 1 7 / 1 0 / h u m o n g o u s - f u n g u s genome/544265, Accessed July 23, 2018.

botanists to an estimated “5.1 million species” of fungi.12 Many of them live on trees. Countless others inhabit the soil. Plant pathologists and medical mycologists study them with an eye to fungal diseases that can cause infections  – like Candida, a fungal yeast species, one of 1500 known fungi-yeast organisms that are hundreds-­ of-­millions of years old. Yeast happens to be one of the most biologically studied types of organisms in the laboratory. Two other fungal species found teeming throughout soils globally, Cryptococcus neoformans and Cryptococcus gattii, have been implicated as defining, opportunistic players in a number of potentially lethal

AM J Bot. 2011 Mar;98(3):426–38. doi: https://doi. org/10.3732/ajb.1000298. Epub 2011 Mar 2. “The fungi: 1, 2, 3 ... 5.1 million species?” Blackwell M, PUBMED, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21613136, Accessed July 23, 2018. 12 

When Philosophy Confronts Trillions of Particulars

7

Fig. 1.5  A stone buddha in from a Kyoto Monastery Garden. (© M.C. Tobias)

human diseases, from meningitis to AIDS.  In Greek, Cryptococcus refers to a “hidden sphere,” in part, because the parent organism relies on its airborne propagules to assist in metamorphosis. In 2009 researchers discovered from within a decaying hollow portion of a peepal tree in New Delhi “a novel anamorphic Cryptococcus species….”13 As with plasmids and bacteria, this particular new strain may be harmless to humans but has been deposited methodically in the CBS-­ KNAW Collection in Utrecht, the Netherlands,14 which, according to its website, offers a “comprehensive coverage of the culturable biodiversity of the fungal Kingdom (over 100,000 strains), while the prokaryotes are represented by unique collections of bacterial mutants, hosts suitable for DNA research, genetically engineered plasmids, broad-host-range plasmids and phages.”15 The biosafety involved in the transferring of such

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, March 2010, Volume 97, Issue 3, pp. 253–259, “Cryptococcus randhawai sp. nov., a novel anamorphic basidiomycetous yeast isolated from tree trunk hollow of Ficus religiosa (peepal tree) from New Delhi, India,” by Zia U. Khan, Suhail Ahmad, Ferry Hagen, Jack W.  Fell, Tusharantak Kowshik, Rachel Chandy,Teun Boekhout, First Online: 20 December 2009, Springer Link, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/ s10482-009-9406-8, Accessed July 22, 2018. 14  http://www.westerdijkinstitute.nl/collections/. 15  http://www.westerdijkinstitute.nl/Collections/ #MoreInfomation. 13 

genetic materials is overseen by the Convention on Biological Diversity (“CBD”)16 and a European Union protocol under the Common Access to Biotechnological Resources and Information program (“CABRI”).17 Which leads us back to trees, a peepal (fig) tree specifically, just one out of those three trillion or so other individuals. While Hindus associate every part of this one with the deities of Creation (Vishnu, Brahman, and others), the Buddhists of India believe that in the village of Bodh, in the District of Gaya, Bihar state, where this tree in question continues to prosper, Prince Siddhartha Gautama, later called Buddha, was himself enlightened sitting beneath its branches in meditation (Fig. 1.5). Mendicants retreating into a forest solitude for the remainder of their days was one of the most proximate of ­ philosophical traditions across India for millennia.18 Today, this famed Enlightenment tree can easily be visited at the Mahabodhi temple complex and is a place of important pilgrimage for the devout, or curious, from throughout the world.19 While the current https://www.cbd.int/. www.cabri.org. 18  See The Exile In The Forest, by Vishwa Chander Ohri, Lalit Kala Akademi, India, Bombay, 1983; See also, Remarkable Trees Of The World, by Thomas Pakenham, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2002, pp. 94–97. 19  See “Tales by Trees – A Brief Guide to the Sacred Trees 16  17 

1 Introduction

8

tree (Ficus religiosa) is said to be a descendant of the original one, legend has it that a shoot of the original tree was taken to what is today Sri Lanka in the third century BC by the daughter of the Emperor Asoka where the local emperor planted it at a monastery in Anuradhapura. That tree flourishes today.20 This Enlightenment tree is classed alongside giant weeping banyans, found from Australia to Asia, Common Ficus in Mediterranean countries, the Ficus sycomorus mentioned in Luke 19:4 (in ancient Jericho, “Zacchaeus climbed a sycamore-­tree to see Jesus as he passed by,”21 not to be confused with the Acer pseudo-platanus, the North American sycamore). Naturalists and ethicists, both, have waxed poetic about the Bo (the Buddha or Enlightenment) tree, its powers over human consciousness and its “inflorescence” (or syconium) comprising “a fleshy cup formed from the flower stem; and within that cup hundreds of flowers [which] open inward.” And all of this lascivious enticement doted upon and fertilized by a specific wasp, or two.22 Buddha’s own contemplative hours become blurred in a natural history thriller that takes to flight. It turns out, writes Colin Tudge, that the very specialized Bo tree fertilizing wasp(s) may indeed be coming from entirely different neighborhoods. They are different species meeting at the same Buddha tree, possibly mating, hybridizing, and, potentially – according to recent DNA research – encouraging the fig trees to hybridize as well “as we have already seen in willow, hawthorns, poplars, and many others….”23 The fig-wasp phenomenon encompasses molecular systematic research at a level that continues to astonish every multidisciplinary component of the biological sciences, accounting for a of India,” by Jyoti Jennings Roth, February 8, 2016, https://www.talesbytrees.com/a-brief-guide-to-the-sacredtrees-of-india/, Accessed July 22, 2018. 20  See https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhistworld/bodgaya.htm, Accessed July 22, 2018. 21  See M.G.  Easton, M.A., D.D., Illustrated Bible Dictionary, Third Edition, published by Thomas Nelson & Sons, London, 1897. 22  See The Tree  – A Natural History Of What Trees Are, How They Lie, And Why They Matter, by Colin Tudge, Crown Publishers New York, 2006, pp. 191–192. 23  ibid., Tudge, p. 338.

superfamily of wasps, the non-pollinating Chalcidoidea, which (to make it more confusing) includes a hypercritical family of pollinating fig wasps known as the Agaonidae.24 They both live out their early life cycles in the fruits of figs, the former being parasites and the later mutualists. The full communion of wasps attends to one of the three fig flowers – the short ones. Nearly 90 million years, in this specific intimacy, of coevolution and what is called co-cladogenesis, coadaptation, intense co-selectivity, and host transitions all of which have led to a community of bio-phenomena of which the fig-wasp interdependent relationships appear to be almost globally emblematic, pillars of hybridization and speciation.25 While some 900 Agaonidae species have been identified,26 estimates on their Chalcidoidea superfamily diversity have ranged from 22,000 to 100,000 to a theoretical number of 500,000 tiny wasp taxa. Those are extraordinary levels of uncertainty, but they should not be surprising, either. As we will probe and ponder, what we don’t know about the natural is almost everything.27 Like the astonishing worlds of fungi, tiny wasps and figs speak to something crucial within the biological sciences, as well as humanity’s assiduous attempts to understand them. Those multitudinal ambassadors of plant and insect also convey largely unopened telegrams. We suspect, but do not know, that they are speaking such realms as might help us to prepare for our own journeys. Their 90 million years versus our 300,000. So startling is their intimacy  – wasps Natural History Museum, Universal Chalcidoidea Database, Notes on families, http://www.nhm.ac.uk/ourscience/data/chalcidoids/agaonidae.html 25  See Boucek, Z. 1988. Australasian Chalcidoidea (Hymenoptera): a biosystematic revision of genera of 14 families, with a reclassification of species. C.A.B. International, Wallingford, England. 832 pp. 26  https://www.britannica.com/animal/fig-wasp. 27  See “Phylogenetic relationships, historical biogeography and character evolution of fig-pollinating wasps,” by Carlos A.  Machado, Emmanuelle Jousselin, Finn Kjellberg, Stephen G.  Compton, Edward Allen Herre, Published 7 April 2001.doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/ rspb.2000.1418, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 268 (1468): 685–94, http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/268/1468/685, The Royal Society Publishing). 24 

When Philosophy Confronts Trillions of Particulars

9

Fig. 1.6 Newly discovered fungal species, Bialowieza National Park. (© M.C. Tobias)

and figs – that, by comparison, our own greatest love affairs have scarcely felt the first touch to one’s lips. We are beginners; no matter how passionate and true our commitments, our alleged cleverness amounts to mere novitiation. Similarly, like the fig wasps and their hybridizing mysteries, fungi also reproduce within as yet ungrasped realms of pure enigma (Fig. 1.6). In fact, says biologist David George Haskell, “The fungi exhibit such a wide array of reproductive methods that most attempts at unifying explanations have foundered.”28 Sycamores of the Bible, fiddle leaf figs – hothouse favorites  – and even rubber trees across India, all share at common theme which  is the wasp that fertilizes the nearly undecipherable flower that opens within the so-called ostiole of the tree.29 Creative evolution, form/function, function/ form, nature/nurture, and nurture/nature: These dialectics are constant metamorphoses that engage every conceivable biorhythm and relationship. Equally involved at a pace likely contingent upon Others, the human conscience and its formation of thought occur within this fabulist botanical verse, the getting of wisdom, fertility,

and morphology by way of the co-engenderment of individuals converging upon the phenomenon of community within evolution. Of groups, vast intricacies, parts, and pieces of life are swept together, bio-typhoons. The resulting landscapes that our aesthetic dalliance glances over are actually the mental and organic offspring of this deep resonance that creates its own perceptions, needs, and dependencies and has the time frame  – hundreds-­of-millions of years  – to experiment with chaos and elegance, both at the same moment, under the astonishing eye of the same choreographer. In the case of minute fig wasps, their long ovipositor offers one of the obvious great form/function creations. But why in insects and fish and not, for example, among gorillas? Why not?30 And why do the wasps themselves comprise wingless males and horizon-thirsty, free-flying females who think nothing of dispersing at great distances? Their “obligate symbioses” that “involve vertical transmission of symbionts to [a] host offspring”31 is certainly one of the great preludes in the lexicons of natural history. A riveting tale, caressed on a moonless night in Verona, of primeval mutualism. And See https://www.britannica.com/animal/fig-wasp. “Obligate mutualism within a host drives the extreme specialization of a fig wasp genome,” by Jin-Hua Xiao, et  al., Genome Biology, 2013, 14:R141, https://doi. org/10.1186/gb-2013-14-12-r141, © Xiao et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013, 20 December 2013,” Genome Biology, https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2013-14-12-r141, Accessed July 24, 2018.

30 

The Forest, A Year’s Watch in Nature, by David George Haskell, Viking New York, 2012, p. 136. 29  Stirling Macoboy’s What Tree Is That?, Crescent Books, A Kevin Weddon Production, Wedding Publishing, Sydney, Australia, 1979, p. 134; See also, “The Queen of Trees: Mutual Dependence,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/ wnet/nature/the-queen-of-trees-video-mutual-dependence/1359/, Accessed July 23, 2018. 28 

31 

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10

f­orever after held peacefully on a bed of roses. Obligate symbiosis is quintessentially about waxing poetic. With each question and discovery, the imaginative formations in humans, as we must assume in every other species, are paradoxically exposed or yield open windows upon yet bigger and more perplexing obscurities. Further research, still, dwarfs whatever is known to that point, at every juncture of inflection and nuance of the scientific discipline trying to make sense of primeval mechanisms favoring offspring. Such has been the history of humanity’s intellectual immersion into Nature. We keep recognizing a stark lesson: there is much more to the evolutionary thrust than expediency or all the footnotes in the world. Sidelines we never considered are equally critical. As we are inclined to worship trees, so, too, shall we worship the wasps.

And There Is Linnaeus And there is Linnaeus naming animals and plants. The names, the languages, and predilections are mentored by phenomena that are frequently the very creations of our own making, of course, adding thickness of habit, stubbornness of appellation, and precedent to outreach again and again within the biosphere we think we know but certainly knows us. While he was likely in error when it came to his belief that swallows hibernated in muddy lake bottoms or that there were precisely 58 plants in the Garden of Eden which would all cross-fertilize to eventually populate the world we know today (Fig. 1.7), species all named by Adam (1: Moses, 2:19), Linnaeus had an incipient grasp of human psychology to the extent that he embraced the phrase, “Nomina si nescis, perit et cognition

Fig. 1.7  “Paradise,” Jan Brueghel the Elder, circa 1606, anonymous collection. (© M.C. Tobias)

Evolutionary Hybridism

rerum” – Without names no Knowledge”32 – and “If we do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost too.”33 Whatever the actual number of plants gracing the lives of one Adam and his companion, Eve – which we will never know nor understand – it is clear, and was so for Linnaeus, religious by nature, that plants and animals propel the gift of morals, intelligence, communications, and purity of beauty that is their contagion. Names are abstract constructs of expediency to which we lend our fleeting summation in the declaration of a word about them. Linnaeus was as much a fancier of linguistics as he was a practical mechanic. His system, when weighed against its targets, feels in our time (for all of its efficiency) more like a theatrical presentation in Latin, some lazy Giorgionesque fète champètre or luminist George Inness meadow beneath a coming storm, all fitted into a perpetually propagative Utopia. But behind the rapturous mask of those fruitions is a tutored, sentient soirée, the haunt of mythopoetics as were enshrined in the mind and work of Charles Darwin’s eccentric grandfather, the brilliant Erasmus who cast his spell in his book, The Temple of Nature or the Origin of Society, published in 1803. He, in turn, gave intoxicating fodder to the Belgian humanist Maurice Maeterlinck’s L’Intelligence des fleurs, 1907. Such works of love instill in us the uncanny realization that what Linnaeus really accomplished was not so much a system, as a proclamation of animal and plant rights within the religious and scientific framework of evolution. That massive crossing over of species dating to a generic Garden, in fact, continues its fertility pageants every second. The See “The legacy of Linnaeus,” by Magnus Lidén, Uppsala University Resource Centre >The Legay of Linnaeus, Volume 4, Number 1, January 2007, …/ resources/article/0565/ www.bgci.org. 33  Carl Linnaeus, Philosophia botanica. Stockholm: L. Salvius, 1751, cited in “Linnaean sources and concepts of orchids,” Charlie Jarvis and Phillip Cribb, Ann. Bot. 2009 Aug: 104[3]: 365–376. Published online 2009 Jan 30. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcp005, PMCID: PMC2720649, PMID: 19182221, © The Author, 2009, Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Annals of Botany Company. 32 

11

resulting individuals, whole populations, inform our convoluted appraisals of life around us, leaving traces moment-by-moment within the annals of applied ethics and conservation biology (Fig. 1.8).

Evolutionary Hybridism Such crossings (e.g., fertilizations) comprise a global, holy, exquisite, ever unpredictable mechanism in nature that obviously touches something profound within our mammalian circuitry, insisting upon “the offspring of genetically dissimilar parents or stock.”34 Every generative occurrence is another ecological iteration defining the growth of all known biomes, whilst also challenging our conceptions of  the origins and identification of each individual and their fate. Hamlet, Vivaldi, the entire population of Iberian wolves and Cuban tree frogs pass before us; we see the destiny of whole civilizations propped up upon a floating ark of genetic communiqués, decade after decade, and these quiet echoes, fossilized memories, and fated lives give us to understand some portion of the intangible. Like a visit to the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, the biosphere is a metaphysic, not a fluid truth. More poetry than physics. Science staggers and gasps before its self-­ propelled languages of computation and empirical surprise after surprise. No one caught out in the ecstatic whorls of eco-dynamics can sit back upon a cold calculus in response. In the case of the aforementioned wasps, for example, there is plenty of evidence to support both horizontal and vertical gene transfer involving life cycle changes that come about through bacteria living on the traveling circus which is each separate wasp, lending equal insights (to date) as to the roles of both bacteria and viruses, as well. This viral dimension adds a third-party candidate in the ever-transmutational enigmas inherent to coop-

For basic definition see https://www.thefreedictionary. com/hybridism, Accessed July 24, 2018.

34 

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1 Introduction

Fig. 1.8  Coryanthes Maculata (South American orchid). (Illustration by E.J. Detmold, in Hours of Gladness, by M. Maeterlinck, Translated by A. Teixeira De Mattos, George Allen & Co., London, 1912, p.84. © M.C. Tobias)

erative fruition between species.35 The juxtaposition of art and science, in the mulling over of molecular biology, poses challenges because somewhere amid the analysis of social insects and plant communities, a human heart, echoes in the brain, become attached. We see a face in each wasp. We recognize the utter magnificence of those daily rounds to which it is committed, and See, Front. Microbiol., 15 February 2016 | https://doi. org/10.3389/fmicb.2016.00136, “Multiple Horizontal Transfers of Bacteriophage WO and Host Wolbachia in Fig Wasps in a Closed Community,” Ningxin Wang, Sisi Jia, Heng Xu, Yong Liu and Dawei Huang, Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory for Biology of Vegetable Diseases and Insect Pests, College of Plant Protection, Shandong Agricultural University, Tai’an, China Key Laboratory of Zoological Systematics and Evolution, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. 35 

all the other organisms which are part of its evolutionary odyssey. We become emotionally  involved; its languages and teleology enter our living rooms, bedrooms, sleep in our minds at night and rouse us in the daylight. Huge military-­ like expeditions have been goaded on by nothing more palpable than a grain of pollen, a fog encincturing a rarely seen mountain in the desert, or a certain ground orchid that blooms but once in a century. Those who would solo across all the oceans of the world do so knowing that their own bodies are more than 70% water. These reciprocities are core to scientific mindsets. Hence, the genesis of animal rights takes hold of similitudes throughout biology and the concomitant arousals of long-lost cousins in our midsts. Our penchant to meet them, speak with them, and to go there, within evolutionary biol-

Evolutionary Hybridism

13

In one of the truly exceptional works of late twentieth century science and philosophy, Marvin Minsky’s The Society Of Mind,38 the author points out that all such numbers (numeric representations, counted collaboratives, minions throughout time) as have already been introduced, are “part of a huge network”39 that fit within a “frame,” a notion he first developed in his 1974 essay, “A Framework for Representing Knowledge.”40 Minsky argues that “As scientists, we like to make our theories as delicate and fragile as possible. We like to arrange things so that if the slightest thing goes wrong, everything will collapse at once!”41 Of course, the fragility of a theory (or a line from Shakespeare, a mere acoustic glance off Mozart’s “Lacrimosa” fragment from his D-minor Requiem) is quite different from the robust application of an infinite number Fig. 1.9 Carl Linnaeus, after Alexander Roslin’s of hypotheses to test any one theory. Painting. (© commons.wikimedia.org) Infinity-to-one: As if to say, any question regarding nature will be accented, contextualogy strikes of a most challenging campaign, par- ized, and reaffirmed. It will segue with fine-­ ticularly in view of the hundreds-of-billions of tuning by way of all the subsequent hypotheses individuals whose rights are at stake. We find it that need not be formalized within the strict very hard to see how such gigantic numbers can rubrics of a scientific theory. be part of a sane human life, but they must. It Fragile versus robust. One example can be takes a most tenacious general conviction, a uni- gleaned in the work carried out on the topic of versal ethic overtly embraced, to step over the “natural soil-vegetation systems.”42 While we abyss and to give in to beauty and compassion learn many fascinating pieces of trivia from the where the rush of the life sciences so counter-­ accumulation of such research, we have to always easily stampede. Linnaeus’ own personal life, ask ourselves: What have we really come to beginning with his exceptional diaries marking a understand? If we attempt to step back from the 3000  mile journey in Lapland from May 12 to human perspective, is there any perspective at September 10, 1732 (Linnaeus was 25 at the all? Or do all measurements collapse, all meantime), emblemizes the struggle to work through the logistics of naming the world out of love and 38 Simon And Schuster, New York, 1985/1986. the endless curiosities of youth in full blush.36 39 ibid., p.192. “Linnea… A plant of Lapland, lowly, insignifi- 40 ibid., p.259. cant, disregarded, flowering but for a brief space 41 ibid., p.193. -from Linnaeus who resembles it” (Carl 42 See AGU100, Advancing Earth and Space Science, Papers, Water Resources Research, An Agu Journal, Linnaeus) (Fig. 1.9).37 See “The Linnaean Correspondence,” in Carl Linnaeus, 1707–1778: A Bicentenary Guide to the Career and Achievements of Linnaeus and the Collections of the Linnaean Society. Commemorative catalogue, by Gavin D. R. Bridson and William T. Stearn, London, 1978. 37  See The Travelling Naturalists, by Clare Lloyd, Croom Helm, London, 1985, p. 12. 36 

“Ecological optimality in water-limited natural soil-vegetation systems: 1. Theory and hypothesis,” by Peeter S.  Eagleson, April 1982, https://doi.org/10.1029/ WR018i002p00325, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley. com/journal/19447973, Accessed July 24, 2018; See also, “Difference Between Hypothesis and Theory,” September 2, 2016 By Surbhi S, Key Differences, https://keydifferences.com/difference-between-hypothesis-and-theory. html, Accessed July 24, 2018.

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1 Introduction

Fig. 1.10  Jane Gray Morison and Burro Friend. (© M.C. Tobias)

ing vanish the instant we get outside of ourselves? The question is the salient one. At the core of transcendental experiences throughout the history of religion, anthropology, and, presumably, within all of the fields of astronomy and cosmology, there is a transport between Self and the Other (Fig. 1.10). It is a reversible dialogue, the conversants equating the odds of actual contact in an area ecologically referred to as the hybrid zone, or a biological margin, an ecotone. These areas are spatial and contain information that is never steadfast. There is movement within that grid, measured according to the goal of any one design, with its control versus experimental groups, core areas and mirror monitoring areas, for example. These dualities driving empiricism are extraordinarily relevant to one kind of logic, but not necessarily to another. Applying theory and hypothesis to numbers, or any representation of a measurement, involves questions and perpetually redesignated, or newly understood, answers. Certainty and uncertainty, stasis and distribution, randomness and stolidity, predictive or pre-emptive causation, and unknown probability: Each of these characteristics of something enter into our minds as we read the textbooks offered through our species’ ever-­ changing lenses that are focused upon drawing distinctions, opining on what we believe to be specific relationships, and suggesting methodologies and fine details to better assist in grasping that which we have already, in some sense, figured out, to paraphrase Pascal (whether we are

right or wrong). Just as numbers invoke and represent ideas, one can easily test this correlation in humans as a defining characteristic of the difference between theories and hypotheses. When we think, principally, of zero, one, two, and three, we easily and almost by definition conjure up ideas, pictures, and pictorial associations in our mind. When we add or subtract one plus two, the same happens. Multiplication becomes more obscure, division even more so. But what is clear is that about three, the numbers start to recede, and as size and complication mount, our ability to connect dots and see through to pictures or invoke memories blurs. We quickly lose the ability to identify with an individual picture; grains of sand become first the sparkling cliché image in one’s palm but then turn into a seashore, the entire beach (Fig. 1.11). All of this pertains to natural history in a most beguiling and headstrong manner. The numbers go from conserving charismatic megafauna  – individual wild beings that arouse our fascination and hopefully empathy – to only vague interest in a class of organisms, to actual indifference. Ultimately, the larger the numbers, the more intellectually abstract do the concepts corresponding to them become. Equally clear, the remoteness and/or diminutive size of organisms tends to invite little mental opportunism by our species. A case in point: a small flash flood in the mountains above Tesuque, New Mexico, in mid-­ August 1977 and the recovery of stream invertebrates following that incident are events that

Evolutionary Hybridism

15

Fig. 1.11  A Rookery at the Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, California. (© M.C. Tobias)

would have been utterly lost in time. Except that at least one scientist cared enough about the small creatures involved to document their plight. In the immediate aftermath, 94% of the river sediment-dwelling organisms were gone. Even after 2 years, Manuel Molles, Jr., discovered that the benthic species compositions remained altered. Molles, Jr., describes how earthworms “showed no clear effect from the flood or its aftermath” and true flies did fine; aquatic mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies “recovered at intermediate rates,” while beetles “recovered most slowly.”43 Such research is more than merely thrilling: it utterly redeems the nature of science, See The Southwestern Naturalist, Vol. 30, No. 2, May 31, 1985, “Recovery of a Stream Invertebrate Community from a Flash Flood in Tesuque Creek, New Mexico,” by Manuel C. Molles, Jr., The Southwestern Naturalist, Vol. 30, No. 2 (May 31, 1985), pp.  279–287, Published by: Southwestern Association of Naturalists, doi: https://doi. org/10.2307/3670741, Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/ stable/3670741, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3670741? seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, Accessed July 26, 2018. 43 

of human beings in general, by showing a sense of curiosity that is mingled with compassion and much hard work. Imagine the interplay of obsession, concern, presumption, hypothesis, and theory based upon instinct, intuition, and then actual empirical evidence that goes into such a research paper. Consider the many approaches to discovering, measuring, and then assessing and reassessing the data; of synthesizing it and coming up with numbers to represent it, within a range of estimation versus precision where confidence in the research can bring it down to express percentages. That requires a comprehensive understanding of the entire research area, its ecosystems, and 10,000 accomplices within the complex topography of ecotonics. Pythagoras plays upon the mind. So does Zeus and Leto’s son, Apollo, whose music persists throughout all of the Phrygian and Lydian modes of behavior and melody, such are the enduring biological principles that seem to propel a human interest in such matters. The lyrical. But this kind of research  – grueling, meticulous, and largely

16

ignored  – also requires an understanding of the pragmatic, an entire field of invertebrate recoveries (in Molles, Jr.’s case, a knowledge of “Oligochaeta,” “Diptera,” “Ephemeroptera,” “Plecoptera,” “Trichoptera,” and “Coleoptera”).44 And it must be added that we have a very personal interest in this particular research because we experienced a major flash flood this very week above our own domicile along that exact same creek in the Sangre des Cristos Mountains at the southern reach of the Rockies. It was a shocking surge of revelations, all our designs and complacencies riven in a dark thunderous extravaganza. We evacuated. The aftermaths were too extraordinary. Grasses and everything else within 200  ft of the river had been flattened as if by trucks whose job it was to scrape the Earth. Then we noticed that all three of the Western wood pewees (Contopus sordidulus) who had been nesting outside our kitchen since Spring, catching insects with fantastic speed, coming to the windows when we knocked, were gone, along with hundreds of shrubs and trees. The hail and lightning and forces all around them in the dark was  – as it was for us  – too much.45 Did the pewees migrate to South America early or attempt another nest? We’ll never know. But the crows were also gone, and we realized the jays and magpies had deserted the area some 2 days prior, before all the lightning began. The same week as the flood, in a phone conversation with Dr. Molles just days before his 70th birthday,46 we learned that he and his wife – who lived in La Veta Colorado, 175 miles north of us – were cleaning up after a disastrous wall of water had swept down the mountain above them

ibid., Manuel C. Molles, Jr., From Abstract. Little wonder, that Molles, nearly 30 years after publication of this particular essay, received one of the most important awards that can be given out to ecologists in the U.S., the Eugene P.  Odum Award for Excellence in Ecology Education by the Ecological Society of America. See https://news.unm.edu/news/molles-receives-eugene-podum-award, Accessed July 26, 2018. 45  The flood hit our home, and those of many of our neighbors sometime after 7:30 pm on Monday night, July 23rd, 2018. 46  Private phone conversation, July 28th, 2018. 44 

1 Introduction

on the same day the Tesuque flash flood occurred. Just a few weeks before the flood (which took out their water system, ironically), they had endured the massive Spring Creek Fire, one of the largest in Colorado’s history, which left the baked soils above them utterly hydrophobic, thus accelerating the raging torrents.47 But in an incredibly upbeat moment, Dr. Molles reminisced about how, as a child, he had seen a documentary on Albert Schweitzer and recalled Schweitzer on camera asking the interviewer not to harm an ant wandering across the table at Schweitzer’s home above the Ogooué River in the village of Lambaréné, French Equatorial Africal, now Gabon. From that time on, said Molles, who grew up on a farm in Merced County California, “reverence for life” was a principal impetus in all of his work. We concluded our conversation on the topic of specimens, and he concurred, in so many words, that the taking of specimens was not something he could sanction, down to the smallest insect.

Different Measures of the World What is generally clear is that historically, our intricately woven, culturally strewn species values and envisions numeric perspectives, measurements, and sizes, cherishing the day and other characteristics defining life, very differently from place to place, century upon century. It is no clear pathway from inches and pounds to living individuals. But at the genetic level, which quickly translates into those very organisms and their subsequent quantification by way of, for example, bionomial classification, phylogenetic trees of life, ancestral ties, and evolution herself, all of their life metrics, can be viewed in a rudimentary sense. That composition endures in the guise of general biological numbers phenomenon. It is something deeply woven into the human consciousness as we approach, mingle with, and ask questions about life. Those life-fostering numerics are also equally spelled out in some 47  https://www.denverpost.com/2018/07/09/coloradowildfire-update-monday-fires/, Accessed July 28, 2018.

Different Measures of the World

17

Fig. 1.12 “Woman Holding a Balance,” (by Johannes Vermeer, 1662–1663, Plate #36, p. 61, from Jan Vermeer De Delft, by Gustave Vanzype, G. Van Oest & Co., Editeures, Bruxelles et Paris, 1921, © M.C.Tobias)

common currency, which, for lack of any better qualification, we can simply label “unit.” How we measure it takes on curious diversity. Even humanity’s approach to the value and differentiation of measurements is quite fascinating and not a little instructive (Fig. 1.12). There is, and it stands out, Clause 35 of the “Magna Carta” in which King John agreed to a “single measure of wine throughout our whole realm”48 to the Système International d’Unités, the General Conference on Weights and Measures, and FOCS 1, the Swiss atomic clock which started ticking in 2004 and is said to have an “uncertainty” one second every 30 million years.49 Then there is that entire body of human daily experience dependent upon or devoted to measures now deemed obsolete. From the Bahar

(a measure of mass, once, in the land of Oman) to the former Bengali passeree, a weight equivalent of roughly 10.3  lbs. The British used to have a measure for a bun generously smothered with butter and cheese, while the lachter, or Berglachter, depending on the region in Germany, was long ago utilized as a standard measure by miners indicating the amount of coal or some mineral a man with outstretched arms could hold. A Guz was a Mughal yard. A sthène (from the mysterious Greek, sthenos) was some obscure, now unknown, force of which there have been countless such powers, pressures, volumes, distances, and suspicious or alluring horizons.50 Abucco, or 196.44 g of gold or silver in Myanmar,

See Donald Fenna, “m. t. s. system”. A Dictionary Of Weights, Measures, and Units, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, A Dictionary Of Weights, Measures, and Units. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002, p.  190. See also, David Herlihy, Medieval Households, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2009. 50 

See https://www.bl.uk/magna-carta/articles/the-clausesof-magna-carta, Accessed July 21, 2018. 49  See compnetworking.about.com, Accessed July 21, 2018. 48 

1 Introduction

18

Fig. 1.13  Japanese dreams in a coin fountain, Kyoto. (© J.G.Morrison)

is no longer the standard,51 and shaku-kan, a system for measuring all sorts of things, including cups of rice, is today only employed on a few islands far to the southwest of Japan’s mainland. The old Warsaw System went out of favor on January 1, 1819 (1 Polish ell or łokieć being equal to 1/3 of a fathom), and the gur-cube or gun2 – the amount of a fully laden burro trundling water or cooking oil or grains – has not been utilized (that anyone knows) since the last hours of early Dynastic Sumer (ca. 2300 BCE).52 But then, how many of us still have to pause, sometimes without closure, on all those annoying equivalencies: ounces, pounds, centimeters, yards, etc.? And while we still refer to ship loads, we do so casually, ignoring the fact it actually once meant something precise: in the UK, 949,760 lbs of coal, or 20 keels.53 Such numeric characterizations, if they are to have meaning for humans, presumably require a See Bruno Kish, Scales and Weights, Yale University Press, 1966, p.237. 52  François Cardarelli, Encyclopedia of Scientific Units, Weights and Measures. Their SI Equivalences and Origins, Springer Science and Business Media, London/ Berlin, 2003. 53  Cardarelli, ibid., p. 48. 51 

human context, an accessible logic, Minsky’s “framework” (Fig. 1.13). But what if we have no way to envision a context? What if the numbers and their represented targets have the equivalent of an absolute zero exchange function with a human context? This could be a frequency outside our anatomical range, or the simple limit, the precise distribution circumference that states: this tree meets all of the average criteria for trees everywhere and thereby hosts “about forty species of insect.”54 It is the exceptions that strain our credulity, falling outside averages, requiring extrapolations that expand or accelerate time, distance, quantity, and qualia in a possibly nonlinear distribution polarity. Within that distance of unknown, abstract zones become the norm, wherein all is speculation based upon that which cannot be known within the ascertainable. Two profound exceptions  are  Yasuní National Park, with tens-of-thousands of insect species living on a single tree, and the unknown ratios of sexuality to asexuality among, say, endophytic fungi in Bialowieza’s ancient forests across northeastern Poland and southwestern Belarus. See The Global Forest, by Diana Beresford-Kroeger, Penguin Group USA, Viking Publishers, New York, 2010, p. 28.

54 

The Problem with Proofs

Whichever age of human consciousness is focusing upon a certain property, quantity, or quality, the distribution potential will always be far in excess of our prime numbers and experimental theaters. Part of this horizon fraction, as we might describe it – what might be beyond what we can prove  – is predicated on a subjectivity whose many forms of bias may never equal our odds of true understanding. We suspect, but cannot know, that the functional areas of a mammal’s cerebral cortex tune that organism’s bias  – the biasphere – just as they probably operate on those endless forces of persuasion guiding a sponge or a fruit fly. We simply have little or no way of knowing. Long-finned pilot whales – the mammal with the most number of cerebral cortex neurons – cannot be proved to have greater gregarious qualities than, say, a naked mole rat or the Trichoplax adhaerens, the last of the Placozoa phylum,55 flat animals, multicellular, capable of both sexual and asexual division, often cited as the simplest of all organisms, yet globally distributed, without even so much as an outline. Trichoplax adhaerens are perfect organisms about which nothing was known prior to their discovery in 1883 by a German zoologist, Franz Eilhard Schulze (1840– 1921). Schulze also loved deep-ocean floor Xenophyophores (bearer of foreign bodies, in Greek).56 He adored sea sponges, particularly the Antarctic and northern Pacific Hexactineliae that became celebrities following Ernst Haeckel’s colorful portraitures (Fig.  1.14) of them published for general readers in the wake of the Challenger Expeditions (1873–1876).57 Their bright color beauty was not unlike the first color lithographs of plants published in seed catalogues following the Civil War.58 Schulze was President of the Deutsche Animal Diversity Web, ADW, http://animaldiversity.org/ accounts/Placozoa/, Accessed August 20, 2018. 56  Universität Rostock, http://cpr.uni-rostock.de/metadata/ cpr_person_00002470, Accessed August 20, 2018. 57  NOAA, “Ocean Explorer,” https://oceanexplorer.noaa. gov/explorations/03mountains/background/challenger/ challenger.html, Accessed August 20, 2018. 58  See American Eden  - David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic, Liveright Publication Corporation, A Division of W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2018, p. 2. 55 

19

Zoologische Gesellschaff. There have been at least 14 other famous male individuals with the last name of Schulze. If, as Linnaeus would have us believe, they were all a member of the Schulze species (the Genus varying between August, Edmond, Johann, etc.), we should be left to contemplate a peculiar conundrum, which is, in fact, precisely the problem with humans naming everything in the world.

The Problem with Proofs The point of these divagations is the pivotal role that language and its antecedents in mind play upon the resourcefulness of the human imagination and its craving to unearth secrets, join numbers into formulae, and resolve ever greater hypotheses and theorems that purport to describe the Cosmos. All those descriptions are subjective, no matter how rigorous the methodologies of proof. There is no way Planck’s Constant59 should equal 6.62607004 × 10–34  m2 kg/s, short of an abundance of presumptions, presuppositions, attitudes, perspectives, historical accretions, and outright prejudice (against specific  – though  we cannot as yet say  – numeric coefficients?) that conform to various inclinations and intolerance, the confirmation of previous confirmations predicated (“Tolstoy Syndrome,” “Confirmation Bias”) on an eerily emergent willingness to confirm, standpoint, and spin. History is all gossip, Dante allegedly quipped. More recently, the BBC has lent considerable energy to analyzing the origins and functionality in social settings of gossip.60 Quantum Physics/The Cosmos, “Planck’s Constant: The Number That Rules Technology, Reality, and Life,” By James Stein on Mon, 24 Oct 2011, The Nature of Reality, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2011/10/plancks-constant/, Accessed August 20, 2018. 60  BBC –Earth, “What Gave Rise To Gossip?” by Melissa Hogenboom, 27 February, http://www.bbc.com/earth/ story/20150227-where-did-gossiping-come-from, Accessed May 30, 2018; See also, McAndrew, Frank T., “The Science of Gossip: Why we can’t stop ourselves”. Scientific American, October 2008. See also, Sommerfeld RD, Krambeck HJ, Semmann D, Milinski M. (2007). Gossip as an alternative for direct observation in games of 59 

1 Introduction

20 Fig. 1.14 Ernst Haeckel’s Mysterious Marine Aesthetics. (© Wikimedia.commons)

There have been taxonomic and evolutionary studies of gossip.61 Gossip in science, however, resists the breakdown of declamation. Science presumes to stamp order on chaos and regularize and formalize notions of logic, origin, even futurism with a language tied to mathematics and physics that is considered core. There are no subatomic particles named gossip, no organisms bioindirect reciprocity. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 104[44]:17435–40. PMID 17947384, Accessed May 30, 2018. 61  Foster, E.K. [2004]. Research on gossip: Taxonomy, methods, and future directions. Review of General Psychology, 8 [2], 78–99; Dunbar, R. [2004]. Gossip in evolutionary perspective. Review of General Psychology, 8[2], 100–110.

logically singled out for their penchants to gossip. (Stone chats, a gorgeous group of highly dignified birds, Genus Saxicola, actually seem to be less chatty than most avians.)62 Indeed, while we may assume that all species engage in patter and chatter, we actually know nothing about it. One way to test the plumb line, that horizon fraction within human language, is to focus within a large garrulous party scene, hundreds of people in an acoustically hot venue all around you. Most Homo sapiens will be incapable of understanding a single word emanating from the gathering. Recognizable content materi“European Stone chat,” https://www.british-birdsongs. uk/european-stonechat/, Accessed, August 20, 2018.

62 

The Problem with Proofs

21

Fig. 1.15 Ornithologist Thomasz Wesolowski at work in Bialowieza National Park. (© M.C. Tobias)

alizes  only in precise one-on-one, with voices raised, as if applying a stethoscope for normal auscultatve purposes, to hear the lungs, or arterial blood flow, for example (Fig.  1.15). But in the Amazon, or inside a termitary, with human ears and minds, it is white noise. You may register all of the subterranean activity with sensors of a bandwith, say, as wide as 15 kHz.63 You’ll establish the presence of another species, but beyond that, it is no different than the human Gala of noise and drowned-out phonemic awareness, differentiation of the least morpheme, or unit of meaning, or semantic access. Meaning hits that fraction of intelligibility versus the unintelligble almost instantly. Something as fundamentally rooted to the tyranny of numbers, like the Planck’s Constant, arises in the wake of between 6 and 13 million years of our common ancestral hominin’s gossip of vocalization and song with left over energy to convey other units of meaning that we cannot hear, but fathom upon a chalk board, amid teeming equations. Metabolically, our energy by whatever ways and means has intention that catalyzes targeted thought. In scientific terms, those thoughts are concrete, symptoms of a function that may or may not be central to something else. Metaphors, similes, and anecdotes, like gossip, give us nominal

range of meaning. But at a certain point, it drops off into nothingness.64 But add numbers or footnotes to an anecdote and one is half-way toward that legitimate hue and cry, where point and counterpoint, criticism, and bibliographic sobriety add up to something else that is not easily ignored. It is still within the horizon, either by experimental, hypothetical, or theoretical equivalency.

Something Else The something else is also a plural phenomenon that suggests directionality, and various types of crossing over within any mathematical, neurological, or even moral topography. Sometimes something else defies straight lines or narrow categories, like natural selection, transcending all the philosophies it gives rise to. Citizen science is one such something else, without which annual Audubon Bird Counts would be far less effective. Polls and surveys, samples, and statistical data, by media and pharmaceutical giants, are at the heart of clinical breakthroughs, Federal Drug Administration determinations, and advertisement revenue. Proofs in math and science require

See, for example, “The Role of Anecdotes in ScienceBased Medicine,” by Steven Novella, January 30, 2008, Science and Medicine, https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ the-role-of-anecdotes-in-science-based-medicine/, Accessed May 30, 2018.

64 

See US20070096928A1 US Application, “Termite acoustic detection”  – App/Pub Number, US10680377, Date, 2003. 63 

1 Introduction

22

replicability. Even Einstein’s various insights, as communicated in elegant, truncated equational form, were dependent upon the assigning of numbers and the verification by independent third parties. Something else may even defy the horizon fraction of what we take to be meaningful, establishing new meaning, as when a cat and a gorilla find companionship or an endangered crane takes a human as her male consort. The simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions (Occam’s Razor) may remain a cause celebré of proof, but there are equal reasons for admiring and adhering to complexity, obscurity, and occlusion, each a fundamental potion of that horizon of meaning. Yet, our intrusiveness, species level solipsisms, and individual investitures are hugely problematic (for all concerned). Hence, the objections rightly raised by the Anthropic paradox.65 String theory has abandoned all hope of reliance on some “theory of everything.” Even Einstein famously questioned the capacity of God to create everything, or to have choice in doing so.66

Differentiating Meaning Within the Anthropocene Human language, despite numerous linguistic extinctions (an estimated 26 languages dying out each year),67 remains a steadfast codification of our own life support dynamic, while most people speak very few human languages (out of the more than 6900 such languages, in addition to unknown

See Mosterín J., [2005], “Antropic Explanations in Cosmology,” in Hajek, Valdés & Westerstahl eds., Proceedings of the 12th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science; http://philsciarchive.pitt.edu/1658/, Accessed May 30, 2018. 66  Kane, Gordon L.; Perry, Malcolm J. & Zytkow, Anna N. [2002]. “The Beginning of the End of the Anthropic Principle”. New Astronomy. 7: 45–53. arXiv:astroph/0001197. Bibcode:2002NewA....7...45K. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1016/S1384-1076[01]00088-4. 67  See “Dying languages: scientists fret as one disappears every 14  days,” by Raveena Aulakhe, April 15, 2013, https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/04/15/dying_ languages_scientists_fret_as_one_disappears_every_14_ days.html, Accessed May 30, 2018. 65 

thousands of dialects, and 7.7 billion customized accents).68 Because our languages are also a dartboard for the naming, and manipulation of others who happen not to be human, the naming is rapacious, with all of the obvious geopolitical implications of humanity’s throw-weight, legislative precedents propounding speciesism, genomic racism, and the consumption of much of the Earth’s biomass. We assume that language, from an evolutionary perspective, is the ultimate confluence for the storage capacity, transport, and display of meaning. But there are other critical spokes on the wheel of our turning, over millions of years: love, hatred, sadness and joy, stress, rage, loneliness, and depression, for example. Franz Schulze studied his invertebrates with no cause for alarm, only the love of those fellow habitants of a biosphere that improbably comprises a thin, approximately 22-km thick ephemeral layer of wonderfully accented protagonists, none possessed of more superlatives than any other. There would seem to be no place for a Karl Marx in that biosphere, but there he was, with ideas that were ecological duds, adding support for a human sense of superiority and more splitting of hairs amid a gigantic hierarchy of assumed class differentiation and attendant human morals, which, in any case, are varietal and rare. Natural history and natural futurism eschew human morality because of its fanatical exclusivity, on a planet that knows only inclusiveness. Debatable fitness, too, inculcates a human-driven set of assumptions that offer no remediation for Others, and that includes the hundreds-of-­millions of economically marginalized Homo sapiens ourselves: hungry, burdened, in pain, and subliminally traumatized by the stories and travails of our own extended genealogies (Fig.  1.16). While human history pays noble tribute now and then to principles of non-violence, our ability to celebrate a general theory of restraint (best illustrated by the Jain, Bishnoi and Brahmanical Hindu insistence on non-interference, or ahimsa) so easily breaks down LSA, Linguistic Society of America, “How many languages are there in the world?” Stephen R.  Anderson, 2012, https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/ how-many-languages-are-there-world, Accessed August 20, 2018.

68 

Differentiating Meaning Within the Anthropocene

23

Fig. 1.16  In a Nairobi Economically Depressed Region. (© M.C. Tobias)

amid the human, runaway demographic (overpopulation) and its nefarious impacts, most notably our addiction to animal flesh and our madness to procreate, the grave illness of mounting censuses, and always between cemeteries. These multiplier effects translate into the Anthropocene. While we have postulated a theoretical individual who goes about impacting the world with the lightest footprint, a collective of such personages would constitute a species of such, but one that is merely hypothetical. Beyond positing explanatory and predictive powers; null versus alternative hypotheses with conceptual frameworks readily tested,69 the hypothetical species with which we are concerned, is tantamount to a reassessment of our perception of evolutionary rubrics. As such, it might be viewed as the first of biological apperceptions, a human engagement of first principles for the purpose of realignment. Even geologists speculate in this regard, in looking at the past size and extent of continents.70 See Hempel, C.  G. (1952). Fundamentals of concept formation in empirical science. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, p. 33. 70  See https://books.google.com/books/about/Hypothetical_ Outlines_of_the_Continents.html?id=NkQsAAAAYAAJ, Accessed July 21, 2018. 69 

These are no mere exercises. In all of the arenas associated with evolutionary, molecular, and conservation biology, systematics, ethics, governance, and animal rights, the re-sorting of priorities and assumptions rests upon both indignation at our behavior and that of others of our kind but also deep forgiveness that is shaped by pragmatic conscience whose ideal is willing to concede self-involvement and correction of course. This is a weighty compass reading and presumes that evolution is not one-directional. And that confronts the history of biology since the time of Thales of Miletus and Aristotle. Two-­ directionality is a new physics that assumes (not incorrectly, we believe) that the conversion, to take one universal example, of carbon dioxide into glucose or some other form of sugar (energy production in all plants or bacterial autotrophs) is equal to the heat of decomposition, and the biographical histories inherent to any inorganic nutrient pool. The flow of energy and nutrients through an ecosystem comprises not just the laws of physics guiding these processes but also the biographical consortia of individuals who take part. Their complete roles are known by their collective force, a Grand Unified Principle of Biology akin to any similarly complete cosmo-

1 Introduction

24

Fig. 1.17  From a Wildlife Preserve in Central Portugal. (© M.C. Tobias)

logical construct.71 To read the schematic flow of energy through any ecosystem is to wander through a global portrait gallery where all of these gorgeous eyes (think of historian Simon Schama’s work, Rembrandt’s Eyes)72 are peering back at us in a reciprocal exchange of breath, similitude, shared interest, mutually vested, life-­ preserving collaboration, aesthetic, and physical corroboration (Fig.  1.17). That museum is the garden of the world, the Garden of Eden, and the paradise it always was and should  – by every right – be so again. Hence, this hypothetical species is one that we attest to and are methodically inclined to confirm. But to do so, we have first to devise appropriate, requisite, and rigorous tests (however intellectual, confined to paper) of its candidacy (Fig. 1.18). For a most accessible overview of these basic principles, see the link provided by Dave McShaffrey, Associate Professor of Biology and Environmental Science, Marietta College, http://w3.marietta.edu/~mcshaffd/ and http:// w3.marietta.edu/~biol/102/ecosystem.html, Accessed May 30, 2018. 72  Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, Alfred A.  Knopf Publishers, New York, NY, 1999. 71 

Fig. 1.18  Elderly Woman, Detail, by Gerard Ter Borch, 1675, Private Collection. (© M.C. Tobias)

2

Between the Theoretical and the Hypothetical

Abstract

A broad examination of numerous unresolved gaps in the scientific and cultural embrace of ecological non-violence concludes with Jain intimations of a socially viable contract with nature. This is in stark opposition to a history of human subjugation of nature, our largely undeviating tendency to want to enroll the individual in outright opposition to all that would actually help our species succeed.

Anthropic Individuals and Multiplicities The topography of neurons in a cerebral cortex is just one of trillions of landscapes. A global encyclopedia of images might or might not include it. Between the outlines and details of our cerebellum and that, for example, of the Khumbu Icefall beneath Chomolungma (Mt. Everest), the notion of any certainty – with so many scientific, artistic, and technical imaging criteria involved  – is almost null. We cannot rely on our own measurements. This poses a fundamental problem for us. Of course, many do care, beyond the confusion of data. There are those who focus expressly, for example, on the prevalence of nasopharyngeal mites in the nostrils of grey seals. This seems to be some kind of eutaxiological testimony (the study

of order and design pertaining to a quality within human evolution), but we can only surmise how many variables there must be within this kind of design rubric, e.g., the rules, if any, connecting ourselves to those that we observe. Surely, in speculating about, and imaging those mites, no teleological evidence of purpose or evolutionary specificity can be predicted or ordained.1 Rules and laws of evolution that we have configured are hapless because of the aforementioned prejudices inherent to every anthropic concept regarding compatibilities of the perceived and the perceiver.2 By focusing on Others (e.g., seals and their mites) to that extent, doubling down, no less, there is reason to believe in the awakening of a post-natural selection.3 Every node of the physical sciences is See B.  Carter, “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology,” IAU Symposium 63: Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp.  291–298, 1974; republished in General Relativity and Gravitation, November 2011, Vol. 43, Issue 11, pp. 3225–3233, with Introduction by George Ellis. 2  See Ernest Nagel, Teleology, Columbia University Press, New York, 1979. 3  See Vet Parasitol. 2012 Feb 10;183(3–4):317–22. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vetpar.2011.08.002. Epub 2011 Aug 7., “Naso-pharyngeal mites Halarachne halichoeri (Allman, 1847) in Grey seals stranded on the NW Spanish Atlantic Coast,” Alonso-Farré JM1, D’Silva JI, Gestal C., PUBMED, PMID: 21871735, doi: https://doi. org/10.1016/j.vetpar.2011.08.002, https://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/pubmed/21871735, Accessed July 26, 2018. 1 

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, The Hypothetical Species, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11319-3_2

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Fig. 2.1  Harbor seals in Southeast Alaska. (© M.C. Tobias)

vulnerable to our singular philosophies (all that which emanates from human minds) and the persistent questions with which we may assume every mind and aggregate of senses are involved. Again: suppositions. The scenarios are legion. They raise dazzling but dangling modifiers. Asked whether an individual has value independent of her/his species? This is as nebulous as suggesting that if there is evolution of life forms, then all such life forms – therefore evolved – have the same physical properties enabling them to speculate on the meaning, and physical evidence, of their own evolution. But it says nothing about species-to-species observations, judgments, and reality checks. Species pummel individuals, just as species-specific populations do (Fig. 2.1). The anthropic dilemmas (strong, weak, intermediate, fractional) give rise to the empirical problems of the Anthropocene and the singular species whose evolutionary conatus is expressly culpable for it. Beyond our blind reproduction, generation after generation, there seems to be

little reconciliatory biology working in favor of Homo sapiens. Carbon chauvinism is quite a different story: those grey seals are not destroying the Earth, as far as can be determined.4 Or, put differently, a species with the more than likely shortest-lived epitaph of any known vertebrate in the annals of life will be hard-pressed to make sense of their own dramatic plunge. Such is the maelstrom, however daunting, we intend to understudy in hopes of extracting some rare form of goodness that might yet clear the way, both Among other things, our own mammalian behavior includes climate disruption at the rate of “17 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year” in wealthy countries and a global total of 21 gigatons (21 billion metric tons). Such numbers need urgently to be reduced to, at most, an average of 3 tons per person worldwide, with an equally zealous approach to 3 tons per person of sequestration, says energy expert Roy Morrison. “Climate Truth: Seven Key Numbers for Sustainability and Local Plans,” by Roy Morrison, http://www.ecocivilization.info/climate-truthseven-key-numbers.html, Personal communication, August 12, 2018. 4 

Pre-Socratic Fragments

intellectually and pragmatically, for something other than doomsday. Otherwise, according to the general principles of any anthropic perspective, fatalism will breed an exclusive set of targets, all condemned to success.

Pre-Socratic Fragments The spellbinding obtuseness and pertinacity of the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides of Elea (late sixth century to mid-fifth century BCE), often called the “father of metaphysics,”5 certainly exploded the boundaries of philosophical reality in contributing to that value-imploding debate – serial advantageousness of Self, setting off the one and (versus) the many.6 Fragments denying and affirming existence (not just of human beings but of all perceived personages) at once capture the imagination as it struggles to identify reality with itself. “What is reality?”, asks Parmenides in sequential poetics and words and phrases that identify graspable identity through reasoning, not by the senses. But what is the reason?7 Such basic queries abound and hasten a deeply disturbing saturation point: the world and the Self becoming one in spite of the temptation to proliferate. Parmenides’ monism contradicts all of biodiversity by predicting the sense of oneness as a function, ultimately, of a unity that is blind, grasping, and God-­driven; a unison that thinks little of the human choices, options, and the indwelling of a calm Self while casting to the wind our contradictory behavior. There are no dualisms, ultimately, in Parmenides. Where there was discord and friction, quietly emerges a tranquil soliloquy that cannot know Nature, because it is Nature.

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If the One is the Many, then by inference, gestation is a global singularity, cohesive, coherent, and indivisible, whether among amoebas or giraffes (Fig. 2.2). We break it down into categories here on Earth, but when we speak of general or unified theories, divisibility has no traction. All of the numbers, fields, waves, frequencies, and other components of a rainbow, a waterfall, and a starry countenance lose their distinctions and turn at once to quintessence. It is an idealistic profile of the world, denying pain, happiness, violence, non-violence, Self, and Other, for all are merged in an underlying Oneness that is without increment or phase, nuance or irregularity. In that world there is nothing to fear, worry about, or fret. All is as it should be, complete, whole, and finished. That is the paradise echoed by “the ancients,” those who retreated to caves in the Thebaid (13 nomes, or administrative divisions, of ancient Egypt favored by ascetics) or to monasteries like that of Mount St. Catherine’s in the Sinai.8 In our hearts, all 7.7 billion of us remain those monks. The contradictions are easily hewn within the observed varieties of the human genome. Human nature, and biodiversity which is our deepest overarching truth, is restless and unrestrainable and comprehensively given to one another, inciting and pushing to the edge, the 11th hour. Our responses  to this tendency are clairvoyantly evinced in the cauldron of evolution, which are forever unleashed. We cannot but react and in doing so engender epics of the emotion, the psyche, and the mind’s most far-reaching biological and imaginative secrets. We have no other destiny but to encounter, embrace, and lend commentary toward that amalgam of plentiful Nature(s) to which we are irrefutably drawn,

See “A History of Imagination In Wilderness,” by Michael Charles Tobias, in, The Mountain Spirit, ed. by Michael Charles Tobias and Harold Drasdo, Viking/ Overlook/Penguin/Victor Gollancz Publishers, 1979; see also Roger S. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity, 4th printing edition, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996; see also Icons From Sinai, Holy Image, Hallowed Ground, Edited by Robert S.  Nelson And Kristen M. Collins, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2006. 8 

See The Legacy of Parmenides, by Patricia Curd, New Jersey: Princeton, 1998. 6  See Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle, Edited by Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd and C.D. C. Reeve, 4th ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011. 7  See The Route of Parmenides – A Study of Word, Image, and Argument in the Fragments, by Alexander P.  D. Mourelatos, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1970. 5 

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Fig. 2.2  Old forest in Brunei. (© M.C. Tobias)

sometimes with a harpoon, at other moments, from a passive cloister of cooling balms and mottled light. Having sought out the Individual within the pageantry of a multiplicity of natures, the natural world, in the present volume, we proceed in that spirit by questioning whether a species, any collective, can affect the entire planet. We all know that it can, based on clear and plentiful contemporary evidence. But there is much more ahead for our kind. And for better or worse. Yes, we as a species are married to outcomes and aftermaths. Can we even slightly alter our course? That is the question with which we are prepared to grapple.

planet.9 But while troublesome presuppositions weigh down such queries of cause and effect, on their face, their very ponderations and potential ethics must impose a reality worth struggling to understand. It is troublesome in the sense that the coordination and sustenance of our own lives depend on the health of these vast ­aggregates, as the neotropics; yet we collectively destroy them. Ultimately, compliance with our biological situation is either a question of free will, creative pertinacity, or morbid fatalism that is not unknown to the life sciences, that latter moribund clamor

See Mythic Woods  – The world’s most remarkable forests, by Jonathan Roberts, Foreword by Thomas Pakenham, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2004; see also A Geography of Hope  - Saving The Last Primary Forests, by Cyril F.  Kormos, Russell A.  Mittermeier, Tilman Jaeger, and Brendan Mackey, Series Editor Cristina Mittermeier, Foreword by Peter A.  Seligmann and Harrison Ford, Cemex Nature Series, Cemex & Earth in Focus, Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, Canada, 2016. 9 

 he Paradox and Complexity T of Species Definitions Obviously, organisms like phytoplankton, coral reefs (entire), and tropical rain forests engender life-nurturing coherent conditions across the

The Paradox and Complexity of Species Definitions

now characterizing responsive aspects of our Anthropocene. It has been well over a half-century since the advent of the so-called modern synthesis (also known as the unified theory) in evolutionary biology (Mendel + Darwin). The thinking of this short-list of provocative scientists consumed by the desire to find unifying principles of the life force continues to engage at all levels of queries circling in on just what precisely constitutes a species. The most cursory application of the Oxford English Dictionary (“OED”) etymologies to what, in Latin, is construed as “of a kind” – not kindness but the most general noun denominating a category  – opens a door upon a dizzying proliferation of nouns and adjectives and applicable states of being. Distinguishing characteristics that lend it to its class, which is a subdivision of a genus, which by turns of taxonomy is given to social norms (laws) and ancient drama, as well as mathematics and the Bible. A word that is flexible enough to carry such curious evocations as Abraham Cowley’s, in his “Praise of Pindar” (1656) when he says of the ancient master of odes that he was “a vast Species alone.” And William Godwin, writing in two instances, “You will live deserted in the midst of your species”10 and, 3 years later in the Enquirer,11 “If individuals were happy, the species would be happy.”12 Advocates of any synthesis, particularly one that necessarily strives to do with biology what the OED has accomplished with the English language, must and do realize the very tenuous appetites that Nature displays when, from seeming to express herself, in the absence of known beginnings or endings, she provisions for absolutely zero closure, only what might be described as ecological flux. Flux itself is predictable but of little consolation. Hence, species definitions are diving off an enormous cliff into an unknown sea, as of the twenty-first human century. The plentiful delinThe Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford and New York, Volume X, 1961, pp. 546–547, Caleb Williams 48, 1794. 11  The Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford and New York, Volume X, 1961, pp. 546–547, 1. i. I. 12  The Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford and New York, Volume X, 1961, pp. 546–547. 10 

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eations evoked in the work of Theodore Dobzhansky,13 Julian Huxley,14 and the prolific Ernst Mayr15 have segued into what might be described as a postmodernist synthesis, engaging the latest generation of scientists and philosophers, artists, and everyone in addition, trying to obtain some glimmer of fundamental understandings of life on Earth, of Self, and the Other. If anything is certain since that mid-twentieth-century Renaissance in natural history, it is that the state of questions has continued to outpace even the original premises, leading to such ominous paths as “units of biodiversity,”16 “diagnosable units,”17 and “separately evolving metapopulation lineages.”18 Kevin De Queiroz, writing in 2007, referred to “24 different named species concepts” and outlined many of them, all evoked beyond the merely biological premise of a likeminded collection of taxa. They include “recognition,” “ecological,” “evolutionary,” “cohesion,” “phylogenetic,” and even “Hennigian,” referring Genetics and the Origin of Species, Columbia Univ. Press, New York, 1937 and Genetics of the Evolutionary Process, Columbia Univ. Press, New York, 1970. 14  Evolution, the modern synthesis, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1942. 15  Systematics and the Origin of Species, Columbia Univ. Press, New York, 1942; Principles of Systematic Zoology, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1969; Mayr and W. B. Provine, editors, The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980; Animal Species and Evolution, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1963; Populations, Species, and Evolution, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1970; The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982. 16  See Mayden, R. L. in Species: The Units of Biodiversity, eds. Claridge, M.  F., Dawah, H.  A. & Wilson, M.  R., Chapman & Hall, London, 1997, pp.  381–424. See Mayden, R. L. in Species: The Units of Biodiversity, eds. Claridge, M. F., Dawah, H. A. & Wilson, M. R., Chapman & Hall, London, 1997, pp. 381–424. 17  See https://books.google.com/books?id=4fkLo2mpIhsC &pg=PT60&dq=%22theoretical+species%22&hl=en&sa =X&ved=0ahUKEwj_p7Hs28bXAhUnsFQKHaB5BUQ Q6AEISDAG#v=onepage&q=%22theoretical%20 species%22&f=false. 18  “Species Concepts and Species Delimitation,” Kevin De Queiroz, in Systematic Biology, Volume 56, Issue 6, 1 December 2007, Pages 879–886, https://doi. org/10.1080/10635150701701083, Accessed May 12, 2018. 13 

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Fig. 2.3  Pastoral scene by Jan Van Londerseel, 1580–1638, after Gillis d’Hondecoeter, 1575–1638, Private Collection. (© M.C. Tobias)

to an “ancestor [which] becomes extinct when [its] lineage splits”19 and first proposed by German biologists Emil Hans and Willi Hennig in 1966.20

Ibid., De Queiroz. Phylogenetic Systematics, translated by D.  Davis and R. Zangerl, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966. See, “Ernst Mayr and the modern concept of species,” by Kevin de Queiroz, PNAS May 3, 2005. 102 (suppl 1) 6600–6607; PNAS –Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, https://doi.org/10.1073/ pnas.0502030102, Accessed May 12, 2018; see also Species Concepts in Biology  – Historical Developments, Theoretical Foundations and Practical Relevance, by Frank. E.  Zachos, Springer, Cham Switzerland, 2016, https://books.google.com/books?id=dNU0DQAAQBAJ& pg=PA107&dq=%22theoretical+species%22&hl=en&sa= X&ved=0ahUKEwin2e7P2cbXAhWqw1QKHfl4CCYQ6 A E I M j AC # v = o n e p a g e & q = % 2 2 t h e o r e t i c a l % 2 0 species%22&f=false, Accessed June 23, 2018. 19  20 

The ambivalent nature of proof positives within an overall negative space (the Anthropocene) summons an inquiry of unending species divergences, behaviors, barriers, and artifacts that either abet our journey or are insufficiently resilient, not up to the task, possibly lacking any reason to be concerned for our safety or species integrity. If that is the case, it urgently devolves to the individual to effect species change and, by turns, to force evolutionary transition that comports with a benign and intentional footprint (Fig. 2.3). It is not our intention to validate foregone conclusions. Nothing about this work has been ordained or fully conceived. It is a work in real time that attempts to grasp the most pressing of all questions underlying the life sciences: How much longer can Homo sapiens survive, given the facts of our behavior in opposition to most other life forms? Mathematical chance, probabil-

The Paradox and Complexity of Species Definitions

ity statistics, and countless scenarios envisioned by molecular biologists and cosmologists enter into the equations  – and endless meditations  – that have already been exposed, drawn up, and debated. Again, this is a treatise in real time rather than some lengthily prepared schematic representing well-traversed doctrines. Most discussions regarding the alleged uniqueness of humanity (at least, of which we are aware) seem little inclined to emphasize with any intellectual rigor or integrity the fate of our species as a by-product, (1) of the fate of our minds and (2) of the fate of all that which resides inside ourselves, as opposed to outside. Probably because to do so  – to be motivated to transcend scientific conceits regarding overconsumption, basic laws of carrying capacity, and so forth – is to suggest that our communication skills (or lack thereof) in whatever form may be demonstrably infantile to begin with, the belaboring of data sets whose ultimate conception does not bode well for the future of reading, or thinking, or of anything concerning our kind. There is a point to it, many points, but they may not involve us whatsoever, and that can be liberating or disconcerting. You give such attention span a power simply by planting it in your thoughts and persistently regarding or disregarding it. It is us, every one of us. But by that shared tenuous token, it is our hope to discover a bare narrative above water in terms of future scenarios that might empower a sustainable biosphere, inclusive of that ungainly newcomer, our species. To date the news has been unfavorable. All that we touch seems to perish or, at best, become subordinate to our unrelenting acquisitiveness and recklessness. Most of the current extinctions and extinction assemblage and concatenation predictions hinge upon empirical data for at-risk phylogenetic diversity (PD), whereas evolutionary distinctiveness (ED) also laid vulnerable is only now beginning to be appreciated.21 See “Phylogenetic diversity metrics for ecological communities: integrating species richness, abundance and evolutionary history,” by Marc W.  Cadotte, T.  Jonathan Davies, James Regetz, Steven W. Kembel, Elsa Cleland, Todd H.  Oakley, 21 December 2009, Ecology Letters, Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1461-0248.2009.01405.x, https://onlinelibrary.wiley. 21 

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The distinctions operate at metrically outlined levels of evolutionary time and history, distribution and abundance, current versus past assemblages, and endeavor to incorporate both past and present into assessments of both species and biome richness and/or at-risk situations. Beyond PD and ED, there are numerous other scientific apperceptions and epiphanies verging upon or having already crossed the extinction boundaries (in mind). They include every individual – emotional, psychological, imaginative, and nonlinear – life history, where there are countless Others for every mathematical zero added to the exponentially accelerating ­ equations of loss. Moreover, we’ve only begun to track ancient DNA and full genome-level and “species assemblage” surveys of the past.22 Describing the outcome of taxonomic research invariably falls back upon what can be ultimately dismissed as a subjective or merely linguistic categorization. For example, as early as 199923 the term “ultrataxon” was employed as a more far-reaching biological substitute for subspecies or, as defined by Shodde com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01405.x, Accessed August 2, 2018; see also “Predicting loss of evolutionary history: Where are we?” by Simon Veron, T. Jonathan Davies, Marc W. Cadotte, Philippe Clergeau, Sandrine Pavoine,14 October 2015, https://doi. org/10.1111/brv.12228, Wiley Online Library, Biological Reviews, Cambridge Philosophical Society, https:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.12228, Accessed May 14, 2018. 22  See “Using Ancient DNA to Understand Evolutionary and Ecological Processes,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, Vol. 45:573–598, Volume publication date November 2014, first published online as a Review in Advance on October 6, 2014, https://doi. org/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-120213-091712, by Lucovi Orlando and Alan Cooper, https://www.annualreviews. org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-120213-091712, Accessed May 14, 2018; see also “Reconstructing past species assemblages reveals the changing patterns and drivers of extinction through time,” Proceedings Of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences, Lindell Bromham, Robert Lanfear, Phillip Cassey, Gillian Gibb, Marcel Cardillo, Published 1 August 2012. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.1437, http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1744/4024.short, Accessed May 14, 2018. 23  R.  Schodde, I.J.  Mason, 1999. The Directory of Australian Birds Passerines, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.

2  Between the Theoretical and the Hypothetical

32 Fig. 2.4 Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Melencolia I, 1514, published in Munich in 1879. (© M.C. Tobias)

several years later, “any terminal taxon on a lineage of organisms….”24 One might by comparison consider the subjective range of titles (names) suggested for what was finally published by Gaston Gallimard as Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, namely, “Melancholia” (Sartre’s original choice, after Dürer’s remarkable engraving); then “The Extraordinary Adventures of Antoine Roquentin,” See “S23-3 The ultrataxon and its use in pure and applied biology,” by Richard Schodde, 52(Supplement): 425–428, 2006, Acta Zoologica Sinica, p.  427, http:// www.actazool.org/temp/%7BDB315E75-E4E3-4528B6F8-89CDB8D18789%7D.pdf, Accessed May 16, 2018. 24 

“Factum on Contingency,” or “Essay: On the Loneliness of the Mind.”25 Each title represents a certain beast. Had “Melancholia” been retained, the history of Sartre’s odyssey, and of the onset of existentialism, might have taken a slightly different course. In that case, Dürer’s “Melenchalia 1” [sic] (1514) engraving would inevitably have been contemplated by members of the artist’s circles (Fig. 2.4). One of the most mysterious of all Old Master prints, and likely referencing the first form of actual melancholy as envisioned in See Sartre – A Life, by Annie Cohen-Solal, Translated by Anna Cancogni, Edited by Norman Macafee, Pantheon Books, New York, 1987, p. 116. 25 

Biosemiotic Variables

the early manuscript version of the brilliant Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s (1486–1535), De occulta philosophia libri tres (Three Books Concerning Occult Philosophy), speculation regarding the image has it as both Dürer’s selfportrait and the very first instance in Renaissance history of such a depiction commanding our futural attention to the nature of discarded tools of reason, of fear and trembling, absence of selfassurance, and of an artist in personal crisis, all traits to be sure of Sartre’s own Roquentin. When we ask, what’s in a title, we are actually invoking the mystery of social semiotics, as the term was first introduced by linguist Michael Halliday in 1978.26 In mentioning the time span from Agrippa to Sartre, we are, in a microcosm, noting the same metric that ecologists examining PD and ED, as well as ancient DNA, must confront, particularly if their focus and evidence are to be a more faithful harbinger of predictive biodiversity data sets. This larger metrical framework encompasses biosemiotics as a crucial element in formulating connectivity from the inside to the outside. If there was a philosophical principle that necessitated statistical outreach between species, this kind of approach might be it.

Biosemiotic Variables All of biosemiosis, anthrozoology, social biology, and its interpretations of zoological and floral signage are fraught with an abundance of signs and the equally numerous concepts for reciprocal meaning, assignation, and the many recoils of signification (Fig. 2.5). The American philosopher/logician/linguist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) articulated at least 76 definitions for a sign.27 The implications of an endlessly expansive semiosis are obviously astonishing when applied to natural history and M.A.K.  Halliday, Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. Maryland. University Park Press, 1978, p. 39. 27  “76 Definitions of the Sign,” by C. S. Peirce, collected by Robert Marty (U. of Perpignan, France, n.d. http:// perso.numericable.fr/robert.marty/semiotique/76defeng. htm, Accessed May 17, 2018. 26 

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our propensity to engage in the odd customs of taxonomy. To have gone in a matter of decades from an estimated maximum of eight to ten million species to  – potentially, including all noneukaryotes – one trillion species underscores the veritable meaninglessness of the word species itself. In 2011, the Census of Marine Life, with its collaborating contingents of field researchers, all thought that the eukaryote question had been resolved with a reasonable estimate: between 8.7 and 10 million species.28 Joyce Weisel-Barth’s “vanishing self”29 and George Boolos’ statement, “To be is to be a value of a variable (or to be some values of some variables),”30 offer an intriguing, if uneasy, engagement of a philosophical variant on Willard Van Orman Quine’s statement “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.”31 When we think of variables in mathematics, all numeric bets are pointless as Googolplexians can be written to the Googolplexian power times themselves. This level of replication and exponentiality allows for no endpoint and certainly little confidence when attributing a firm number to the extent of imagined multicellular species on the planet. One to the one-hundredth, to the one-hundred-hundredth, and so on has certainly been intuited by numerous mathematicians and philosophers. Note the nature of “truth degrees,”32 of “many-­valued logic,” Baruch Spinoza’s “infinite attributes,” Curry’s paradox by which anything denominated has thus set a precedent for its own

Camilo Mora, Derek P.  Tittensor, Sina Adl, Alastair G.  B. Simpson, Boris Worm. “How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?” PLoS Biology, 2011; 9 (8): e1001127. doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pbio.1001127, Accessed May 17, 2018. 29  See The Theoretical Individual  – Imagination, Ethics and the Future of Humanity, by M.  C. Tobias and J.  G. Morrison, Springer, New  York and Switzerland, 2018, p. 132. 30  George Boolos, Journal of Philosophy 81 (*):430–449 (1984), doi: jphil198481840, Accessed May 17, 2018. 31  op. cit., Tobias/Morrison., p. 132. 32  Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, Volume 162, Issue 10,  October 2011, Pages 816–835, “Completeness and cut-elimination theorems for trilattice logics,”, Science Direct, Elsevier, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ article/pii/S0168007211000352, Accessed May 17, 2018. 28 

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2  Between the Theoretical and the Hypothetical

Fig. 2.5  Dr. Biruté Mary Galdikas and hand of orangutan friend. (© M.C. Tobias)

existence,33 and the Kleene-Rosser paradox that points out the inconsistency within strict logic of Curry’s paradox.34 There are other combinations in the history of logic and mathematics that challenge any conventional biological notion of numbers, statistics, and a real individual staring into the mirror. With Zeno’s paradoxes, the elements of time, space, and distance are all prey to the first described ecological dialectics and dichotomy: the immersive scenario an ad infinitum that wants somehow to be described according to an origin, not of species but of duality35, of Bradley’s regress  – relationships, defined by relata also confronting ad infinitum divisibility problems36, infinitary logic and languages37 and the principle See Curry, Haskell B., J. Roger Hindley, and Jonathan P. Seldin, 1972, Combinatory Logic, volume 2, (Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, 65), Amsterdam: North-Holland. 34  See The Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 36, No. 3, July, 1935, “The Inconsistency of Certain Formal Logics,” S. C. Kleene and J. B. RosserSecond Series, Vol. 36, No. 3 (July, 1935), pp. 630–636, Published by: Mathematics Department, Princeton University, doi: https://doi. org/10.2307/1968646, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/ stable/1968646, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1968646?ori gin=crossref&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, Accessed May 17, 2018. 35  See Reeder, P., 2015, ‘Zeno’s Arrow and the Infinitesimal Calculus’, Synthese, 192: 1315–1335. 36  See Henninger, M.  G., 1989, Relations: Medieval Theories 1250–1325, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 37  See Barwise, J. and S. Feferman (eds.), 1985, Handbook of Model-Theoretic Logics, New York: Springer-Verlag., 33 

of deductive explosion, or ex contradictione (sequitur) quodlibet: from contradiction anything follows38. Going back from modern mathematics and logic to medieval spirituality, the paradoxes and endless multitudes of zeros take on even more intriguing infinities. The ninth-century “Irishman,” John (Johannes) Scottus Eriugena (c.800  – c.877), in his remarkable work, Periphyseon, or Division of Nature, speaks of “the immovable self-identical one” (unum et idipsum immobile).39 In Eriugena, physis, or natura, contains all, or both working together, Being and nothingness. And every dust mote and scintilla has a share in this universality of proliferations and unities. Should we be expectant, concerned, and enlivened? Each, for there are no boundaries in the biosemiosphere, the world of signs which we inhabit. Cantor’s Theorem; see Gray, Robert [1994], “Georg Cantor and Transcendental Numbers,” American Mathematical Monthly, 101: 819–832, doi: https://doi. org/10.2307/2975129; see also Löwenheim, L., 1915, “On Possibilities in the Calculus of Relatives,” in van Heijenoort 1967, pp. 228–251. 38  See Carnielli, W. and Marcos, J., 2001, “Ex contradictione non  sequitur quodlibet” Proc. 2nd Conf. on Reasoning and Logic Bucharest, July 2000. 39  See Periphyseon, Patrologia Latina CXXII I. 476b. See Periphyseon -The Division of Nature – Translated by I. P. Sheldon-Williams and JJ O’Meara, Montreal: Bellarmin, 1987; see also Periphyseon (De Naturae Division). Edited with the collaboration of Ludwig Bieler. Dublin, The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 4 volumes, 1978–1995.

Biosemiotic Variables

A medieval theologian/naturalist offers consoling words up to a point. Recent non-­shadow biospheric generations, most notably ours, are struck by serious fragments, as if traveling from another solar system: discordant immediacies. One example, most relevant to conservation, involves what we term the conservation paradox, simply: What we perceive to be there (A), what isn’t there (B), what we are able to project (C), and where our models of projection lack sufficient confidence percentages to be relevant (D). For the population, following division by n (equals the number of numbers), the anticipated frequency and viability of distributions can neither be normal nor symmetrical because the gap of unknowing pertaining to existence versus the nullity for any species, or collection of species, is all structurally effacing. When we start adding up all of the unknowns, subjectivities, differing yardsticks and technologies of measurement, conceptual outcomes of such measuring sticks themselves, the differing languages, memories, and wild perspectives – all those human components of any premise, outcome, and orientation – we lose out, by even the most elementary of reading lists, if there ever was one. Step back a moment to ask, was there something else (again) which, when added to that chaos of mathematical scenarios, might turn out to mentor the best of eco-­dynamics, the ways of an infinite variety of contexts – through engagement – and ultimately into which wisdom is received or discarded? The Christian mystic who authored The Cloud of Unknowing (Middle English, latter half of the fourteenth century)40 perhaps preferred anonymity, the equivalent form of humility, not dissimilar from so many unsigned gardens, Tibetan thangkas, and other works of art  – with the deeply affecting hope that through the surrender of one’s ego, a breakthrough of illumination was possible. Through abdication of all literal presumption, rules and procedures, standards, and confirma-

“The Cloud of Unknowing,” Introduction Patrick J.  Gallacher, Editor, Middle English Texts Series, University of Rochester, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/ text/gallacher-cloud-of-unknowing-introduction, Accessed August 20, 2018. 40 

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Fig. 2.6  Mother and child, chained in a Saudi Arabian Animal Market. (© M.C. Tobias)

tions, something new on the horizon could be conjured, not a fraction but a whole. All of these hurdles to knowing anything, or even to trusting knowledge and its motivations, truth herself, become suspect in the gigantic act of trying to flavor this existence we think we know and hence, the power of unknowing and of delimiting the arrogance of proof. Our knowledge lives almost entirely within that some Bermuda Triangle of ecological ephemeralities and subsequently calls upon all fools and shamans, poets, philosophers, jurists, scientists, civic-minded good people, and all the children of the world, with an equal, unified urgency. It would not be so, not such desperate times, if the general chorus of intuition was not so sincerely stunned by so massive and deeply united frantic alarm over the degradation of this one planet we happen to cohabit (Fig. 2.6). Perhaps circumstances will change. Maybe they won’t. Language origins, mathematics, genetics, and natural selection are each out of sync with actual human evolution. E. O. Wilson

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Fig. 2.7  Remains of an earlier civilization in Rome. (© M.C. Tobias)

characteristically says it insightfully: “The multiplicity of pathways in the evolution of elementary syntax suggests that few if any genetic rules guide the learning of language by individual human beings…the rapidly changing environment of speech does not provide a stable environment for natural selection….”41 If the very tumultuousness of human history can outpace natural selection, what of humanity’s ever-escalating attacks on the planet at large (Fig. 2.7)? Our goal is to explore the rudiments of a narrow window of opportunity in which a change of circumstances might enable us to try through practice at large and by means of contemplative experiment to better grasp the essentials of a progressive natural selection the pathways to which our rapid response times might proffer an edge, The Social Conquest Of Earth, by Edward O.  Wilson, Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W.  W. Norton & Company, New York, 2012, p. 235.

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some slight advantage over our violence and/or complacencies in the face of brutality. By that, it is our intention to promulgate a world that would ideally include, rather than exclude, its human species. The fundamentals of current conservation biology and animal protection mandates implicate our species so unambiguously that nothing less than a global seismic shift in ethics, of our appreciation, outwardly expressed, activism fully excited, of the realities of all the deaths we are criminally inflicting on other species and habitat, will do.

Life and Death Recall the myriad of daily struggles, both in material and expressive forms, adorning the hieroglyphs and stories laid out in 31 Egyptian kingdoms, particularly the strange and forbidding relations expressed by laymen, priests, pha-

Life and Death

raohs, and their legions, between life and death, all of the animal- and human-hybridized graphics within a language that thought nothing of slaughter, cutting out the thighs, forelegs, and heads at the entrance of tombs or during ritualized burials. In spite of so much murderous mayhem, the pharaohs also held in special favor countless animals as admonitory and god-like, in one especially noted text, “Report about the Dispute of a Man with His Ba, Papyrus, Berlin 3024,” as translated and discussed by Professor Hans Goedicke.42 The Old and Middle Kingdom thinking of a person’s Ba was no different than the soul, or psyche, both ­material and immaterial, ensconced with the living and with the dead. The Ba was capable of transiting in the normal course of the world between the various actors on the ancient stage. The allegedly common knowledge of a fractured transport mode also recognized any and all ambiguities divined by the enigmatic figure with a human head and bird body, the essence, its life force, its personality, neither shadow nor suggestion, rather, the real person with the ability to emanate its personifications. These pictographic immersions into both grotesque and aesthetically surprising revelations equate with complex numbers, in general, factoring the a + bi plane, wherein the a/b are real enough, but the “i” is equal to an imaginary numeric representation, an algebraic extension, as it is called.43 At the heart of all indeterminacy is a human fabrication known as an imaginary unit, which is to say, the absence of real numbers inasmuch as there is otherwise no possibility, in algebra, of squaring a negative. In short, mathematical manipulation has granted logic an entire See The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1971; see also The Debate Between a Man and His Soul: A Masterpiece of Ancient Egyptian Literature (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East #44, by James P. Allen, Culture and History of the Ancient Near East #44, Brill Publishers, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2010; see also The Book Of The Dead – The Hieroglyphic Transcript of the Papyrus of ANI, the Translation into English and An Introduction by E.  A. Wallis Budge, University Books, New Hyde Park, New  York, 1960, pp. 76–78. 43  See Kapil D.  Joshi, Foundations of Discrete Mathematics, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1989. 42 

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ring theory of ideals: order, fractional, prime, integral, and the unit ideal, even a proper ideal. All of this constitutes the realm of abstract algebra which is not that different from biological taxonomy, inasmuch as it comprises a vast constellation of structures, from groups and fields to lattices and vector spaces, which are denominated formally by so-called category theory. These are equations pertaining to the classic polynomial P and Q forms (P = Q) underlying the notion of coefficients being partnered with multivariates or variables. Inconsistencies and undetermined variability are set side by side with so-called “zero-dimensional” systems, in which the number of endless equations formulated by people (not by cells, trees, or sharks) is equivalent to the number of variables involved in the very same manipulation and described as “well-behaved.”44 For those unversed (or utterly uninterested) in mathematical manipulations, it is worth standing back for a moment and pondering the very strangeness of tampering with numbers in general. The reason being, it is virtually identical in nature and thrust to our continued naming of names and our creation of taxonomic definitions and rules. Algebra at the level of the ideal underscores the arbitrariness of most biological norms when placed in human hands. At its most alarming levels, we humans manufacture such creatures as a sheep we  named Dolly, born July 5, 1996. In the vast body of works represented through the human lens of hieroglyphics, our scheming indulgences upon life and death awaken a charged and clearly lethal tangent to nature’s own conduct and affairs. In our own death throes, always solitary at the end, we champion every cell that ever lived, staring back through millions of years of dead ends and liberations, all the fuels that lay waiting to be ignited, which is the story of evolution. But for we humans the tree of life has also echoed the tree of death. See Songxin Liang, Jürgen Gerhard, D.J.  Jeffrey and Guillaume Moroz, “A Package for Solving Parametric Polynomial Systems,” ACM Communications in Computer Algebra, 43 (3/4), 61–72, 2010.

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Fig. 2.8  The exuberant afterlife of a tree, Northeast Polish Forest. (© M.C. Tobias)

In his translation of the Book of The Dead,45 Sir Wallis Budge explored this ancient Egyptian superhighway system of symbols by elaborate descriptions of an ecstasy-bound journey to the other world. The problem with this all-encompassing odyssey of the soul, with the espousal of such notions as a soul within a soul, a creature within a creature, is especially pronounced for conservation, and ecology in general, because it blurs the reality between the living and the dead (Fig. 2.8) and all those atoms, molecules, cells, and genes undergoing invisible transition between biomes, jettisoned by events and populations, mutations, and genetic cul-de-sacs, rendering it impossible to delineate that which is precious and living now from that which is somehow less precious, and already dead, or in the process of becoming a huge metaphysical construct. Ancient Egyptian symbols – as both Budge and Goedicke were so aware  –rebuke the delineation, making protection, or the designation of imperatives, a precurThe Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum; the Egyptian Text with Interlinear Transliteration and Translation, a Running Translation, Introduction, etc. British Museum.

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sor to actual safeguarding, so obfuscated as to have been lost in the hierarchy of that which we endeavor to sustain. In the history of human identity, this fleeting yet fixated Egyptian creaturewithin-the-creature leaves open the question of what kind of world humans are wont to create for themselves, when, clearly, other forces have intervened long before their birth. Analogies cascade. We will later take up questions of the singular and the plural and of humans and birds and how taxonomy has loomed with intervening force to shape the modern hieroglyphics and their origins. And such interventions, we must point out from the beginning, are  – in the immediacy of their kinetics and their actions and impacts in real time  – not demonstrably dependent on social norms and the debates and mathematical formulas attending upon genes. Such genes and genotypes and allele frequencies might simply be dismissed, against the massive backdrop of the human propensities for destruction. Conversely, the argument that genetics determines annihilatory currents begs the issue of interspecies altruism, one of whose early commentators was William Donald Hamilton (1936–2000). In his formative work on the genetics of altruism, he expressed the following characterization: c< r x b,

Contemporary Hieroglyphics

where c represents the cost of an altruistic action to the protagonist of the theorem, r being the overall relationship, more expressly, relatedness of the protagonist and the recipient of the action within any given population, and b, the alleged fitness benefit to that recipient.46 The debate from 1964 when Hamilton published his philosophical notion, to the present, stirred by significant other arguments pertaining to personal and inclusive fitness within the overall evolutionary umbrella, was punctuated in 2010 when Martin A. Nowak, Corina E.  Tarnita, and Edward O.  Wilson published their essay, “The evolution of eusociality,” in Nature.47 In essence, the trio emphasized a more elegant approach to understanding altruism in humans and eusocial insects than had ever been advanced. This was accomplished by arguing on behalf of information derived from recent mathematically assimilated insights coming from population dynamics, as well as traditional natural selection data from across the far realms of global biological empiricism. The result, claimed the authors, was a firmer grasp on the nature of kinship and its relevancy to more finely honed concepts of inclusive fitness, concepts that should empower researchers to better differentiate amid a proliferation of hypotheses concerning kin altruism and how it is likely to play out across multiples of generations. Their six-page research report was vigorously rejected by “137 biologists committed to inclusive fitness theory” in 2011.48 In 2013, Tarnita and Wilson along with Benjamin Allen expanded these investigations with a paper entitled “Limitations of Inclusive Fitness.”49 To grasp the See W.  Hamilton, (1964). “The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I”. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 7 (1): 1–16. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(64)900384. PMID 5875341. Hamilton, W. (1964). “The genetical evolution of social behaviour. II”. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 7 (1): 17–52. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/00225193(64)90039-6. PMID 5875340. 47  Nature, Volume 466, pages1057–1062, 26 August 2010, doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09205, https://www. nature.com/articles/nature09205, Accessed May 8, 2018. 48  See The Meaning Of Human Existence, by Edward O. Wilson, Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York, 2014, p. 73. 49  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 46 

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intriguing richness and s­imultaneous emptiness of such debates, we recommend the very terse and penetrating point of view embraced by David Sloan Wilson who neatly summarizes the conceptual dilemma by urging all concerned to “perform ‘equivalence checks’,” to avoid a situation whereby “equivalent paradigms will be pitted pointlessly against each other, as they have for over half a century….”50 One case in point: the fact of a John James Audubon and his Irish contemporary, Richard Dunscombe Parker (arguably the more subtle and engaging of the two ornithological painters, with much more vivid backdrops), both sharing the use of rifles to capture their doomed paragons. For that reason, “Neither could convincingly represent a bird in flight,” as Martyn Anglesea has written in a fine introduction to the historic printing of the Birds of Ireland.51 When we consider art as one more form of taxonomy – of a language or hieroglyph intended to enshrine and differentiate – then those obvious limitations to accurate expression evoke significant benchmarks (hindrances) of our ability to convincingly know the outside world (Fig. 2.9).

Contemporary Hieroglyphics Atop the southern Swedish mountain known as the Helagsfjället, as reported in worldwide media, something extremely important has happened. There, where lived a “subpopulation of the endangered Scandinavian arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus), founded by six individuals and isolated for 9 years at an extremely small population size” (a total of 543 individuals), newcomers suddenly arrived. They included two blue sibling foxes and a third white one all from Norway, who had Volume 110, No. 50, pp. 20135–20139. 50  David Sloan Wilson, Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, and Templeton Press, 2015, p. 44. 51  See Birds of Ireland – Paintings by Richard Dunscombe Parker (c.1805–1881), Edited by Martyn Anglesea, Designed by Wendy Dunbar, The Blackstaff Press, Dundonald, Northern Ireland, 1983, p. 8.

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Fig. 2.9  Contemplating hieroglyphics of the outside world at Royan-ji, Kyoto. (© M.C. Tobias)

migrated in 2009 some 150 miles to Helagsfjället and immediately started breeding. Within 5 years, not only had a large number of the Swedish population of foxes turned into a “ravishing indigo” color,52 but “the population had more than doubled in size and allelic richness increased by 41%.”53 The Norwegian immigrants had come from a conservation restoration program devoted to finding ways to help ameliorate the fast-dwindling numbers of these foxes, whose populations had become severely fragmented throughout Scandinavia, leading to what is known as the

“Arctic Foxes on a Swedish Mountain Turned ‘Blue.’ It Was a Good Thing,” The New York Times, by Steph Yin, March 28, 2018. 53  “Genetic rescue in an inbred Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) population,” by Malin Hasselgren, Anders Angerbjörn, Nina E. Eide, Rasmus Erlandsson, Øystein Flagstad, Arild Landa, Johan Wallén, Karin Norén, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Published 28 March 2018. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.2814. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/285/1875/20172814, Accessed April 4, 2018.

genetic crisis of inbreeding depression. It is typically the prelude to Critically Endangered and then Extinct species. It is rare in conservation biology to see significant success stories, but they do occur (“significance” remaining by every definition, a most tentative, and time-­ dependent variable). The California Condor saga is one such example.54 Arctic foxes, possibly, are another. But condors in Big Sur, California, and the Grand Canyon55 and Scandinavian arctic foxes are two critically endangered organisms out of some unknown multiplicity of organisms about which taxonomy is but one lens, human pictorial imagination,

52 

See the feature documentary, “Hotspots,” PBS, A Dancing Star Foundation Production, http://www. hotspots-thefilm.org/. 55  http://www.iucnredlist.org/search, Accessed April 4, 2018; “IUCN proposes new method for measuring species’ conservation success,” 26 March 2018, http://www. iucnredlist.org/news/iucn_proposes_new_method_for_ measuring_species_conservation_success, Accessed April 4, 2018. 54 

Contemporary Hieroglyphics

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Fig. 2.10  From “Seven Days of Creation” by Jan Sadeler I, 1550–1600, after oil painting by Maarten de Vos, Private Collection. (© M.C. Tobias)

another, as in the famed case of the “Seven Days of Creation” by Jan Sadeler I, engraved between 1580 and 1590 after the original oil painting by Antwerp master, Maarten de Vos (Fig. 2.10).56 With so little understood about the actual number of species on the planet57 and even less known about the number of individuals, let alone average number of individuals per species, questions regarding true conservation success are always up for debate, as is the obvious issue of

practicality. How much can conservationists achieve and how much should advocacy set its sights upon, given the global moral and economic storm of worsening preconditions for what is essentially a moribund maze of biological triage?58 Writes Jennifer Kahn, “As the list of endangered animals worldwide grows longer, society may soon be faced with an impossible decision: which ones to take off life support.”59

See British Museum #1937,0915 0.35; see also Hollstein’s Dutch And Flemish Etchings, Engravings And Woodcuts CA. 1450–1700, VolumesXX1 and XXII, Aegidius Sadeler To Raphael Sadeler II, Text Compiled By Dieuwke De Hoop Scheffer, Edited by K.  G. Boon, Van Gendt & Co., Amsterdam, 1980. 57  “Researchers find that Earth may be home to 1 trillion species,” National Science Foundation, Staff Report, May 2, 2016, www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=138446.

58 

56 

See “Should Some Species Be Allowed to Die Out?” By Jennifer Kahn, New  York Times Magazine Section, March 13, 2018. 59  Ibid., New York Times Magazine Section. This dialectic, very much at the heart of environmental ethics, was enshrined quite powerfully in the book Noah’s Choice – The Future Of Endangered Species, by Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer, A Borzoi Book, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995.

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Biological Differentiations The moral and practical considerations that science, policy, and ethics confer upon the differentiation of individuals, species, and their morphological presence combine human history with the biosphere, and the philosophical outcomes are certainly a work in progress. The animals we tend to leave alone are those within national parks and preserves or family pets. However, even in those vouchsafed domains, there are terrible contradictions. For example, in the USA, despite the 1916 congressionally codified National Park Service (“NPS”), enshrining the conservation of “wildlife therein,”60 the manipulation and killing of animals within parks have been, to varying degrees, park policy since as early as the 1930s. As the Animal Welfare Institute (“AWI”) points out, by 1963 “public outrage over the lethal control of wildlife within national parks” was such that the Leopold Report also known as “Wildlife Management in the National Parks” was published demanding a reassessment of methods and recommendations for natural regulation. Nonetheless, in 1995 the NPS ordered “a massive lethal deer slaughter to reduce the population in order to restore and protect the scenic elements that ostensibly reflected the landscape of Gettysburg in 1863.”61 There could be no greater irony. Between July 1 and 3, 1863, the Gettysburg landscape contained 7863 dead soldiers, 27,224 wounded soldiers, and another 11,199 captured or missing and presumed dead. This was the landscape  – using deer as surrogates – that the National Park Service sought to recreate. Says AWI, “Fundamentally, the NPS has forgotten the lessons of its past and has re-embraced the bullet, perceiving it to be the solution to an alleged, yet unproven, problem with deer or elk overabundance” (as defined by so-called “carrying capacity,” with all of its own subjective incongruities.)62 See “The Dark Side of the National Park Service,” n.a., Animal Wildlife Institute Quarterly, Fall 2009, Vol. 58, Number 4, pp. 10–11. 61  Ibid., AWI, p. 11. 62  Ibid., AWI, p. 11. 60 

The number of poaching incidents throughout the world within park boundaries is impossible to calculate. Here are just a few of the representative kinds of trespass: “Trade in rhino horn fuels massive poaching surge in South Africa,” by David Smith63; “Ginseng Poachers Nabbed at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park,” by Jim Burnett64; “Tigers Critically Endangered” (Fig. 2.11),65 “Big Thicket National Preserve To Issue Hunting Permits At Visitor Center,”66 “Saving Salonga National Park,”67 and “Bonobo and Congo Biodiversity Initiative.”68 Even the records of lavish affection doled out to our family pets are peppered with recorded incidents of negligence and other forms of witting and unwitting cruelty,69 whether with pet hamsters, dogs, ferrets, or benign urban birds like pigeons in Paris and Vienna or Canada geese in regions where they have multiplied, even chick-

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/07/rhinohorn-poaching-south-africa, October 7, 2009. 64  National Parks Traveler, www.nationalparkstraveler. com/2009/09/ginseng-poachers-nabbed-cumberland-ga. 65  n.a., www.wildlifewarriorswarriors.org.au/asian_conservation/tiger_conservation.html; Serengeti –The National Park’s Official Site, www.serengeti.org/nav/ head_serengeti.html. 66  US Fed News Service, July 14, 2009, www.highbeam. com/doc/1P3-1786648971.html. 67  www.zoosociety.org/Conservation/Bonobo/BCBI/ Salonga.php. 68  See Zoological Society of Milwaukee, accessed 11/17/2009. See also “America’s National Park System: The Critical Documents,” edited by Lary M.  Dilsaver, Chapter 5, “Questions of Resource Management: 1957– 1963,” “Wildlife Management” in “The National Parks” (often referred to as the Stegner Report), 1962, www.nps. gov.history/history/online_books/anps/anps_5c.htm. See “Horesback Hunts in Alaska’s Largest National Park,” www.wrangelloutfitters.com/hunting.html; see also “Poaching –CopperWiki,” www.copperwiki.org/index. php/Poaching; and “Park Management, Conservation and Research –answers to the conflict between Man and Wildlife?” www.serengeti.org/serengeti.html. 69  See “Protecting Animals” American Humane, www. americanhumane.org/protecting-animals/; see also www. peta.org/mc/facts/fsc3.html; see also “World Top Ten Countries With Most Pet Dog Population,” www.mapsofworld.com/world-top-ten/countries-with-most-pet-dogpopulationm.html. 63 

Biological Differentiations

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Fig. 2.11  Mid-twentieth-century poaching of a tiger in Singapore. (© M.C. Tobias)

ens in Key West where idiotic controversy rages over what is to be done about them.70 The Jains have for millennia also focused upon what they call the simplest of life forms, or class of souls, namely, nigodas.71 It is worth pausing, here, to reflect upon the 7 million years or so of hominid neurology that would accumulate sufficient motive and sensory acuity72 to accord with a most satisfactory feeling within a 175 lb male member of the Homo sapiens species that derives See www.nytimes.com/1992/03/03/opinion/1-pigeonsare-swee-loving-and-don-t-bite-762692. html?pagewan; see also NYC Pigeon Legislation Still Up in the Air – Anti-Pigeon Bill Ruffles Activists’ Feathers, by Betsy Morais, January 23, Coloumbia Spectator, http:// pigeonpolitics.globspot.com/2008/01/nyc-pigeon-legislation-still-up-in-air.html. 71  See Padmanabh S.  Jaini’s “Collected Papers on Jaina Studies,” reviewed by Mari Heim in Journal of the American Oriental Society, January 2003, in www. Britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/11676151/ Collected-Papers-on=Jaina-Studies-book. 72  See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/species.html, Accessed July 7, 2018. 70 

expressly from the magnanimous act of saving a flea and of changing just slightly one’s pace in order to save some unnamed little bug crawling on the ground. These are Jain basics that happen to be the root of conservation: impulse, a sense of virtue and the possibilities of unconditional kindness. Even the nigodas, who believe the Jains, deserve to follow their own independent path, are  to be left alone; however, difficult it is for humans to oblige, given that we can’t see them with our naked eye. With the dawn of the microscope, microbiology, and genetic studies, we are now much closer to appreciating the ethical deliberations inherent to an ancient Indian culture that had the foresight and courage of its convictions to go on faith that the unseen particles of life were part of the planetary puzzle and important in and of themselves. Today, we might call such “blind beliefs” romantic, unrealistic, or a combined reverse of each. But that is precisely the point: pragmatic idealism. We now know the invisible ones to be the very genes, cells,

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microbes, bacteria, and viruses that constitute all those seemingly infinite species we don’t see, the “millions of bacteria and other one-­ celled microbes” living on our skin – at least “112,000 bacterial gene sequences” “19 different phyla and 205 different genera.” On a human forearm, researchers have found at least 44 different bacterial species, 9573 in the mouth, some “600 different species” of bacteria, representing “100 million in every milliliter of saliva,”74 and more still in a human colon. If one considers enzymes, amino acids, and all the other ingredients that are living and make up some “10 trillion cells” per human body,75 the animal rights connectivity and ethical injunctions become quite clouded. It is thought that the most numerous of all Orders is that of the Pelagibacterales, also known as the SAR II clade. And it has been argued that the oceans probably contain a number near 2.4 × 1028 (24 billion billion billion) of them, accounting for at least one-third of all free-living marine bacteria,76180 trillion beings, when we start to do the math.77 The acute demeanor of all these beings and their cells starts to come into human perceptual focus at the threshold of a single cell, augmented under a microscope to yield the prefigurements of a metaphorically apprehensible world, akin to a stretch between a single angstrom of size, or 1.0–2.0 × 10 to the minus 10 m, to that observable with the naked eye. From the history of metaphysics and quantum mechanics, we know that these life-sized beings (cells of all See “Study Finds Unexpected Bacterial Diversity on Human Skin,” by Julia Segre, Ph.D., senior author of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), NIH News, National Institutes of Health, www.nih.gov/ news/health/may2009/nhgri-28.htm. 74  See “New species of bacteria found in human mouth,” www.thaindian.com/newsportal/world-news/new-species-of-bacgteria-found-in-human-mouth_10082526.htm. 75  See “How Cells Work” at http://science.howstuffworks. com/cellular-microscopic-biology/cell1.htm. See “How Cells Work” at http://science.howstuffworks.com/cellular-microscopic-biology/cell1.htm. 76  https://biocyc.org/CPEL335992/NEW-IMAGE?type=O RGANISM&object=TAX-54526, Accessed May 7, 2018.. 77  See The Metaphysics of Protection, by Tobias/Morrison, Waterside Press, Cardiff by the Sea, CA, 2014, p. 138. 73 

types, containing up to two trillion molecules per cell) are enormous by comparison with yet smaller dimensions, such as 1 Planck length, or 1.61619926 × 10 to the minus 35 m, said to be a constant. What we do not know is whether other life forms cohabit such lengths. Or, stated more properly, to what lengths life will go to fill in the so-called blanks? Thus far, most biological nomenclature in the West is of Greek origins, concentrated in the word organon, meaning tool, a word first employed in English long after Shakespeare, in 1701. At the heart of modern taxonomic differentiations for biodiversity are three words within organon, namely, archaea, “ancient things,” bacteria  – prokaryotes, “before the nucleus,” and eukaryota, or “true nuclei.” In sub-Saharan Africa, the red-billed quelea numbers are between 1.5 and 5 billion breeding pairs, the most numerous known bird species in the world, at least since the time of the passenger pigeon (Fig. 2.12). As for humans, on the extreme side of current data, one chilling projection by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs back in 2004 suggested that if Homo sapiens survive in the coming decades and continue breeding at (then and present) rates, our population could reach “31 billion,” even “34.5 billion” by 2300.78 By the standards of Southern (Antarctic) Ocean krill counts (up to 60,000 individuals per cubic meter and an estimated “379,000,000 tons”),79 quelea and humans would World Population to 2300, http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf; See also “UN’s world population estimates raise questions on sustainability,” Dec 14, 2010 by Michael Krebs, h t t p : / / w w w. d i g i t a l j o u r n a l . c o m / a r t i c l e / 301443#ixzz1BD7KmqBs. 79  See A.  Atkinson; V.  Siegel; E.A.  Pakhomov; M.J. Jessopp; V. Loeb (2009). “A re-appraisal of the total biomass and annual production of Antarctic krill” (PDF). Deep-Sea Research Part I. 56 (5): 727–740. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr.2008.12.007; and for the “tonnes” figure, U.  Kils; P.  Marshall (1995). “Der Krill, wie er schwimmt und frisst  – neue Einsichten mit neuen Methoden, “The Antarctic krill – how it swims and feeds – new insights with new methods,” in I. Hempel; G. Hempel. Biologie der Polarmeere  – Erlebnisse und Ergebnisse (Biology of the Polar Oceans Experiences and Results). Fischer Verlag. pp.  201–210. ISBN 3-334-60950-2.; 78 

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Fig. 2.12 Red-billed quelea (Quelea quelea) H10 South of Tshokwane, Kruger NP, South Africa. (© Bernard Dupont from France)

not theoretically pose a threat in mathematical terms. But, of course, we know that humans  – their predation and climate interference  – mean everything, ultimately to krill, which underscores the vulnerability of all numbers and sizes to evolutionary flux and speciation. There is no general theory of protection,80 and if there were, it’s highly unlikely that many people would pay much attention. While quelea and humans are fertility amateurs compared with beetles and most microscopic creatures, the numbers games do begin to play out in ways that defy predictability. We’re all accustomed to hearing about big numbers – and seeing them. For those who have grown up around any of the cottonwood species, each adult tree, each spring, propagates up to a distance of some 5  miles nearly “48 million” seeds.81 Male sperm in a single human ejaculation may number between 20 and 100 million (the numbers have been demonstrably dropping throughout the world). In Yasuni National Park, 1 ha of rain forest contains at least 655 different tree species, on average, with an average of approximately 100,000 insect species living on R. Piper (2007), Extraordinary Animals: An Encyclopedia of Curious and Unusual Animals. Greenwood Press. 80  For discussion, see The Metaphysics of Protection, by Tobias/Morrison, Waterside Press, Cardiff by the Sea, CA, 2014, p. 7. 81  See “Eastern Cottonwood,” by D.  T. Cooper, https:// www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/misc/ag_654/volume_2/populus/deltoides.htm, Accessed May 27, 2018.

each tree, times that existential surrealism of numbers per individual species.82 Each seed, each individual, is subject to the vagaries of change, “Religion of Nature” which Voltaire (a vegetarian) invoked.83 Jains have grappled with “pain” based upon various presumed criteria84 in which are delineated the different levels of sensory organs which Jains attribute to all life forms, so as to better grasp potential pain sensors, and corresponding human activities that are justified, or not. But in the end, human choices about consumption and killing are bound to look fickle, certainly from the perspective of minute See “Scientists identify Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park as one of most biodiverse places on Earth,” January 19, 2010, University of Texas at Austin, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100119133510.htm, Accessed May 27, 2018; Reprinted with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily from, “Global Conservation Significance of Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park,” PLoS ONE, 2010: 5 (1): c8767. doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.008767, by Margot S.  Bass, Matt Finer, Clinton N.  Jenkins, Holger Kreft, Diego F.  CisnerosHeredia, Shawn F. McCracken, Nigel C. A. Pitman, Peter H. English, Kelly Swing, Gorky Villa, Anthony Di Fiore, Christian C. Voigt, Thomas H. Kunz. 83  See Voltaire’s poem, “Epistle to the Beautiful Uranie:” “Believe that the eternal wisdom of the Most High Has graven with his hand, in the depths of your heart, The Religion of Nature,” cited in Voltaire  – Genius Of Mockery, by Victor Thaddeus, Brentano’s Publishers, New York, NY, 1928, p. 65. 84  See Life Force  – The World of Jainism, by Michael Tobias, Asian Humanities Press, Freemont, CA, 1991. 82 

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46 Fig. 2.13 Fungal Universe, Belarussian Forest. (© M.C. Tobias)

organisms: the 7 million follicle mites in our eyelashes dominated by Demodex folliculorum and Demodex brevis, 2 of the 65 known Demodex species, thought to be among the smallest of living arthropods, for example.85 We are, of course, hosts to a vast constellation of life forms, viral and bacterial. Scientists at the University of Georgia led by microbiologist William B. Whitman estimate that the total number of bacteria in the world numbers “five million trillion trillion” (“a five with 30 zeroes after it.”)86 “We’ve just scratched the surface of the microbial world,” says Dr. Paul Davies of Arizona State University (Fig. 2.13), speculating on the possibility that there could even be a second wave of life forms on Earth that would ordinarily rank as “aliens,” most likely microbes that could be living in our nostrils. Davies first published these ­considerations in Scientific American, “Are Aliens Among Us?” (the December 2007 issue). In that article, Belgian biochemist Christian de See “Demodex spp., − Face Mites – Follicle Mites are Common Parasites of Human Facial Skin”, by Rosemary Drisdelle, August 29, 2007, http://skindisease.suiute101. com/article.cfm/demodex_spp_face_mites. For conflicting data, citing only “approximately 13 species in this genus,” see “Demodex folliculorum,” http://zipcodezoo. com/Animals/D/Demodex_folliculorum/. 86  See “First-ever estimate of total bacteria on earth  – Study shows far greater numbers than ever known before”; see San Diego Earth Times, September 1998, www. sdearthtimes.com/et0998/et0998s8.html; see also “Microbial Population Explosion,” by David Tenenbaum, http://whyfiles.org/shorties/count_bact.html.

Duve quoted from a 1995 statement in which he declared (contrary to the conventional wisdom espoused by Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod in 1970 suggesting that we are basically alone in the universe) that, in fact, life is “a cosmic imperative…it is almost bound to arise.”87 Bacteria break down our food for digestion, and our corpses, as well, which they are most often accountable for, including at least 48 predominant types, from those which result in hepatitis, pneumonia, sexually transmitted diseases, and cardiovascular disease to encephalitis/meningitis, the common cold, and myelitis, to name but a few. Among viruses (“poison” in Latin), there are at least seven major groups from dsDNA to dsDNA-RT viruses.88 Viruses, in fact, may outnumber bacteria, with an estimated “10 million virus particles” in every drop of seawater, “100 million” per “pinch of soil,” and a world total of something like “1 with 31 zeroes behind it.”89

85 

See “Scientist: Alien life could already be on Earth,” by Raphael G.  Satter, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/ id/35083220/ns/technology_and_sciencescience/?GT1=43001. January 26, 2010. 88  See “Beneficial Bacteria to Humans,” by Batul Nafisa Baxamusa, www.buzzle.com/articles/beneficialbacteriato-humans.html, October 28, 2009. 89  See “Virus Myth Busters,” by Sharath Srinivasiah, Doctoral Student, and Professor K.  Eric Wommack, University of Delaware, www.expeditions.udel.edu/ extreme08/microbes/virus-myth.php. 87 

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Fig. 2.14 Arabian leopard (Panthera pardus nimr), possibly fewer than 50 individuals in the wild. (© M.C. Tobias)

At the other end of the numeric spectrum, the largest virtually unknown species in the world is that of the spade-toothed beaked whale (Mesoplodon traversii). The first time ever seen by human eyes was an instance in which a mother and calf had beached and were found dead in New Zealand in December 2010.90 Absolutely nothing is known about their status (which is likely to be perilously non-abundant). Those species known to be fast verging on zero include New Zealand’s kakapo (Strigops habroptila, numbering fewer than 160),91 the white-­headed langur of Cát Bà Island in Vietnam (Trachypithecus poliocephalus, fewer than 100),92 one known Spix’s macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii) seen and filmed in the wild in 2016,93 and the Hawaiian crows (ʻalalā, Corvus hawaiiensis) for whom it appears the bell has tolled, at least for any known individuals left in the wild.94 There are 30 Amur (also called Siberian) tigers (Panthera tigris tigris) outside of zoos, 5 white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum), 35 Javan rhinos (Rhinoceros sondaicus), fewer than 100 vaquita https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/ worlds-rarest-whale-seen-for-first-time-spade-toothedwhale/ Accessed May 7, 2018. 91  https://www.earthtouchnews.com/conservation/endangered/kakapo-comeback/. 92  http://eol.org/pages/4453635/details#conservation_status. 93  https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2016/06/30/ lost-and-found-the-worlds-rarest-parrot/#13dc0ef74568, Accessed May 7, 2018. 94  https://corvidresearch.blog/2017/01/05/the-rarest-crow/. 90 

porpoises (Phocoena sinus), between 800 and 900 mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei), and approximately 60 greater bamboo lemurs (Prolemur simus). Among plants the Sophora toromiro which went officially extinct sometime after 193595 on the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) was replanted in a few gardens there. We saw two individuals, protected in a garden of the headquarters of the Chilean Forest Service on Rapa Nui in 2008,96 but it now survives in what we might describe as a (not uncommon) linguistic purgatory.97 In terms of insects, a stick insect, the Lord Howe (Dryococelus australis) on Australia’s Ball’s Pyramid, numbers no more than 30 individuals.98 The litanies burgeon.99 There are hundreds of other known examples where the species numbers less than 500 individuals (Fig. 2.14). http://islandheritage.org/wordpress/wpcontent/ uploads/2010/06/RNJ_9_3_Liller.pdf, Accessed May 7, 2018. 96  See www.hotspots-thefilm.org. 97  See http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/ journal.pone.0115548, Accessed May 7, 2018. 98  http://theconversation.com/australian-endangered-species-lord-howe-island-stick-insect-11789,  January 23, 2013, Accessed May 7, 201. 99  See “13 Species We Might Have To Say Goodbye To in 2015,” n.a., https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/ world/2015/01/02/globalpost-species-near-extinction/21182221/, Accessed May 8, 2018. 95 

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For many years, biologists, particularly systematists (those specializing in large-scale statistical taxonomy and biogeographical relations among species), have known the unknown, namely, the vast gaps in data collection hampering our true picture of how devastating the Anthropocene really is. Hence, for years now numerous endeavors have been put in place to catalogue and differentiate as much of life as possible.

Libraries of Life The Library of Life consortium100 includes, among others, the following current global initiatives, involving tens of thousands of scientists and volunteers: the “AmphibiaWeb,” “Animal Diversity Web,” “AntWeb,” “ARKive,” “Atlas of Living Australia,” “BioLib.cz,” “Biolib.de,” “BioPedia,” “Biopix.dk,” “Catalogue of Life Partnership (CoLP),” “Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL),” “FishBase,” “Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF),” “IUCN,” “Microscope,” “Mushroom Observer,” “Naturalis,” “Plazi,” “Solanaceae Source,” “Nearctic Spider Database” (the Nearctic being one of the eight terrestrial biomes on the Earth covering most of North America and Greenland, as opposite, for example, to the Neotropic which comprises the New World Southern Hemisphere), “Tree of Life Web Project (TOL),” “World Register of Marine Species,” and “ZooKeys.” Given the now estimated 100 million or more species (by some estimates, between 200 million and one trillion), multiplied times the number of average individuals per species (a very vague, at best, taxonomic guess list), there are trillions of individuals currently on the brink of extinction. A convergence of long-term research suggests, as we have reiterated the prolific chorus of such plaintive distress, we are currently inflicting the sixth great extinction spasm, obliterating by our actions as much as

See “Saving the ‘library of life’” by Gregory Benford, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Volume 89, pp. 11098–11101, November 1992; see also www.eol.org/. 100 

40–60% of all life on Earth. Lost in the white noise of species extinctions are all the individuals. If, as some have speculated, the average number of individual vertebrates per species, taken across the entire known suite of earthly vertebrates, is 3 million, then, at 40–60% of 100 million-times-x? estimated species, the individual numbers reside in a stark, unimaginable quantum: as many as 180 trillion Beings. At the highest end of estimates, factor one trillion times 3 million. A different computation by British ecologist Norman Myers calculates the loss according to the estimated 2.2 billion distinct (separate) populations of creatures (be they a velvet ant colony in the Amazon, a flock of flamingos nesting in Southern Africa, or the human population of Santa Fe, New Mexico), and of these an astonishing 43,000 populations are going extinct every day. How to qualify pain among such a vast realm of species, over 98% of which are still in a virtually blank slate in terms of any database, poses a daunting ethical challenge, arguing unambiguously for a precautionary approach to our (theoretically defused and) humble interactive place in the world, as one species among so many others.101 For British social scientist Mayer Hillman, there is no doubting the accelerated speed of continuing destruction. In an interview in the Guardian he asks, “Can you see everyone in a democracy volunteering to give up flying? Can you see the majority of the population becoming vegan? Can you see the majority agreeing to restrict the size of their families?” This led journalist Patrick Barkham to meditate on the fact that “accepting the impending end of most life on Earth might be the very thing needed to help us prolong it.”102 See God’s Country: The New Zealand Factor, Tobias/ Morrison, Zorba Press, Ithaca NY, 2011, p. 16; see also “The Barometer of Life,” by S. N. Stuart, E. O. Wilson, J.  A. McNeely, R.  A. Mittermeier, and J.  P. Rodríguez, Science, Vol. 328, 9 April 2010, p.  177, http://cmsdata. iucn.org/downloads/the_barometer_of_life_article.pdf, Accessed April 4, 2018. 102  See “We’re Doomed: Mayer Hillman on the Climate Reality No One Else Will Dare Mention,” by Patrick Barkham, The Guardian, April 26, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doomedmayer-hillman-on-the-climate-reality-no-one-else-willdare-mention, Accessed May 8, 2018. 101 

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Fig. 2.15  A rooster and human friend in southern New Zealand. (© M.C. Tobias)

Of the slightly more than two million species that have been identified thus far (given taxonomic names – trinomial or binomial) – “The vast majority of species—including most plants, invertebrates, and lower vertebrates, and almost all fungi— are still grossly underrepresented” in terms of any documentation.103 Estimates for expanding our taxonomic base have long been proposed and largely unembraced. Humanity is at a terrible crossroad: we don’t know what we’re losing. More importantly, biodiversity has never been ours to lose. Our ambiguous presence conveys a different form of description. As the sole globally aggressor species, no philosophical point of reference has yet come close to any threshold of persuasion or, in other words, success. As daunting as conservation of species and all those tens of thousands of discrete populations going extinct every day may be, our having mostly lost touch with the power and beauty of the individual among other species presents an even more heartbreaking and perplexing conundrum, though one that is beginning to see itself in the mirror. We have no problem aesthetically assimilating, for example, the larger-than-life portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger in the collection of drawings in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, executed between 1532 and 1543104 in the same breath as those vastly differIbid., “The Barometer of Life”. See Drawings By Holbein From The Royal Library Windosr Castle, With an introduction and catalogue by 103  104 

ent types of human portraits throughout Picasso’s career.105 Lately, our recognition of like-minded Beings in a strange mirror – wherein daily intimacies become a source of comfort – (Fig. 2.15) has been validated by such photographers as Scotsman David Yarrow106 and Nebrsakan native, Thomas D. Mangelsen;107 a new, if historic appreciation of so called “farm animals.”108 And - following the revelations from a history of microscopy  - Claudia Fährenkemper’s Imago  Insect Portraits which, to quote her, embrace “radical dimensions” using techniques that hover around a scanning electron microscope, enlarging fields -individual heads and necks of insects up to a magnification of 100,000-fold.109 How different from earlier insect portraits illustrated Susan Foister, Johnson Reprint Company Ltd., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, London 1983. 105  See, for example, Picasso Lithographe, Notices Et Catalogue établis Par Fernand Mourlot, III 1949–1956, André Sauret, Éditions Du Livre, Monte-Carlo. 106  See Wild Encounters  – Iconic Photographs Of The World’s Vanishing Animals And Cultures, Foreword by HRH The Duke Of Cambridge, Rizzoli International Publications, 2016. 107  See Polar Dance – Born Of The North Wind, Thomas D.  Mangelsen, Story By Fred Bruemmer, Published by Images of Nature, Omaha, Nebraska, 1997. 108  See Farm Animal Portraits, by Elspeth Moncrieff with Stephan and Jona Joseph, Antique Collectors’ Club, Suffolk, UK, 1998. 109  Friedrich-Hundt-Gesellschaft, Münster: Art Galerie Siegen; Kunstverein Unna; DruckVerlag Kettler, Bönen, 2008, pp. 10–13.

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Fig. 2.16 From Lucas’s Histoire Naturelle Lepidopteres d’Europe. (© M.C. Tobias)

des

directly in the field in Suriname by the brilliant German-born Maria Sibylla Merian (1647– 1717)110 or the nineteenth-century Frenchman, Pierre-Hippolyte Lucas, whose Histoire Naturelle des Lepidopteres d’Europe111 revealed butterflies with dazzling beauty, approaching a sense of distinct personality in every portrait and an array of anatomical details never before seen by humans thumbing through pages of a well-constructed book (Figs. 2.16, 2.17, and 2.18). These elusive elixirs of converging portraiture stoke deep contemplation of every guise of anthrozoological, cross-species non-violence but have also stubbornly remained the intellectual and ethical paradox of every age. From Plato and Aristotle, Euclid and Leibnitz to nineteenth-century Boolean algebra and twentieth-century existentialism, there have been wide-ranging human discussions about laws of identity, all coming down to the self-evident: “Whatever is, is.” This may be a spiritually uplifting reality, but it is also devastating to what might have been for all those who were prevented from existing because of the unnatural deaths perpetrated by Homo sapiens against other individuals, often out of a sense of superior indifference. Maria Sibylla Merian: Insects of Surinam, by Katharina Schmidt-Loske, Taschen America LLC, 2009. 111  Published by Pauquet, Debure, 1834. 110 

Fig. 2.17 From Lucas’s Histoire Naturelle Lepidopteres d’Europe. (© M.C. Tobias)

des

We want to believe that this exasperating superiority complex is breaking down in the twenty-first century with the advent of deeply embraced philosophies (and realities) like those of biophilia. And maybe it is. Plant-based foods are slowly making inroads into the meat and fish sections of grocery chains; a few red lights in Brussels now advertise vegan lifestyles. Nonetheless, the evidence, by and large, suggests otherwise.112 See, for example, “Modern Man’s Superiority Complex Is Modern Man Superior to His Predecessors?” by Fr. Chad Ripperger, F.S.S.P., PhD. Copyright © 2006, http:// www.sensustraditionis.org/MansComplex.pdf, Accessed July 28, 2018; see also “How Our Human Superiority Complex Has Clouded Research on Ape Social Intelligence,” by Mike Harris on 09/05/2017, https:// friendsofanimals.org/how-our-human-superiority-complex-has-clouded-research-on-ape-social-intelligence/ Accessed July 28, 2018. 112 

Cultural Transitions

Fig. 2.18 From Lucas’s Histoire Naturelle Lepidopteres d’Europe. (© M.C. Tobias)

51

des

Cultural Transitions Previously, the authors have written about that personage who comes of age and manifests the power and aforementioned persuasiveness to effect change within his/her/its species.113 We believe there is ample rationale for acceding to the promise of such people, not just among humans, though that is the target audience given its inordinate impact upon all others. Now, our primary concern is to further that enquiry, better grasping the nature of a biological individual as that taxonomic unit (a phrase common in biological quarters) plays a role within its species and that species somehow registers both quantifiable and qualified change. There is a transition period toward such change, cultural transitions that may involve one or many more generations. The time frame is crucial, and our analysis will not lose sight of it. The See The Theoretical Individual  – Imagination, Ethics and the Future of Humanity, by M.  C. Tobias and J.  G. Morrison, Springer, Switzerland, 2018. 113 

hypotheses upon which the individual-to-species transformations lay their claim necessarily involve the history of science but also of grounding in the interdisciplinary humanities as they affect human emotions, psychology, and expression. So let us start there, in that convergent nexus, by means of what may seem like arcane data but lead by surprising turns toward some hopeful epiphany that can shed light on the task before our kind. The collective is guided by the individual. And as we have earlier indicated, even three foxes can change their world. This individuated being  – whether the fox, or the grapes, number 15 of the Perry Index of Aesop’s Fables (Ben Edwin Perry, 1892–1968, was a professor of classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a leading authority on the Aesopica) – was first articulated in the Chandogya Upanishad sometime between the eighth and sixth centuries (the same period in which Aesop lived) and translated from the Sanskrit (“Tat Tvam Asi”) as either “You are That” or “That Thou Art,” or numerous variations thereof. More recently, in 1912, the assertion was delineated mathematically by Bertrand Russell (in Chap. VII of his The Problems of Philosophy), as well as by Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their remarkable threevolume Principia Mathematica [1910–1913]. This mythic “is” – “Whatever is, is” – goes well beyond any simple reconciliation of the one and the many, the individual and the species, a dialectic that was core to ancient Greek philosophy, translating into pure paradox. Which is to say, what are the characteristics of an individual within the collective and vice versa? Every community, species, and individual comprises a bewildering array of dangling biochemical, and we like to think, spiritual modifiers, whether in the social and natural sciences, or the arts, or religion or any other sphere of human consideration. Our emphasis, our vantage, and our hopes, dreams, and choices evolve and emanate from every conceivable and primeval source, all coming down to our humanity, our being human. But this is merely “our” individualism, as we habitually think of it, even in our most generous reveries. Aesop grants to the fox an intelligence and mordant wit that overcomes defeat in being unable to reach the cluster of grapes hanging from a vine, by giving the fox the following line: “I thought

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Fig. 2.19 “A Parliament of Birds,” Engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1607–1677, In Aesops Fables, 2nd Edition, London, 1668, p. 95. (© M.C. Tobias)

those grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour (Fig. 2.19).”114 Aesop turns upon a core ethological set of altruisms. They all stem from what, in scientific terms, would be a thought experiment, something in a test tube, a laboratory setting, the human consciousness. This “our” is a nosism, a pluralis maiestatis or royal “we.” And it is utterly corruptive. It defines the nature of overreaching, of presumptuous that claims a distinct sovereignty for humans. It is the myth of human superiority over all other species, of humans over each other – class and racial warfare – actionable and absurdist claims tantamount See Aesop’s Fables, Translated by V. S. Vernon Jones, With illustrations by Arthur Rackham and Others, Macmillan Collector’s Library, London, 2017, p. 17. 114 

to the superego. Every human science is invested in perpetuating the point of that ego’s pivot, whereby the observer holds the power, defines the activity, and claims authorship over all encounters, outcomes, and informational content. Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) was the SuperLotto of vanity, in this regard. So contrary to Plato’s “Apology 29b-d” from which we may infer the so-called Socratic paradox – I know that I know nothing  – which has been forever expanded upon in countless guises of humility and/or a countering denial, all centering, ultimately upon two forms of the famed “Münchhausen trilemma”  – circular, regressive, and axiomatic arguments that lead by turns, nowhere, or perpetually back upon themselves. The Galician, Francisco Sánchez, (c. 1550 to November 16, 1623) capped a few thousand years of speculation on humanity’s

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claim to self-knowledge and superiority in his work of devastating skepticism, Quod nihil scitur (That Nothing Is Known), composed in 1576 and published in 1581.115 Science has been accumulating tidbits of an ingrained sense of continuity with respect to human exemplary insights born of allegedly unique experience and observation, not so much to refute the absurdity of total ignorance, but from a compulsion at the heart of human arrogation. It is little wonder that Edward O.  Wilson’s Sociobiology116 opens with a reference to perhaps the most considered of all of Albert Camus’ provocations: “Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide.” But Wilson argues that natural selection is the real holy grail at work as it pressures and controls the philosopher’s unconscious operating system, in combination with “the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system.” These, in turn, dictate the terms of what we think, feel, and perceive. Hence, “Self-existence,” says Wilson, “or the suicide that terminates it, is not the central question of philosophy…the philosopher’s own emotional control centers are wiser than his solipsist consciousness.”117 Camus himself, at the opening of his The Myth Of Sisyphus and Other Essays,118 has cited Galileo “who held a scientific truth of great importance, [but] abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life.”119 But in comparing the famed biologist with the Nobel Prize winning author, an irresistibly Münchhausean dyad doggedly distracts. Writes Camus, “Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the

absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.”120 Camus died in a car crash in 1960. He was 46. Fifteen years later, Wilson published his initial Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.121 And then in 1980 came the abridged edition, in which Wilson concluded by asserting “that our autocatalytic social evolution has locked us onto a particular course which the early hominids still within us may not welcome.”122 And then by referencing Camus, taking more of that initial meditation on suicide to a most depressing, if illuminating zenith: “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.”123 And Wilson finishes with the thought, “This, unfortunately is true. But we still have another hundred years.”124 The sad fate of the historically rooted fancy which has its basis not in philosophy but human arrogance is its lethal hegemony, a bully’s handling of metaphysics and philosophy in general. Wilson indicates that “we still have” until the year 2080. More recently, Paul Ehrlich tells The Guardian that “Collapse of civilization is a near certainty within decades (Fig. 2.20).”125 So now we’re speaking of 2038, or 2048, or there about. What has changed? We know it is the combining of all those components and fuels igniting an accelerated rate of extinctions of populations and species and of the fouling of every biome and the vile and heinous cruelty in all forms imaginable being meted out to the biosphere, solely by our kind. This is no longer a matter of a Camus or a Wilson ­psychoanalyzing an individual’s commit-

Francisco Sánchez: That Nothing is Known. Edited and translated by Elaine Limbrick, and Douglas F.  S. Thomson, Cambridge, UK, 2008. 116  The Abridged Edition, Drawings by Sarah Landry, The Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1980, p.  3 of the chapter “The Morality of the Gene”. 117  Ibid. 118  Translated from the French by Justin O’Brien, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1955, p. 3. 119  Ibid., p. 3.

120 

115 

Ibid., pp. 5–6. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1975. 122  Ibid., Wilson, 1980, p. 300. 123  op.cit., Camus, p. 6. 124  op.cit., Wilson, 1980, p. 301. 125  Interview by Damian Carrington, “Paul Ehrlich: ‘Collapse of Civilisation is a Near Certainty Within Decades’” The Guardian Newspaper, London, March 22, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/22/ collapse-civilisation-near-certain-decades-populationbomb-paul-ehrlich, Accessed April 2, 2018. 121 

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Fig. 2.20  Post-collapse on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). (© M.C. Tobias)

ment to, or rejection of, suicide. Rather, our collective willpower overcoming the final hurdle to our possible happiness, and that of all others; namely, our determination to exterminate all others, and thereby cut off every lifeline to ourselves.  In otherwords, by the most peculiar delusions, our evolution seems to be imploding.

All the Rage The cartography of our power, our rage for conquest of all “others” that has, most obviously, brought upon the world a livid violation of the fundamental life force, and with it, the alleged and sacrosanct methodologies of evolution, is unprecedented, though it lacks precise baselines. We have previously tracked a rough overview of over 125 line items – slaughterhouses, road kill, puppy mills, biomedical experimentation on animals, and the sheer quantity of animals killed for human pleasure globally, numbering among terrestrial and aquatic vertebrates, several trillion annually, excluding collateral killing and edge effects in

tropical forests.126 Other attempted baselines are historical: the number of quadrupeds annihilated by our ancestors during the massive periods of megafaunal extinctions in the late Ice Age of the quaternary, for example.127 In the early 1990s, we designated this fulsome power of humanity over all nonhuman species, “World War III.”128 These shattering poignant estimates of a time frame for our mass suicide – a century or decades – and the killing of trillions of sentient beings See God’s Country: The New Zealand Factor, by Tobias and Morrison, Zorba Press, A Dancing Star Foundation Book, Ithaca, NY, 2011. 127  http://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/our-work/originsevolution-and-futures/extinction-large-mammals-latequaternary.html, Principal Investigator, Professor Adrian Lister, Natural History Museum, Accessed April 4, 2018; see also Late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions on the continents: a short review, Anthony John Stuart, First published:  20 December 2014, https://doi.org/10.1002/ gj.2633, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ gj.2633, Accessed April 4, 2018. 128  See World War III –Population and the Biosphere at the End of the Millennium, M. Tobias, Bear & Co., Santa Fe, NM, 1994. 126 

All the Rage

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Fig. 2.21  A tree of life biome in the Nilgiris, India. (© M.C. Tobias)

(before even beginning to compute for most invertebrates) every year by humans are numbers based largely upon externalities and biochemical feedbacks, although Arthur Schopenhauer would have us realize that life is really about death. We recognize others (e.g., biodiversity) economically, politically, and in least degrees, morally. And of course, we can all point to cultural traditions throughout time and geography that have revered lions, trees, coyotes, and cows, to name but a few. Added to that, we live with hundreds-of-millions of companion animals, and there is no doubting our love of these separate beings who have lovingly comingled within our households. But with the advent of serious empirical observations, whether in the strict rubrics of a Linnaeus, the contradictory evidence brought to bear by Darwin in terms of individuals, varieties, hybrids and species, or the poetic sciences mastered unequivocally by a Thoreau,129 we have been increasingly struck by the perceived similarities 129  See Henry David Thoreau, Collected Essays And Poems, The Library Of America, Literary Classics of the United States, New York, 2001; see also The Journal Of Henry D.  Thoreau, In Fourteen Volumes Bound as Two, Edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, With a Foreword by Walter Harding, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1962.

and differences binding an interdependent whole that is life. The myth, like the word, the principles of divine reason, e.g., the Logos, has turned into a flesh of confusion. Many people figure that they’ve nicely worked the equations out: conservationists who strive to save habitat and endangered species, animal rescue workers, but equally so, those who control and collaborate with slaughter houses, animal control, and all those industries, stockholders, and human activities in general that are rapaciously destroying the biosphere. We see this chaos coming at us from different worlds and levels. In formal taxonomies and zoological nomenclature, we take great pains to delineate barriers and constraints to reproductive success and distribution, tree of life definitions, family trees, species, and individuals (Fig. 2.21). With quantum physics, operating upon principles of uncertainty wherein human observation alters subatomic relationships, we have anthropic considerations that, again, thrust the human perceptual category by definition not just into the mix but at center stage, the zenith. We think of ourselves as the conductors, redactors, translators, and arrogators: but this time a Verdi’s “Requiem” or August Wilhelmj’s remarkable downward transposition of Bach’s “Air in D major” from his “Orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068” to “Air on

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Fig. 2.22  Moral duties in the political sphere, Washington D.C. Parade. (© M.C. Tobias)

the G String” – in C major – becomes a manipulative frenzy encompassing the entire planet. We mention the Bach/Wilhelmj transformation because it is suggestive metaphorically of both the subtlety of changing biological nomenclature but also the dramatic alterations dependent on nothing more than an individual’s artistic expression, in this case, a downward shift of a full octave to the lowest string on the violin, as well as the emphasis on a solo violin’s narrative, rather than that of several violins interweaving throughout the four staves of the composition. What had been pure baroque and celestial was given an entire makeover of pure romanticism. This changed the life of the music, popularizing Bach’s 2nd Movement in that suite, as if to bring the very taxonomy of Bach’s “Air,” composed in the period 1717–1723 (others have suggested the year 1731) to the year of Wilhelmj’s alteration, 1871.130 That See John Keillor’s description at All Music, https://www. allmusic.com/composition/orchestral-suite-no-3-in-d-majorbwv-1068-mc0002393446, Accessed August 21, 2018. See also http://www.harmoniousmusic.com/blog/?p=524; and https://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_August_Wilhelmj. 130 

century and a half corresponds quite vividly with similar reinterpretations, rearrangements, re-­ parsing, and phrasing throughout the writing and interpreting of natural history. The comparison is apt because it reflects upon the changing nature of human volition both in the arts and sciences. Culture shifts rewrite taxonomic denominations. The beauty inherent to the original is only modified in the sense of interpretation, naked and unblushing. There are no facts, only variations on proverbial themes that have long obsessed the human imagination. As with music and beauty, the arts and sciences, so too with regard to our evolving theories of justice, particularly of intergenerational justice, humans have only (relatively) recently spoken of, and advocated for, the rights of other species, a shift in emphasis that is telling commentary on the interpretive range of society. Each cornerstone of the human story confounds the fundamental confluence and expressions of this great dilemma we face in our time, namely, the nature of individualism, and its duties and responsibilities to others (Fig. 2.22).

What Can We Glean of the Other?

Is it really possible for us to get inside ourselves – in order to truly reach outside – and see how we are behaving on an Earth that is only too willing to present our reflections before us at every nanosecond?

What Can We Glean of the Other? The calculus of an individual’s ontology, and her/ his/its fate in the environment, and what we can conceivably know about it in the deepest sense, affords scrutiny of several crucial propositions, hypotheses, and theories. For example, with respect to subatomic relationships, if Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty is ­relevant to waves and particles and human beings, imagine the exponential levels of uncertainty when we begin acknowledging and recognizing observations of the universe by every bird, ant, worm, and so on. We wrote early on in The Theoretical Individual,131 “We hope, then, in confirmation with the above premise of tempering our conquest of nature in an ill-advised attempt to hail the Self, to question individual and collective mechanisms of change that human nature has consistently, but not entirely embraced. The norms, but also the exceptions are of equal interest to us and span speculations on any number of human agencies: genetic, moral, political, civic, legal, socio-economic, ethnographic, and particularly those born of the aesthetic predilections and the natural sciences.” As our arguments are laid out, there is no doubting the logic of goodness, altruism, virtue, and selflessness, within the evolutionary umbrella. There are no truly codified mathematical norms which insist upon Self. This is the case,  notwithstanding all of the Herbert Spencer “survival of the fittest” biases, post-Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. Or of the oft-validated notion that writing any ecological tome is a matter of trying to forge some bridge between our own maniacal species, bent on destruction, and the inherent goodness of all See The Theoretical Individual  – Imagination, Ethics and the Future of Humanity, by M.  C. Tobias and J.  G. Morrison, Springer, Switzerland, 2018. 131 

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other personages. We engage in such science and philosophy  with the implicit and indisputable reasoning, that such personhood, attributed to all Others (but by implication, to other members of our own species), is an unambiguous, if ambitious discourse we must observe, as a matter of faith as much as science. It is true that human beings can do more than survive for a period of however many years they are allotted in this form. Witness the passions exhibited magnanimously by Edward S.  Curtis (1868–1952) in his 20-volume masterpiece, The North American Indian, or within an entire tribe, like that of one of the only remaining vegetarian communities on Earth, the Todas of South India. But just how the individual influences the species is a biological conundrum. The DNA helix expresses far more than any philosophy can encompass. From a potato to a bumble bee, from the Amazon parrot to the lonely nature photographer, among all the Others of nature, we humans are the sole newcomers in the biosphere to the needs and science of ecological community. Because an abundance of our experience collectively has been gleaned through a vastly compacted enormous suffering, it is little wonder that we stand bewildered, formulating Gods, myths, and rituals and devising endlessly proprietary chicaneries and ecological interventions to help us bypass a world that, for example, Buddha suggested was instinct with suffering. In The Theoretical Species, we have written that “it remains an entirely open question to pose meaning, philosophical or even practical meaning, in the guise of a singular personhood. For this reason alone, the biological sciences have been at odds with the individual since the very inception of applied generalities concerning species.” What this means for the individual is, in fact, far more complicated for the species. Whole revolutions have been waged (by humans) over alleged differences, all tempered by an instinctive regard for some version of biological jurisprudence, equality, liberty, and so forth. But phylogenetic compatibilities among individuals, as between species, tend to be less interesting than all the differences. Who has not been astonished by their first sight of Earth as

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seen by the famed Apollo 17 mission (“The Blue Marble” photograph)? Or stood in reverential awe on a boat upon reaching for the first time the Antarctic coastline? Or seeing a scarlet macaw taking flight up the Tambopata River in Peru? Or witnessing dawn gently cooing upon the south face of Dhaulagiri? The young Darwin near the beginning of his 5  years on the HMS Beagle, spending his first day alone in a Brazilian rainforest and falling into a primordial rhapsody, about which author Lyanda Lynn Haupt has beautifully written? These are experiences that extend the normal concept of biogeography into some sphere altogether different, raw, and revitalizing. The beast in the human is at once emotionally brought down to original ecstasies and impulses, all of which are generous and fair. They await no more complicated instructions than those which provide for another as we would want to be provided for ourselves. The possum, the deer, the songbird, and the senator. All those wonderful epithets, invocations and virtuous hopes, the Golden Rule, and the wisdom of Ecclesiastes apply to each and every individual, or they should. Both Plato and Aristotle discussed that most tender of them, ta koina, shared things (Fig. 2.23). This kind of sharing is ultimately no more complicated than common sense and empathy. Loving thy neighbor. From individual to species. Applied science, engineering, poetry, and activism all know what this means. Curtis is one of countless ambassadors – like a Vermeer, a Mozart – of an ecological iteration in the guise of a personage that assures us all equally of the possibilities of a new human nature, one that is kind, dignified, and globally altruistic. Of course we are evolving: not so much physically (although there are definite, if subtle, morphological changes taking place across the human genetic landscape, and these have been well studied – e.g., quiet size changes in teeth and jaws) but most assuredly in the conceptual realms. Certainly, for the last 30,000  years, our evolution has occurred almost entirely within the world of introspection. There is no reason to doubt that the same is happening in every other species. Indeed, in various reptiles and avifauna, we are seeing evolutionary change within the real time of mere generations, even,

Fig. 2.23  Bust of Aristotle. Wikimedia Commons

ironically, among certain finches in the Galapagos, “Because,” (as we wrote in The Theoretical Individual) “we have no measurements or even baseline for consciousness, as such, our sudden journey does not comprise great thought, just thought; neither consistent virtue nor villainy, just a multitude of behaviors. We heed whatever compass reading is convenient, restlessly grappling with those semblances of order and invention our myriad compulsions have seized upon, from day to day, millennium by millennium.” Indeed, consciousness itself is one of the great “hard questions” in science, because we don’t know whether it is, as Rupert Sheldrake has spoken of it, a “mind field,” not unlike gravity or electromagnetism,132 or some other mechanism that extends outside the skull in receiving and transporting our perceptions of the world. But in any case, the outcome of this road map with no map is the reality of potential. We show great potential as a species, because of the individuals who inspire, invent, and invalidate old grudges and missteps. These people form a See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thFacdSOX5Y.

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community – and we all know – or perhaps belong to such communities throughout the human world. The same individual transformation into community appears to be happening among other species, presumably amid  every species. We may adduce that it has always been like this, which means that this adventure is epic in scale because it includes every member of the biosphere, on an equal moral footing.

Altruism in the Biosphere The biosphere keeps presenting us the most obvious way to paint a gorgeous landscape, raise loving children, and honor one’s parents, siblings, friends, and strangers. It is not only the best idea, but the only ideal worth assiduously advocating. The particulars by human-perceived proxy, of evolution and molecular biology, are completely in sync with this ideal. This is our hope that nothing can interfere with a human being’s potential to learn, to reflect, and to change. Throughout The Theoretical Individual and in an earlier work entitled Anthrozoology: Embracing Co-Existence in the Anthropocene,133 we discuss what psychologists have come to understand as a person’s “readiness potential.” This pertains to those factors involved in the nearly 775,000 estimated choices/decisions a person makes during her/his lifetime. We also examine what we term “the reciprocity potential,” namely, those qualities of biophilia, co-creative compassion, synderesis, and physiolatry, all signifying qualia and noumena that are like neurons waiting to be fired, feelings which, at a mere touch, can be positively unleashed upon the world and are so, in all species and individuals relating to each other. The soul speaks when it is spoken to. These potentialities give rise to a massive field of harmonious growth and evolution throughout the biological world. They are the game-changers in terms of probability science. As we have said for years, evolution does not condemn or liberate us. Only our choices can do that. Religion, science, art, motherhood, fatherhood, brotherly love, and so on – are all aspects of Springer Publishers, New York, Cham, 2017.

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the human experience fraught, as Wordsworth gently established, with a world too much with us, if that is possible. So rather than nailing certain dogmas into what are probably well-earned coffins, let us get past the dialectics, let go of so much rancor and lamentation, and move confidently into an urgent, real world, poised to do the pressing work, which is the reaffirmation of what humanity is capable of. Not simply predicated upon all those who have already suffered and died – though we must never forget their hallowed sacrifices  – but a new and refreshing embracethrough-intention-and-action of that undoubted nobility of spirit which never wanes. These are almost embarrassing words because we all know them by heart, from every somber occasion, typically following another human massacre. But a new nature is something we believe in. It should be at the heart of all education. Ethics, morality plays, and spiritual immersions will never cease to  dissuade us from the fascinating prospect of turning ideals into reality. The individual can do that – among every species. Not in the future, but today, tonight. The details are endlessly interesting, like the near infinities within Jan Brueghel the Elder’s many paradise paintings. Such expressions invite a serious discussion of what it will take to render Utopia tenable. And there are uninvited judgment calls awaiting the task, because Utopia has always meant so many things to so many vertebrates and invertebrates and others, typically bathed in skepticism. And that’s because for we humans, there are a few basic infrastructure necessities that continue to remain criminally unconsecrated. You can’t envision a Utopia that lacks easy access to fresh drinking water, food, shelter, or human and all other animal and ecosystem rights. Forests and watersheds, mangroves, and every biome possessing legal standing, in human terms. All that natural beauty and so-­ called “capital” was here innocently getting on, prior to the arrival of our kind, 330,000+ years ago. But we have not honored that gift of cooperation and sharing. Instead, we have struggled to diminish the equitable distribution of the Earth’s bounty. Why? Everyone has some version of the same answer: because warfare and power grabs appear momentarily profitable; and

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Fig. 2.24  Baby cheetah and tortoise, Namibia. (© M.C. Tobias)

profitability seduces those easily seduced by some kind of secret outside the seeming constraints of evolutionary fairness. Our hateful distractions  – war, oppression, and consumption of other species  – are the shadows in a human biology that seems to have gone awfully awry. Those with an eye toward darkness can find holocausts throughout all eco-­dynamics on the planet. What the notion of a new (human) nature suggests, however, is the readily accessed paradigm of a natural positivism, long described, that takes its cues from biodiversity and acts out its cravings for love, for justice, and for fellowship with a thoroughly tender and integral touch (Fig.  2.24). Minimalism that doth sing its heart clear of all obstruction, even beneath the many Towers of Babel that maim clarity, and make of simple breath a politic gone dire. It needn’t be. Jain Digambara monks have set one sterling example of what is possible in a quasi-Utopian sense, from the Sanskrit, “parasparopagraho jivanam – interdependence of soul(s).”134 See http://en.encyclopediaofjainism.com/index.php/ The_Jain_Teachings; see also Lord Mahavira And His Times, by Kailash Chand Jain, Lala S.  I. Jain Research Series, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers PVT.  LTD., New Delhi, 1974; see also Life Force: The World of Jainism, by Michael Charles Tobias, Asian Humanities Press, Fremont, CA, 1991. 134 

The instinct to bond with others, and we think it is an instinct, possibly the timeworn amalgamation of behavior that became learned in the wake of so much satisfactory outcomes, is defined by the community. Most primates (baboons being a major exception) do not exceed approximately 150 members. This may have to do with crucial corollaries between bonding and carrying capacity in any biogeographical setting where mathematical ratios brush up against the tragedy of the commons at great peril. Given what we have learned from Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, and others, humanity’s greatest challenge – regardless of any number of these so-called theoretical individuals  – will be our relentless and continuing population explosions within a large remaining patchwork of fragmented and paranoid human communities throughout the world (Fig. 2.25). Whether vast bonding mechanisms like social media can accelerate the necessary anodynes, assuaging hunger, violence, and hatreds remains an unknown as the human commons, teeming with prayer and/or chatter, may become a perfect storm for better or worse. There is no theorem that can be demonstrated on the basis, to date, of predictable and successful community engagement via the Internet, for example. Although there is plenty of sociological data to give us encouragement in this

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Fig. 2.25  Central Los Angeles. (© M.C. Tobias)

instance. Students in Florida, or years ago, forces for democracy in Rumania, to cite obvious examples. But 7.7 billion ungainly largely carnivorous Homo sapiens have far exceeded the Earth’s biological boundaries. The map of pain points our excesses have propounded upon others is unimaginably gruesome. As a species we know the makings of a Holocaust. Most recently, like a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch, the artist and Auschwitz survivor, Marian Kolodziej, has memorialized his own horrifying experiences. Can we halt the ecological holocausts accompanying our propensity to bond into megacity-sized accretions or right-wing supremacist parties? That is the question. In our book, God’s Country: The New Zealand Factor,135 we detailed pain as an expression of human culture, not just in the sense of a Buddha who declared that life consists largely of DukkhaTobias/Morrison, Zorba Press, Ithaca, NY, March 21, 2011.

135 

Dukkha (Pali words for pain and suffering, though greatly discussed and often disputed by Buddhist scholars). Our examination of suffering stems from common sense, as in the Jain use of intentional violence, Sankalpinī hiṃsā, and occupational violence, Udyoginī hiṃsā, and in contrast with the Buddhist proclamation, however it be interpreted, indicative of active moksha, the panAsiatic concept of liberation from endless cycles of reincarnation, which translates within the Buddhist pantheon into pain. Whether within Jain or Buddhist ratiocionations, no social contract can in any way suggest a Utopian orientation if pain is an omnipresent factor, notwithstanding the realities of our mortality. Deliberate promulgation of pain targeted at others, by human individuals, by our communities, and by our entire species, must be rectified if the alleged hypothetical species is ever to be manifested. The deliberate infliction of pain and suffering constitutes the most virulent rejection of any such contract, violating every

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sense to isolate the largest destroyers of animal life and map them in brazen highlights, to collectively assess where the densest and most grievous arrays of destruction is concentrated. Those numeric coordinates (fronting a modest point of optimism in terms of mollifying) will most assuredly comprise far less than the Tissues and Organs, “Misrepair mechanism: a mechanism essential for individual adaptation, species adaptation and species evolution,” by Jicun Wang-Michelitsch, Thomas M.  Michelitsch, [Submitted on 14 May 2015 (v1), last revised 4 January 2017 (this version, v2)], https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.03900, Accessed August 18, 2018. 155  “A Review of the Double Bind Theory,” Paul Watzlawick, Ph.D.,, Family Process, Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology, First published: March 1963, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.1963.00132.x, h t t p s : / / o n l i n e l i b r a r y. w i l ey. c o m / d o i / abs/10.1111/j.1545-5300.1963.00132.x, Accessed August 18, 2018; and Bateson, G., Jackson, D.  D., Haley, J. & Weakland, J. (1956) “Toward a theory of schizophrenia,” 153 

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the annals of mental health research, has come to invoke a sustained and searing cultural crisis from which – as from a black hole – neither the irony nor gravitas of the affliction is easily liberated. In essence, the more our species is capable of adapting to its inflictions, the more relaxed we become about our very  continued visitation of biological ruin upon the planet. By undermining our potential learning curve with a surrogacy of blind, perpetual survival under any and all circumstances, we never see what is actually happening. As co-extinction among interdependents looks steeper and steeper, the graphing slope of a linear equation between X and Y, long into the future, targeting our own mortality, goes unseen until the near end. Along the way, we are fixated on our adaptive genius, our ability to persevere no matter what. By this example of a very real evolutionary cul-de-sac for Homo sapiens, we become trapped by all those compensatory mechanisms  – an entire class of compensation for the damages wrought by our alleged adaptability in the Anthropocene.  Such supposed adaptations include a spate of new cancer cures, more efficient air conditioning, taller, in some cases green and smart skyscrapers, more income generation per capita, new kinds of entertainment, better, faster Internet-related gizmos, electric cars, talk of terraforming Mars, tour groups into the Chernobyl hot  zones where abandoned homes and schools are teeming with wildlife, etc. These are compensations which further empower our delusions that Homo sapiens have somehow marvelously broken away from the continent of life, free and clear of all our biological duties and responsibilities. Free to blunder, to live in isolation, to ignore the world save that which humans comprise. The tragic flaw in this fundamentally incommensurate relation is that obfuscation of all the ecological inflictions perpetrated by humanity on the biosphere, at the very moment when we believe we have survived. And for a while, we Behavioral Science, 1, 251–264; see “Schizophrenia and the Family: ‘Double Bind Theory Revisited,’ ” by Mathijs Koopmans, © Mathijs Koopmans, 1997.

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Fig. 8.55 The Hispaniolan lizard cuckoo, Coccyzus longirostris, a bird doing well in Haiti despite intense deforestation. (© M.C. Tobias)

might survive, but at the price of the vast majority of Others and of biomes upon which we depend. But as our dependency diminishes (technology, affluence, all the hallmarks of human isolation from the real exigencies of biology), the peril, unseen until the end, narrows, like an asymptote. We feel mathematically and culturally buffered, for a while, even as the distribution of survivors is entirely nonuniform across our species, whole cultures and their languages dying out, and grim inequities throughout the entire socioeconomic and nutritional food chains escalating.156 The human ecology spectrum. The paradox could not be more deafening: the better we are at adapting to those conditions we ourselves as a species have imposed, the more likely our civilizations are to come crashing down at the 11th hour. There will undoubtedly be some scattered survivors of that implosion, but not at the species level. And this poses a most peculiar set of circumstances. We must ask, what sorts of existential reengineering, best environmental practices, and legal, policy, economic, and moral tools at our disposal might be dispatched in the interests of achieving the biologi“Anthropocenic culturecide: an epitaph,” Divya P. Tolia-Kelly,Ph.D., Pages 786–792 Published online: 5 July 2016, https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.11936 23, Journal Social & Cultural Geography, Volume 17, 2016  – Issue 6: Provocations for Cultural Geography Today, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/146 49365.2016.1193623?journalCode=rscg20, Accessed August 18, 2018. 156 

cal greater good? Does our adaptive character allow for self-sacrifice? Are we morally equipped to cope with our complicity in the ruination of all our fellow creatures on Earth? If we are so endowed, how do we back away from our conspiracy? Are we even at the point of acknowledgment, or does the Anthropocene also present an intellectual array of blinders that is making it all but impossible for us to see and comprehend and then offer rational, unselfish, and redemptive strategies in time to alter our unprecedented footprint (Figs. 8.55 and 8.56)? Moreover, there are on occasion good tidings that help to momentarily soften our views of the sixth extinction spsasm: Not all species are in obvious or drastic decline, the Hispaniolan lizard cuckoo, for example; and teleosts, the ray-finned fish of the world; along with copepods, brown rats and house mice. If those aren’t enough questions, the most serious query of them all concerns other species and their adaptations to us. This is where the biospheric cybernetics get especially confusing and dire, as feedback loops avalanche into the negative. Sarah Diamond, the George B.  Mayer Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at Case Western Reserve University, has conducted remarkable studies of urban acorn ants (Temnothorax curvispinosus) in three US urban environments where the cities are heating up. Her findings, and those of her colleagues, suggest that within some 20 ant generations (5  years on average per generation), there is

Future Species

303

Fig. 8.56 Ninety-five percent of the Cedars of Lebanon, Cedrus libani, and Syria have disappeared as a result off deforestation and climate change. (© M.C. Tobias)

“evidence that temperature ramp-rate plasticity [has] evolved in the urban population” of ants, in excess of the less heat-tolerant rural acorn ants.157 Greater heat tolerance among the ants may assure them several generations of a physiological buffer, as their genetics rapidly change to help them cope with a heating planet. But at what point does it all collapse, the heat ultimately demolishing their upper limits?158

See Conservation Physiology, Oxford Academic, “Evolution of plasticity in the city: urban acorn ants can better tolerate more rapid increases in environmental temperature,” Sarah E. Diamond, Lacy D. Chick, Abe Perez, Stephanie A.  Strickler, Crystal Zhao, Conservation Physiology, Volume 6, Issue 1, 1 August 2018, coy030, https:/doi.org/10.1093/conphys/coy030, 14 June 2018, h t t p s : / / a c a d e m i c . o u p . c o m / c o n p hy s / a r t i c l e / 6 / 1 / coy030/5037691, Accessed August 18, 2018. 158  See “Biologists study swift evolutionary changes in acorn-dwelling insects,” August 17, 2018 Case Western Reserve University, Phys Org; the data originally published as “Evolution of thermal tolerance and its fitness consequences: parallel and non-parallel responses to urban heat islands across three cities,” by Sarah E.  Diamond, Lacy D.  Chick, Abe Perez, Stephanie A.  Strickler, Ryan A.  Martin, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences, Published 4 July 2018. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0036, http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/285/1882/20180036, https://phys.org/news/2018-08-biologists-swift-evolutionary-acorn-dwelling-insects.amp, Accessed August 18, 2018. 157 

Future Species With all the good, the bad, and the ugly, will evolution abandon Homo sapiens? Does our collective behavior ordain the biological equivalent of a supervolcano, like the one that has occurred during several past 650,000  year  time spans in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, where the earth quivers and the seismographs register thousands of temblors per day? There is a good analogy there with the heaving emotional tensions of the human biography, hour by hour. But one possible answer to this fundamental challenge to the question of our longevity as a species may have been quietly couched in an altogether separate, yet relevant, meditation by a late eighteenth-century aesthetician who penned the following: “She seldom passes abruptly from one mode of scenery to another; but generally connects different species of landscape by some third species, which participates of both. A mountainous country rarely sinks immediately into a level one; the swellings and heavings of the earth, grow gradually less. Thus as the house is connected with the country through the medium of the park; the park should partake of the neatness of the one, and of the wildness of the other.”159 Reverend William See William Gilpin’s Remarks on Forest Scenery and Other Woodland Views, London 1791, p. 184. 159 

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Fig. 8.57  Jomolhari, 24,035, a sacred mountain in Buddhist Bhutan where nearly 70% of the country is ecologically protected. (© M.C. Tobias)

Gilpin (1724–1804), author, artist, adventurer, philosopher, was the most prolific advocate of the Picturesque Movement in England, writing 11 classics on the subject between 1748 and the year of his death. This “third species” of which he speaks would be echoed throughout America’s Transcendentalist Movement and rise of those many conservationist appeals that would result in the National Park Service and the scientific and aesthetic credos inherent to the ecological advocacy now driving every attempt at the protective measures for biodiversity throughout the world. That “third species” also invites consideration of some other elusive, biologic intermediary. The earlier referenced hundreds of thousands of specially protected areas, with a variety of National Park, scientific and refuge-type definitions and fulfillment parameters, from state parks and wilderness areas to Strict Nature Reserves, Natural Monuments, Habitat/Species Management Areas, Protected Landscapes/

Seascapes, and Managed Resource Protected Areas, etc.160 are proof-positive, despite their many flaws, that humanity has been, of late, ceaselessly conscious of and concerned about the protection of the world they cohabit. Such conservation is unlikely to ever translate into an all-­embracing moral absolute. Nonetheless, the trend is positive, as noted by a broad coalition of ecological democrats, vegan activists, Digambara Jain munis, deeply sensitive international jurists, diplomats, and legal minds like Howard Zahniser (principal author of the 1964 Wilderness Act) and the indomitable Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Fig. 8.57).

See http://www.nationalparks.gov.uk/students/whatisanationalpark/nationalparksareprotectedareas/iucncategories; see also http://www.nationalparks.gov.uk/students/ whatisanationalpark/nationalparksareprotectedareas/ nationalparksaroundtheworld; see also Sanctuary: Global Oases of Innocence, by Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison, Council Oak Books, A Dancing Star Foundation book, Tulsa, OK and Los Angeles, CA, 2008. 160 

Future Species

Since the times of a Hugo Grotius, Desiderius Erasmus, John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin, Abraham Lincoln, and Mahatma Gandhi, we have all been privileged to witness charismatic and effective leadership, now and then. And all said, the current natural history interdisciplinary Renaissance does provide some cause for informed optimism. Birth rates are slowly coming down throughout much of the world. Renewable energy resources and organic non-animal foods are gaining cultural traction. Environmental awareness brought about by climate change is now virtually universal. The human species is changing, much for the better. These trends will not bring back the lives of all those Others who have already fallen before the axe, on assembly lines in slaughterhouses. Many of us will be haunted by the memories of their senseless, criminal demise. But in those cherished memories is also lodged an indelible commitment to the future generations  – among every species – counting on us to get it right. The

305

future taxonomic labels we use to designate are token reminders of our imaginative passions and dreams, not of our goals of insane conquest or full comprehension. Let such names upon that so-called Tree of Life be no more than they are: human attempts to count, to remember, and to conduct basic housekeeping. The many varied pursuits of taxonomy are but one more example of our youthfulness and our duties to change course toward stewardship, in all humility. The links between all those protected habitats, species, and individuals are sacred. The coming novel future species will embody identities and significant biographies, whose restless cause in favor of life will and must prove antithetical to all those Anthropocenic trends of our current humanity. Our challenge at this time will be to pass the ultimate test of biological sanity, ethics, and durability; through labyrinths of inflictions such as our species, Homo sapiens has never yet confronted. But our cultural admission of this human-induced disaster may bode of a new beginning, at least hypothetically so (Figs. 8.58 and 8.59).

Fig. 8.58  Japanese cranes, symbols of hope and longevity, anonymous mid-nineteenth century painting, private collection. (© M.C. Tobias)

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8  Biological Consensus Mechanisms: The Future of Coexistence

Fig. 8.59  American bison: a spectacular recovery after near nineteenth-century extinction. (© M.C. Tobias)

Index

A Acer pseudo-platanus, 8 Acorn ants (Temnothorax curvispinosus), 302, 303 Adam, J., 110 Adams, J., 84 “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” 135 The Adventures of Doctor Dolittle (H.Lofting), 194 Aegis, 176, 272 Aesop’s Fables, 51, 52 African helmeted guineafowl (Numida meleagris), 129 African wild dog (Lycaon pictus), 277 After Man: A Zoology of the Future, 109 Agaonidae, 8 Agrippa, H.C., 33 Agronomy, 96 AIDS, 7 “Air in D major,” 55 Alaska, 26, 42, 178, 179, 275 Albus, A., 179 Alice In Wonderland, 161, 162 Allele variations, 38, 75, 101, 105 Allen, B., 39 Amazonia, 260, 287 American Dipper (John James Audubon), 78 American lion, 110 American Museum of Natural History, 181, 182, 184, 195, 232 Amino acids, 44, 106 Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi Devi), 65 Ammonites, 140 Amur tiger, 47 Anagenesis, 75, 278 Ancestral ties, 16 Anderson, J., 6 Andes, 300 An Essay On Abstinence From Animal Food (J.Ritson), 214 Angielczyk, K.D., 291 Animal abuse, 65, 213, 233 Animal Farm, 130 Animal market, 35 Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), 42, 269 Antarctic krill, 44

Anthropic principle, 22, 25, 99, 100 Anthropocene, 3, 22–24, 26, 29, 30, 48, 59, 69, 70, 72, 89, 94, 95, 112, 121, 130, 146, 150, 156, 160, 161, 171, 175, 182, 206, 229, 239, 242, 249, 263, 266, 284, 288, 301, 302 Antoine Roquentin, 32 Apocalypse, 239, 250 Apollo 17 mission, 58 Aquina, T., 139 Arabia leopard (Panthera pardus nimr), 47 Ara macao, 115 Arcadia, 200, 218 Archimylacris, 84 Arendt, H., 68 Aristotle, 4, 23, 27, 50, 58, 63, 64, 68, 75–82, 124, 128, 133, 145, 169, 170, 216 Armillaria bulbosa, 6 Armillaria ostoyae, 298 Arnhem Land, Australia, 119 Arthropods, 46, 83, 84, 98 Arunachal Pradesh (India), 184 Asteraceae, 98 Atman, Hinduism, 4 Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, 189 Attâr, F.-u.-D., 174 Attenborough, D., 101, 181, 254 Audubon, J.J., 39, 77–79, 167, 168, 173, 177, 202 Aufhauser, M., 271 Aurignacian, 214 Auschwitz, 61 Australian Magpies, 93 Autopoietic systems, 144 Autotrophs, 23 Avalonia, 288 Aves, feathered dinosaurs, 126, 297 Avian cholera, 282 B Baboons, 60 Bach, J., 55, 56 Bachman, R.J., 167 Bacteria, marine, 44

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, The Hypothetical Species, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11319-3

307

308 Balanidae family, 190 Balfour Declaration, 183 Ball’s Pyramid, 47 Bambi: A Life in the Woods (F.Salten), 245, 246 Banboo Lemur (Prolemur simus), 47 Banksia, 98 Barkham, P., 48 Barth, F., 296 Bartram, J., 200 Basking shark, 268 Bateson, G., 301 Beagle, voyage, 58, 116, 189, 196–198 Beckett, S., 71 Belarus, 18, 46 Bereitschaftspotential (“readiness potential”), 209, 254 Berger, H., 253 Bergman, J., 197, 198 Berzelius, J., 139 Bialowieza National Park, Poland, 9, 21, 208 Bibliography of natural history, 85 Bifurcation points, 102, 165, 281, 282 Binomial nomenclature, 2, 98, 117 Biocapacity, 292 Biodiversity, 1, 2, 4, 7, 27, 29, 33, 42, 44, 48, 49, 55, 60, 63, 67, 75, 81, 82, 85, 91, 95, 97, 98, 110, 117, 126, 148, 150, 157, 158, 160, 173, 175, 179, 187, 189, 198, 206, 207, 223, 224, 228, 231, 237–239, 252, 259, 260, 262, 265, 270, 272, 278, 291, 297, 304 Biophilia, 50, 59, 65, 249, 271, 281, 299 Biosemiosis, 33 Biospheric cybernetics, 302 BirdLife International, 98, 204, 205 The Birds of America, 75, 77–79, 168 Birds of Ireland, 39 The Birds of La Plata, 85 Birds of Mexico, 297 Birds of New Zealand (Walter Buller), 177 The Birds of the Southwest Pacific (E.Mayr), 181, 182 Bishnoi, 22, 168, 282 Bison antiguus, 110 Bison latifrons, 110, 111 Bison priscus, 110 Blake, W., 245 Blatta orientalis, 84 Bodh Gaya, 6 Bodhi (peepal, pipal) tree, 5–7 Bohr, N., 122, 201 Bonaventura, S.D.S., 138 Book of Hours, 121, 172 Book of Proverbs, 232 Book of the Dead, 37, 38 Boolean algebra, 50 Boolos, G., 33 Borlaug, N., 163 Borluut, L., 136, 137 Borromeo, C.F., 280 The Botanic Garden, 114 Bougeant, G.-H., 214 Bovines, 240

Index Boyle, R., 137 Brachiopods, 289, 290 Breeding Bird Atlas, 237 Brenton Blue (Orachrysops niobe), 33, 241 Brindabellaspis, 291 British Assococation for the Advancement of Science, 85 Broadleaf-podocarp forest, 244 Brown pelican, 273 Brown rats, 302 Brown, R., 141, 142 Brueghel, J., 10, 59, 174, 218 Brunei, 28, 172 Buber, M., 270, 271 Buchanan, H., 173 Buddha, 7, 8, 57, 61, 64, 165, 168, 218 Budge, W., 37, 38 Buffett, H.G., 275 Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Singapore, 295 Buller, W., 173, 177, 179, 180 The Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club, 253 Burdach, K.F., 280 Butterflies, 50, 133, 182, 237, 238, 241, 269 Byron, G.G., 238 C California Condor, 40 California Floristic Province, 99 California redwood trees, 69 Calyptraeids, 103 Campephilus imperialus (Ivory Billed Woodpecker), 205 Camus, A., 53, 167 Canada geese, 42 Candida, 6 Candide, ou l’Optimisme (Voltaire), 277 Canetti, E., 185 The Canticle of The Birds (Farid-ud-Din Attar), 174 Capped Heron (Pilherodius pileatus), 151 Carboniferous period, 84, 140, 290 Caribbean islands, 188 Cassell, J., 178 Cato, 96 Cats, 22, 47, 110, 232, 240, 282–286 Catskill Delta, 289 Caughilly, P., 257 Cave paintings, 110, 121, 214 CBS-KNAW, 7 Cedars of Lebanon (Cedrus libani), 303 Cell membranes, 106, 107 Cells, 4, 6, 37, 38, 43, 44, 74, 84, 88, 103, 106, 107, 124, 128, 132, 133, 196, 226, 278, 280, 285, 298, 301 Census of Marine Lire, 33 Central Park, 200, 248, 249, 263, 264, 266, 292 Central Suriname Nature Reserve, 260 Cephalopods, 121, 122, 140 Chaco Canyon peoples, 95 Chaillu, P.D., 124 Chalcidoidea, 8 The Challenger, 19, 178 Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi, India, 159

Index Chang, J., 104 Chapple, C., 270 Cheetah, 60, 275 Chernobyl, 301 Chesterton, G.K., 75 Chestnut-crowned Titmouse (John James Audubon), 79 Chickens, 85, 188, 192, 202 Choices, 22, 27, 32, 41, 45, 51, 59, 62, 91, 100, 108, 148, 153, 166, 168, 207, 209, 210, 232, 235, 262, 297 Chomolungma, 25, 209 A Chorus of Birds (Kitagawa Utamaro), 174 Choukoutien, 232 Christ Passion, 168 Cicero, 164 Cioran, E., 167 Cirripedia, 190 Cladistics, 133 Cladogenesis, 75, 278 Cladograms, 133, 134, 241 Clarke, C.B., 81 Climate change, 65, 123, 165, 184, 222, 267, 278, 279, 291, 303, 305 Clingendael, 96 The Cloud of Unknowing, 35 Coastal wetlands, 67 Coccosteus, 177 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES ) of Wild Fauna and Flora, 175 Cocker, M., 175 Code of Hammurabi, 152 Code of Ur-Nammu, 152 Coexistence, 243–306 Co-extinction, 301 Cogito ergo sum, 52 Coimbra Filho’s titi monkey (Callicebus coimbrai), Brazil, 242 Coldspots, 62, 65, 156 Coleopteran pollination, 299 Collaert, A., 176 Columbidae Family, 203 Columna, F., 81, 82 Common Access to Biotechnological Resources and Information program (CABRI), 7 Common Blue Bird (John James Audubon), 77 Concentrated animal feed lots, 223 Confirmation bias, 2, 19, 90 Conscious evolution, 210 Consensus mechanisms, 243–306 Contopus sordidulus, 16 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), 7 Conway, M., 185 Cook, O.F., 278 Cooper, T.S., 192 Copenhagen interpretation, 122, 201 Copepods, 302 Corpuscles, Grandry and Herbst, 298 Coryanthes Maculata, 12 Cottonwood trees (Populus deltoidae), 93 Covington, S., 198 Cowley, A., 29

309 Coyote, 55, 209, 226, 239, 283–286 Crinoids, 140 CRISPR/Cas9, 298 Crossbreeding, 96 The Crowd in Peace and War (M.Conway), 185 Crowds and Power (E.Caetti), 185 Cruelty To Animals (Lord Erskine), 214, 221 Crustaceans, 190, 197 Cryptococcus gattii, 6 Cryptococcus neoformans, 6 Cuban tree frog, 11 Culex pipiens molestus, 112 Curry’s paradox, 33, 34 Curtis, E.S., 57, 255 Curtis, W., 89 Cuttlefish, 121, 123 Cuvier, G., 131, 147, 160, 189 Cycliophora, 289 D D’Hondecoeter, G., 30 Da Vinci, L., 166 Dalai Lama, His Holiness, 187 Dalton, J., 142 Darfur, 188 Darwin, C., 2, 4, 11, 29, 55, 58, 70, 75–82, 88, 101, 110, 112–117, 121, 124, 127, 128, 135, 143, 146, 176, 182, 187–190, 195, 196–198, 200, 202, 205, 206, 210, 224, 238, 247, 255, 278, 287, 294, 296 Darwin, E., 114, 115, 128, 143, 147 Data Basin Protect Areas Centers, 277 David, S., 291 Davies, P., 46 de Buffon, C., 76, 147, 164, 173, 179 de Cervantes Saavedra, M., 277 De Chardin, P.T., 108 de Duve, C., 46, 107, 133 De Hamilton, C.W., 174 De La Fontaine, J., 174 de’Medici, C., 280 De Natura Deorum (Cicero), 164 De Plantis, 81 De Queiroz, K., 29, 30 De Quincey, T., 172 de Vos, M., 41, 234 De Waal, F.B.M., 188 Dead-zones, 65 Deep ecology, 249 Deep lineages, 107, 278 Demes, 133, 140 Demodex brevis, 46 Demodex folliculorum, 46 Denisovan, 94 Descartes, R., 70 Descent, 75, 88, 104, 131, 133, 224, 247, 251 The Descent of Man (C.Darwin), 224 Desh, 139 Detmold, E.J., 12 Devonian, 84, 140, 177, 289, 290

Index

310 DeVore, M.L., vii, viii Dewey, J., 239, 291 Diamond, J., 164 Diamond, S.E., 302, 303 Dickens, C., 78 Didus solitarius, 127, 176 Dieren, 96 Digambara (Jain monks), 60, 64, 65, 304 Dinosauria, 172 Diploid populations, 105 Dire wolves, 110 Disney, W., 245, 254 Dixon, D., 109, 255 DNA, 7, 8, 31, 33, 57, 68, 90, 94, 103, 104, 106, 108, 110, 111, 125, 132, 156, 184, 207, 209, 229, 278, 285, 298, 301 Dobzhansky, T., 29 Dodo, 127, 161, 171, 175, 176, 192, 203, 229 Dollo irreversibility, 103 Dollo, L., 101–103 Dollo’s Law, 101, 103 Don Quixote, 75, 231, 277 Donovan, E., 85, 173 Dore, G., 231 Double bind, 300–303 Down House, 190 Doyle, C., 177 Dracaena cinnabari (Socotra Archipelago, Yemen), 279 Dravyas, 139 Dryandra, 98 dsDNA, 46 dsDNA-RT virus, 46 Dubois, E., 126 Duff, O., 193 Dukkha-Dukkha, 61 Dumbo, 246 Duncan, P.M., 178 Dupont, B., 45 Durer, A., 32, 33, 82, 125, 232, 233, 235 Dworkin, R., 235 11th Dynasty, 95 E Early Netherlandish Painting, 137 Ecclesiastes, 58, 210 Ecological Footprint Network, 293 Ecology spectrum, 302 Economy of Vegetation, 114 Ecotonics, 15 Ectopistes migratorius, 203 Edwards Plateau, Texas, 102, 234 Egyptian kingdoms, 36 Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus), 122 Ehrlich, A.H., 60, 166, 293 Ehrlich, P.R., 53, 60, 92, 163, 166, 237, 261, 293 Einstein, A., 22, 100, 141–143, 246, 247 Ekman, P., 187, 188 El Cielo Biosphere, Mexico, 130 Electroencephalogram, 253

Electron/fluorescence microscopy, 298 Elephant, 75, 189, 223, 268, 275 Elephant bird (Madagascar), 229 Elgin Botanic Gardens, 200 Eliade, M., 86, 248 Eliot, T.S., 248 Elliot, D.G., 173, 179 Elongate Hemloc Scale, 83, 84 Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 (R.J.Howgego), 178 End-Permian-Triassic Extinction, 291, 294 Eocene, 140, 142, 177, 287 Epping Forest, 273, 275, 276 “Equilibrium Theory of Insular Zoogeography” (R.H.Macarthur and E.O.Wilson), 207 Erasmus, D., 305 Eriugena, J.S., 34 Erskine, T., 22, 214, 221 Escherichia coli, 102, 240 Esfeld, M., 151, 228 Essenes, 217, 218 Ethics, 11, 23, 28, 33, 36, 41, 42, 51, 57, 59, 79, 86, 89–91, 106, 130, 137, 144–146, 153, 163, 182, 185–187, 190, 199, 222, 227, 228, 235, 236, 242, 271, 272, 277, 305 Etz Chaim, 232 Euclid, 50, 70, 88 Eudaimonia, 63 European cherry fruit fly, 103 “Eustachius,” (A.Durer), 234–236 Everglades, 68 Evolutionary distinctiveness (ED), 31, 33 Evolutionary variables, 4, 25, 68, 91, 186, 233, 260 Existentialism, 32, 50, 205 Extinct Animals (E.Ray Lankester), 77 Extinct Birds (Walter Rothschild), 127, 128, 176, 177, 179, 182, 191, 192, 204 Extinct Monsters (H.N.Hutchinson), 177 Extinction, 3, 22, 31, 47, 48, 53, 54, 66, 67, 69, 80, 97, 110, 111, 115, 123, 147, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 165–167, 170, 171, 175, 176, 178, 184, 188, 189, 192, 193, 195, 196, 202, 204, 206, 209, 224, 228–230, 232, 239, 245, 250, 253–255, 261, 269, 270, 278, 281, 287, 290, 291, 294, 297, 302, 306 F Fahrenkemper, C., 49 Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, 15, 145 The Fate of the Earth (J.Schell), 193 Fatty acids, 300 Faust, 208 Fellowes, W.D., 218, 220 Feral cat, 283–286 Ficus, 5, 7, 8 F. religiosa, 7, 8 Fiddle leaf figs, 9 Finches, 58, 75, 76, 100, 189, 197, 199 Fiordland National Park, New Zealand, 261 Fisher, J., 173

Index Fletcher, A.L., 110 Flora (Linnaeus), 80 Florida panther, 68 Florissantia quilchenensis, vii Formenkreis, 131, 140, 251, 252 Fossey, D., vi Fossil record, 116, 140, 178, 190, 288, 297, 298 Four Quartets (T.S.Eliot), 248 Fox, G.E., 88 Framingham Study, 255 Franklin, R., 125 Franzius, W., 226 Freud, S., 185 Fukuoka, S., 88 Fuller, E., 127, 177, 181, 191 Funch, P., 289 Fungi, 6, 8, 9, 18, 49, 86, 128, 149, 226, 298 The Future is Wild: A Natural History of the Future, 110 G Galapagos, 58, 75, 100, 189, 197–199, 202 Galdikas, B.M., 34, 146, 147, 276 Galilei, G., 53, 199 Gallego, J., 257 Galleria Doria Pamphilj, 4 Gallus gallus, 170 Gandhi, M., 3, 166, 218, 305 Garden of Eden, 10, 24, 200, 218, 224–232, 248 Gastropod, coiling, 103 General zoology or Systematic Natural History, 85 Genesis, 12, 82, 95, 211, 218 Genetic/allelic fingerprints, 105 Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), 292 Geospiza conirostris, 75 Geospiza fortis, 75 Gessner, C., 79 Gesture and Speech, 117, 118 Gettysburg, 42 Ghent Altarpiece, 3, 135 Ghiselin, M.T., 190, 195 Gibson, A., 167 Gilgamesh, 1 Gilil, A.B.F.L., 80, 126, 180, 259 Gilpin, R.W., 303–304 Giltsch, A., 294 Ginsburg, R.B., 304 Glacken, C.J., 164 Glickman, D., 97 Global Footprint Network Advancing the Science of Sustainability, 292 Goat Island (New Zealand), 272 God’s Country: The New Zealand Factor, 48, 54, 61, 65, 97, 146, 158, 166, 193, 194, 222, 223, 277 Godwin, W., 29 Goedicke, H., 37 Golden Gate Bridge, 202, 203 Golden rule, 58, 188 Gorongosa National Park (Mozambique), 169 Gossamer-winged blue butterflies, 241

311 Gossip, 19–21, 73 Gould, S.J., 76, 173, 294, 297 Grand Canyon National Park, 40, 95, 277 Graneledone boreopacifica, 268 Grange, 200 Gray-crowned cranes (Balearica regulorum), 116 Great Apes, 90, 108, 190 Great Chain of Being, 126, 202 Great Dying, 156, 291 Great Expectations, 78 Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, 303 Greco-Roman, 95, 134 Green Mansions, 85 Green New Deal, 267 Green Revolution, 163 Green, R., 130, 173 Greenblatt, S., 224 Greenland, 48, 211, 276, 277, 300 Grotius, H., 305 Grupo Lobo Sanctuary, Portugal, 253 Gut-Aiderbichl, Salzburg, Austria, 74, 100, 271 H Haeckel, E., 19, 20, 126, 178, 227, 294, 296 “Half-earth” theory, 62, 258 Hamilton, A., 89, 200 Hamilton, P., 89 Hamilton, W.D., 38, 39 Hamlet, 11 Handbook of the Birds of the World, 297 Hans, E., 30 Harari, Y.N., 105, 106, 155, 223 Harbor seals, 26 Hardin, G., 125, 126, 253 Harpending, H., 123 Harriman expedition, 180 Haskell, D.G., 9, 148, 149 Haupt, L.L., 58, 196, 197, 199 Hawaiian crow (ʻalalā, Corvus hawaiiensis), 47 Hearne, M., 75 Heath hen (Tympanuchus cupido cupido), 202 Hegel, G., 146–148 Heisenberg, W., 57, 122, 201 Helagsfjallet, 39, 40 Hennig, W., 30 Henry III, 273 Heraclitus (“Fragments”), 210 Herophilos, 280 Hester, R.T., 184 Hexactineliae, 19 Hexapoda, 83 Hillman, M., 48 Himalayan black bear (Ursus thibetanus laniger), 90 Himalayas, 73–75, 90, 119, 234, 300 Hindu Kush, 104 Hispaniolan lizard cuckoo (Coccyzus longirostris), 302 Histoire Naturelle des Lepidopteres d’Europe, 50, 51 Historia animalium sacra (W.Franzius), 124, 226–227 Historiae animalium, 79

Index

312 Hitler, A., 181, 188, 207 Hobbes, T., 198 Holbein, H., 49 Holdren, J., 293 Holland (The Netherlands), 34, 96, 110, 220 Hollar, W., 52 Holocaust, 60, 61, 67, 182, 188, 206, 238 Holophusikon Museum, 85 Hominid evolution, 101 Homo erectus, 73, 126, 232 Homo sapiens, 20, 22, 26, 30, 43, 44, 50, 61, 66, 72, 75, 94, 102, 104, 107, 110, 119, 123, 124, 130, 133, 140, 150, 156, 166, 170, 199, 208, 209, 224, 225, 238, 247, 254, 257, 266, 282, 284, 291, 294, 301, 303, 305 Hooded crows, 93 Hornaday, W.T., 130 Hosack, D., 19, 89, 90, 200, 201 Hotspots, 40, 47, 62, 65, 97, 156, 160, 171, 258–260, 291 Hours of Gladness, 12 House mice, 302 Howgego, R.J., 178, 179 Huber, H., 269 Hudson, W.H., 85 Hull, D., 127, 128, 133 Human Development Index (HDI), 292 Human Genome Project, 105 Human nature, 27, 57, 58, 60, 91, 92, 100, 135, 137, 168, 182, 205, 220, 230, 232–242, 272–274, 278, 281 Human Natures - Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (Paul R. Ehrlich), 92 Humboldt, A., 2 Hume, J.P., 175, 191, 204 Hunter, J., 84 Hutchinson, G.E., 125 Hutchinson, H.N., 177 Hutton, J., 147, 160 Huxley, J., 29, 108 Hyatt, A., 101 Hybrid biology, 94, 95, 227 Hybrid interaction, 237 Hybridization, 4, 8, 75–77, 90, 93, 95, 107, 110, 207, 226, 228, 237, 239, 241, 243, 247 Hybrid lipids, 107 Hybrid sharks, 226 Hybrid species, 95 Hybrid variants, 76 Hybrid zones, 14, 93, 237 Hyde Park, 37, 200 Hyena, 217, 289 Hypothetical biologies, 194–199, 205 “Hypothetical phylogeny,” 133 “Hypothetical Species and Mystery Birds,” 191 I Iberian wolf, 144, 253 Ibis, 85, 93, 161, 173, 229 Icarus, 169 Ich und Du (M.Buber), 270

Il Barone Rampante (Baron in the Trees), 169 Imago-Insect Portraits, 49 Independent People (H.Laxness), 192 Index Animalium, 85 Indian ethnobotany, 5 Indigenous grasslands, 97 Inflation adjustments, 260 Inflorescence, 8 Inner Kanekes (Sundanese Baduy), 282 Instar phase, 98 Insular zoogeography, 207, 297 Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 157, 158 Intermediaries, 122, 242, 287, 288, 304 International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), 85, 86 International Commission on Zoology, 98 Introgressive hybridization, 93 Investigations on the Theory of the Brownian Movement, 141, 143 IPAT equation, 293 Iredale, T., 181 IUCN, 40, 48, 98, 156, 170, 175, 181, 242, 270, 277, 297, 304 J Jackson, J., 90 Jain, 4, 22, 43, 45, 60–68, 139, 152, 153, 163, 168, 183, 187, 190, 224, 245, 247, 254, 256–258, 262, 304 Japanese cranes, 305 Japanese knotweed (Fallopoia japonica), 193 Javan rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus), 47 Jefferson, T., 198 Jesus, 8, 135, 150 Johnson, K.W., 184 Johnson, V., 90, 200, 201 Jomolhari, Bhutan, 304 Jones, T.R., 178 Joyce, J., 1, 119 Judaic History (Josephus), 217–218 Jurine, C., 189 “Justice for Hedgehogs” (R.Dworkin), 235 “Justice for Termites,” 70 K Kael, P., 245, 246 Kagan, D., 185, 186 Kahn, J., 41 Kakapo (Strigops habroptila), 47, 171 Kalimantan, Borneo, Indonesia, 89, 147 Kalos Anthropos, 155 Kalpa Sutra, 256, 257 Kamm, F., 234 Kangchenjunga, 90 Kant, I., 1, 3, 4, 98, 131, 144, 234 Katzim Pahalin Bal, 73, 90 Kerala, 65, 282 Keulemans, J.F., 191

Index Key West, 43 Keyl, F.W., 192 Khumbu icefall, 25 Kierkegaard, S., 140, 205 King Lear, 208 Kiwi, 188 Kleene-Rosser Paradox, 34 Kleinschmidt, O., 131, 251, 252 Klimburg-Salter, D., 119 Koko the gorilla, 169 Kolodziej, M., 61 Kolreuter, J.G., 113 Krasin, L., 110 Kristensen, R., 289 Kruger, South Africa, 45 Krylov, I., 174 Kubu (strongold), 275 Kyoto, Japan, 7, 18, 40, 87, 102, 185, 258 L The Lamb, 135, 215, 242 La Nausée, 32 La Pasiega cave, Spain, 110 La Trappe Monastery, 220 Lactose intolerance, 301 Ladakh, 73, 90 Lake Biwa, Kyoto, Japan, 102 Lake Burrinjuck (New South Wales, Australia), 291 Lamarck, J.B., 76, 107, 147, 280, 296 Lambrecht, K., 127 Lanai hookbill, 192 The Language of Birds (Mrs. G. Spratt), 174, 214 Lankester, E.R., 177 Lao Tzu, 168 Lascaux, 118, 119, 276 Laszlo, E., 281 Latin, 2, 5, 11, 29, 46, 81, 93, 95, 96, 117, 119, 121, 134, 265, 272 Lawrence, D.H., 206 Laxness, H.K., 192 Le Bagillou, 178 Le phenomene humain, 108 Leguatia gigantean, 127 Leibniz, G.W., 50 Leicester Square, 84, 85 Lenin, V., 110 Leonard, N., 151 Leonora Curtin Wetland (Santa Fe, New Mexico), 94 Leopold, A., 107, 186, 209 Lepidoptera, 133, 237, 241 Leroi-Gourhan, A., 117, 118, 121 Les Atomes, 142 Lever, A., 85 Leverian, 85 Levi-Strauss, C., 133 Lewis, M., 141 Libet, B., 209, 254 Library of Life, 48 Libya Hill, 238

313 The Life Of The Mind, 68 “Limitations of Inclusive Fitness,” 39 Lincoln, A., 84, 305 Linnaeus, C., 2, 10–11, 13, 19, 55, 68, 71, 75–82, 84, 85, 88, 89, 95, 96, 115, 121, 124, 126, 143, 170, 208 Linnean Society, 81, 98, 173, 298 Linnean terminology, 98 L’Intelligence des fleurs, 11 Lofting, H., 84 London, J., 71 Long, W.J., 70, 71 Lonicera fly, 241 Lord Howe stick insect (Dryococelus australis), 47 Los Angeles, 27, 61, 85, 97, 119, 164, 180, 182, 188, 200, 222, 223, 259, 269, 304 The Lost World (Conan Doyle), 177 Lovejoy, T., 126 The Loves of the Plants, 114 Lubbock, J.W. III., 190 Lucas, P.-H., 50 Ludd, General, 238 Luke, 8 Lungfish, 291, 293, 296 Lutts, R.H., 71, 245, 246 Lyell, C., 147, 160 M Macarthur, R.H., 207 Macromolecules, 74, 122 Macrotermes michaelseni, 83 Madison, James and Dolley, 200, 201 “Madonna and Child in a Landscape” (Aegidius Sadeler), 82 Maeterlinck, M., 11, 12 Magdalenian, 214 Magna Carta, 17 Mahabodhi temple, 7 Mahavira, 3, 60, 63, 64, 161, 166, 183, 187, 190, 256, 257 Mali, 83 Malibu, California, 99 Mallet, J., 77, 195 Malthus, T., 60, 190 Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future, 109, 255 Mangelsen, T.D., 49 Manhattan, 188, 199–201, 248, 266, 282 Many-worlds interpretation, 122 Mariana Trench, 227 Martha (Passenger Pigeon), 171, 203, 204 Martha’s Vineyard, 202 Martin, J., 225 Marx, K., 22, 230 Mascarene Islands, 192 Mathematical probability, 4, 150 Matthew, W.D., 231, 232 Matthisson, F., 286 Maturana, H.R., 144 Mauritius, 127, 175, 192, 203 Mayans, 164

Index

314 Mayer, G.B., 302 Mayr, E., 29, 30, 108, 181, 182, 184, 195 McCarthy, E.M., 81, 226 McHarg, I., 184 McMahon, B., 200 Meckle, J.F., 296 Medea hypothesis, 196 Megacities, 61, 278, 279, 282 Mehdawy, M., 219 Melancholia, 32 Melonys rubicola (Bramble Cay, Australia), 278 Mendel, G., 29, 76, 124, 132 Merian, M.S., 50 Mesoplodon traversii, 47 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 219 Metaphysics, 1, 11, 27, 38, 44, 45, 53, 85, 86, 89, 101, 115, 129, 139, 144, 145, 151, 228, 230, 246, 268, 278, 298 Mexico City, 109 Microbial Evolution and Growth Arena (MEGA) Plate, 239 Microchiroptera (species of bat), 133 Microcontinent, 288 Middle Kingdom Egypt, 95 Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, 175 Milford Sound, 261 Mill, J.S., 168, 305 Miller, R.W., 70, 119 Milton, J., (Paradise Lost), 225 Minsky, M., 13, 18 Minus Cognitarum Stirpium (Lesser Known Plants), 81, 82 Mirabilis, 287 Misanthropy: The Critique of Humanity (Gibson), 167 Mittermeier, R., 28, 48, 146, 259, 260 Mlikovsky, J., 203, 205 Modus tollens, 132, 166 Molles, M. Jr., 15, 16 Monism, 27 Monk parakeets, 283–286 Monod, J., 46 Monticello, 200 Montpelier, 200, 201 Moore, G.E., 146 Moraceae, 5 Moreno, L., 265 Morocco, 83, 104 Morse Code, 99 Morse, S.F.B., 99 Mt. Everest, 25, 90, 209, 300 Mount St. Catherine, 27 Mount St. Elias, 267 Mount Vernon, 200 Mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei), 47 Mozambique, 105, 169, 204 Mozart, A., 13, 58, 119 Muir, J., 71, 179, 214, 266 Mulberry, 5 Multi-objective optimization, 282

Museu de Historia Natural de Maputo, 204 Myers, N., 48, 259 Myrmecophilous, 241 The Myth Of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 53 Mystery individuals, 128, 129 N Naess, A., 249 Naked mole rat, 19 Nakhshabi, Z.u.-Din, 174 Namibia, 60, 83, 186, 277 National Museum of Prague (NMP), 203–205 National Park Service (NPS), 42, 304 Natural History Museum at Tring, Hertfordshire, 177 Natural selection, 4, 21, 25, 35, 36, 39, 53, 70, 75, 78, 89, 91, 101, 111, 115, 117, 121, 124, 127, 128, 132, 135, 140, 149, 188, 189, 196–198, 200–202, 209, 224, 234, 237, 239, 248, 253–255, 262, 278, 287, 291 Naturalis Historia, 96 Nazis, 142, 245, 294, 296 n-dimensional hypervolumes, 282, 284 Neanderthal, 94, 104, 110, 111, 118, 207 Neanderthal genome, 111 Nelumbonaceae family, 108 Neospirifer condor, 290 Neotoma wood rats (Pack Rats), 95 Nepalese Sherpas, 300 Nephilim, 95 Nestor productus, 204 Net Primary Production (NPP), 66, 165 New Caledonia, 97, 156, 230 New York Botanical Garden, 200 New Zealand, 47–49, 54, 61, 65, 97, 98, 146, 166, 169, 173, 176, 177, 179, 191–194, 222, 223, 244, 261, 272, 277, 286 Newkirk, Ingrid (PETA), 216 Niger, 83, 90 Nilgiris, India, 55, 268 Noah’s Ark, 85, 95 No-kill zones, 272 Noncooperation, 253 Non-violence, 22, 27, 50, 63, 65, 69, 155, 190, 213–224, 232, 234, 288 Northeast Greenland National Park, 276 Notornis Alba, 176, 191 Nowak, M.A., 39, 150 Null hypothesis, 127, 166 Nyctaginaceae, 287 O Obligate symbiosis, 10 Occam’s Razor, 22 Oconee River, 84 Octopus, 121, 122, 268 Odum, E.P., 16, 76, 125 Offset biological communities, theory, 148

Index Old Testament, 96 Old World knife fishes, 291 Oligocene, vii Olmecs, 164 Olmsted, F.L., 266 On Rare Birds (A.Albus), 179 On the Origin of Species, 57, 78, 127, 176, 189, 224, 247, 278, 287 Orangutan, 34, 89, 147, 222, 275, 276 Orangutan Foundation International (OFI), 222, 275 Ordovician, 288, 294 Oregon’s Blue Mountains, 298 Organic agriculture, 194 Organic Remains of a Former World, 85 Ornithurae, 126 Orwell, G., 130 Ostiole, 9 Otago skink, 286 Ovid, 218 Owen, J., 110 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 29, 134, 172, 182 P Pacific Decadal Oscillations, 272 Pacific Pocket Mouse, 283–286 Paddy the Wanderer, 69 Pain points concept, 61–63, 65, 165, 272, 282 Pali, 61 Panofsky, E., 137 Panthera tigris tigris, 47 Papineau, D., 228 Papua New Guinea, 179 Paradox of exile, 254 Parasparopagraho jivanam, 60 Pariasaurus, 177 Parker, R.D., 39, 173 Parkinson, J., 85 Parmenides of Elea, 27 Parva Naturalia (Aristotle), 145 Pasteurella multocida, 2825 Pavord, A., 5, 119 Pech Merle, 118 Pedunculated cirripedes, 190 Peirce, C.S., 33 Pelagibacterales, 44 Pelecaniformes, 297 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 214, 216 Periphyseon, or Division of Nature, 34 Perrin, J.B., 142 Perry Index (Ben Edwin Perry), 51 Peruvian Amazon, 141 Peruvian bamboo rat (Dactylomis peruanus), 148 Peruvian bark, 89 Peter Rabbit, 70, 71 Petrucci-Fonseca, F., 253 Phanerozoic, 268 A Philosophical Amusement Upon the Language of Beasts (Father G-H.Bougeant), 214

315 Phospholipids, 107 Phyletic evolution, 278 Phylogenetic diversity (PD), 31, 33 Phylogenetic trees, 16 Phylogeny, 98, 101, 133, 178, 294, 296 Phytochoria, 243 Phytopinax, 81 Pic Macaya National Park, Haiti, 262 Picasso, P., 49, 154, 265 Picturesque Movement, 304 Pigs, 188, 192, 251, 272 Pilpay, 174 Pithecanthropus erectus (Java Man), 126 Pitman, I., 98 Placoderms, 291 Placozoa phylum, 19 Planck length, 44 Planck, M., 225 Plant intelligence, 11, 149 Plantarum (Linnaeus), 89 Plato , 50, 52, 58, 68, 128, 216, 218 Pleistocene, 110, 241, 287 Pliny the Elder, 96, 124 Poecilia reticulata, 112 Pollination, 69, 239, 244, 299 Polychromophilus, 133 Polymerase chain reaction (PCR), 298 Polymorphisms, 105, 209 Polytypic taxa, 140, 237 Pope Innocent X, 4 Poplar Forest, 200 Population ecology, 166 Populus section Aigeiros, 93–94 Porphyrio hochstetteri (purple swamphen), 176 Porphyry, 166, 215–218 Portugal, 24, 144, 148, 219, 253 Post-Cartesian, 214 Potter, B., 104, 192 Pradeu, T., 128 Praise of Pindar, 29 Pre-Cambrian explosion, 166, 230 Presidential platform, 263, 266, 299 Priestley, J., 280 Principia Mathematica, 51 Principle of Uncertainty, 57, 201 Probability theories, 122, 156, 184 The Problems of Philosophy, 51 Prokaryotic domain, 88 Prolegomena to An Future Metaphysic, 1, 144 Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic (Immanuel Kant), 1, 144 Prospectus for Fine Bird Books, 1700-1900: A Bibliographical Record of Two Centuries of Coloured Plate Bird Books, 173 Protection, 12, 36, 38, 44, 45, 69, 85, 158, 175, 177, 184, 211, 246, 258–261, 263, 265, 268–273, 275–278, 298, 304 Protista, 86 Pseudogenes, 105 Psychodiagnostik, 269 Ptolemy, C. , 134

Index

316 Punnett square, 287 Pushkar, Rajasthan, India, 62, 219 Pythagoras, 15, 218 Q Quaker, 65, 220 Quammen, D., 81 Quantum physics, 19, 55, 122, 281 “Queen Mab” (P.Shelley), 214, 215 R Raccoon, 283–286 Radio-frequency identification devices (RFID chips), 109 Ran (Akira Kurosawa), 208 Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), 47, 54 Raphus cucullatus (Dodo), 161, 175, 229 Rapid evolution, 111, 112, 121, 209, 255 Rats, Lice, and History, 150, 151 Red-billed quelea (Quelea quelea), 44, 45 Red List (IUCN), 98, 133, 156, 175, 270, 297 Reef building, 290 Re-evolution, theory, 4, 91, 102–107, 184, 186, 233, 234 Relative operating characteristic curve (ROC), 237 Rembrandt’s Eyes, 24 Renewable energy, 305 Report about the Dispute of a Man with His Ba, 37 Republic, Washington, 142 Reunion, 127, 192 Rhagoletis pomonella fruit fly, 241 Rhagoletis tephritid flies, 241 Rigaut, J., 71 Rio Grande Cottonwood (Populus deltoids wislizeni), 94 Ritson, J., 214, 215, 218–220 River Valley, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 275 RNA (ribosomal), 88, 132, 184, 229 Robinson Crusoe, 70 The Rohan Master, 121 Rome, 4, 36, 81, 82, 153, 180, 181, 259 Roopnarine, P.D., 291 Roosevelt, T., 70, 71, 205 Rorschach, H., 269 Rorschach Test, 268–269 Rosen, C., 285, 286 Roslin, A., 13 Rothschild Flea collection, 104 Rothschild, M., 104, 105 Rothschild, N.C., 104 Royal Jersey Agricultural and Horticultural Society, 192 Royal Library at Windsor Castle, 49 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, 85, 272–273 Royan-ji, 40 RSPCA (Bhutan), 92 Rubens, P.P., 218 Rudolf II, 203, 280 Rugosa, 294 Rush, B., 89 Ruskin, J., 305 Russell, B., 51

Russian Institute of Cytology and Genetics, 149 Rutherford, A., 104, 105 Rwanda, vi Rydal Falls, 274 S Saber-toothed cats, 110 Sabeti, P., 123, 124 Sadeler, A., 41, 82, 233, 234 Sadeler, J. I., 41 Said, E., 205, 206 Salamanders, 102, 163, 234, 237 Salten, F., 245–247 Salvin, O., 85, 173 Sambar (Rusa unicolor), India, 247 Sanchez, F., 52, 53 The Sacred and the Profane - The Nature of Religion, 86 Sangre des Cristos Mountains, 16 Sankalpinī hiṃsā, 61 SAR II clade, 44 Sartre, J.-P., 32, 33, 100, 167 Saudi Arabia, 219, 250 Savery, R., 174–176 Saxicola, Genus, 20 Sceloglaux rufifacies (North Island laughing owl), 177 Schama, S., 24 Schell, J., 193 Schmidt Ocean Institute, 227 Schopenhauer, A., 55 Schweitzer, A., 16 Scotland, 221, 282 Select Works Of Porphyry (T.Taylor), 215 Sergeant Stubby, 169 Serres, É., 296 Seventh Day Adventist, 65, 218 Shakespeare, 4, 13, 44, 99, 270, 301 Shanidar, 232 Shaw, G., 85 Sheldrake, R., 58 Shelley, P., 214, 215, 218 A Shepherd’s Calendar (O.Duff), 193 Sherborn, C.D., 85 Sherwood Forest, 238 Shoebill, 297 Shoumin, B., 173 Siberia, 94, 110, 111, 288 Siddhartha Gautama, 7 Silent Valley National Park, India, 268 Silurian Period, 288 Sinai, 27 Singapore, 43, 295 Sitwell, S., 173 Six-Spotted tiger Beetle (Cicindela sexguttata), 84 Skandhas, 139 Smith, A., 60 Snyders, F., 174 The Society of Mind, 13 Sociobiology, 53 Socotra, Island of, Yemen, 122, 278, 279

Index Socrates, 68, 105, 216 Soil-vegetation systems, 13 Solomon Islands, 182, 184 Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), 278 Sophora toromiro, 47 Sorgvliet Het Loo, 96 Southern Mexican red-eyes towhee, 93 Spade-toothed beaked whale, 47 Speciation, 8, 45, 77, 182, 186, 189, 238, 243, 278 Species: A History of the Idea (J.S.Wilkins), 195 Spencer, H., 57, 111, 135, 146, 173, 198 Spinoza, B., 33 Spix’s Macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii), 47, 204 Spratt, G., 174 Squids, 121, 123 18S rRNA, 88 St. Augustine, 70 St. Basil, 164 St. Bavo Cathedral (Ghent, Belgium), 135, 137 St. Francis with the animals, 138 Stearnes, S., 255 Stegomyia (Aedes), 98 Sthanakvasi (Jain), 64 Stochastic process rare event sampling, 272 Stone Age, 105, 282 Stromatoporoids, 289, 290, 291, 294, 296 Struthio camelus (Common ostrich), 299 Subatomic particles, 4, 20, 122, 139, 202 Suicide, 53, 54, 71, 105, 196, 202 Sulloway, F.J., 198 Sumerians, 152, 164 Summa Theologiae, 139 Suriname, 2, 50, 118, 139, 154, 260 Svetambara (Jain), 64 Sycamore, 8, 9 Syconium, 8 Symbions, 289 Systema Naturae Di Linneo, 80, 126, 180, 259 Systematics, 12, 23, 29–31, 133, 170, 182, 207, 252, 278, 297 T Tacon, P.S.C., 119 Takahé, 98, 99, 176 Taktsang Monastery, Bhutan, 200, 227 Tamaulipas State, Mexico, 71, 72 “Tameness Gene”, 149 Tanjung Puting National Park, Indonesia, 275, 276 Tarai gray langurs (Semnopithecus hector), 117 Tarnita, C.E., 39 Tasaday of Mindanao, 71 Tat Tvam Asi, 51, 69 Tattooed lizards, 188 Taxonomic names, 49, 98 Taxonomy, 20, 29, 33, 37–40, 48, 56, 75, 81, 83, 98, 128, 129, 170, 179, 181, 182, 185, 187, 190, 252, 292, 297, 305 Taylor, T., 215, 217 The Temple of Nature or the Origin of Society, 11

317 Ter Borch, G., 24 Terapanthi (Jain), 64 Termitary (Bahamas), 283 Terrace, E.L.B., 95 Tertiary period, 298 Testable ideal, 91 Tesuque, New Mexico, 14–16 Tetracorallia, 294, 296 Thales of Miletus, 23 Theodoric of Freiberg, 124 The Theoretical Individual, 3, 33, 51, 57–59, 69, 130, 209, 211 “Theoretical species,” 57, 140, 253 Third species, 164, 280–296, 303, 304 Thoreau, H.D., 55, 218, 269, 270 Tibet, 129, 178, 232, 234 Tibetan plateau, 300 Tiger, 42, 43, 47, 74, 84, 237, 238, 270 Tijuca National Park, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 274 Tipling, D., 175 Tiriyo Indians, Suriname, 2, 154 Tobgye, L.S., 90, 266 Todas, tribe, 57, 282 Toda Tribe, South India, 263 Tolstoy Syndrome, 19 Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 164 Trachypithecus poliocephalus, 47 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Ludwig Wittgenstein), 130 “The Tragedy of the Commons,” 60, 126, 253 Tranquille Shale (McAbee Beds, British Columbia), 140 TransAmazonian highways, 260 Transcendentalist Movement, 304 Treviranus, G.R., 280 Trichoplax adhaerens, 19 Trilobites, 140 Trimmer, S., 271 Trinidad, 112 Trinomial nomenclature, 49, 237 Tshering, T.P., 92 Tudge, C., 8 Turkey, 141, 188, 192, 202, 250 Turner, W., 79, 169 Turritopsis dohrnii, 166 Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot, Ziya’ u’d-Din Nakhshabi), 174 U Udyoginī hiṃsā, 61 Ultrataxon, 31, 32, 70 Ulu Temburong National Park (Brunei), 172 UNCLOS (Law of the Seas), 266 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, 276 UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 223 United Nations Population Fund, 69 Upanishads, 51, 69 Upsal Botanic Garden, 200 Urkaryotes, 88 U.S. Declaration of Independence, 277

Index

318 U.S. First Amendment, 153 US Fish and Wildlife Service, 71 U.S. Supreme Court, 152 Utamaro, Kitagawa, 174 Utopia, 1, 11, 59, 121, 217, 227 Utrecht Zoo, The Netherlands, 269 V Valmiki, 270 Van Beethoven, L., 3, 119, 245 van der Werhe, M., 186 Van Eyck, J., 3, 135, 146 van Helmont, J.B., 280 van Kessel, J., 174 van Leeuwenhoek, A.P., 7, 86, 88, 124 Van Londerseel, J., 30 Vaquita Porpoise (Phocoena sinus), 47 Varela, F.J., 144 Vaux, C., 266 Vegetarianism, 2, 65, 166, 214, 215, 218, 219 Velasquez, D., 4 Vermeer, J., 17, 58, 88, 173 Victoria crowned pigeon (Goura victoria), 123 Viennese Woods, 245 Vietnam, 47 Vijd, J., 136, 137 Virgin Mary, 147 Vivaldi, A., 11 The Viviparous Quadruped of North America, 167 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 45, 218, 277, 294 von Gartner, C.F., 113 von Goethe, J.W., 208 von Schiller, F., 286 Vulpes lagopus, 39, 40 W Wadi Deir el Bersheh, 95 Waiting for Godot, 71 Wallace, A.R., 124, 178, 181, 190, 294, 295 Walters, M., 191, 204 Watson, R., 157 Wedgwood, E., 117 Weisel-Barth, J., 33 Wenzel, G.I., 213 Werehpai Cave, 2, 118, 139 Wesolowski, T., 21 White-crowned hornbill, Malaysia, 91

Whitehead, A.N., 51 White Rhino, 47, 275 Wierx, Anton, Johann and Hieronymus, 136 Wilhelm, D. V., 280 Wilhelmj, A., 55, 56 Wilkins, J.S., 195 Wilson, D.S., 39, 253, 254 Wilson, E.O., 35, 36, 39, 48, 53, 62, 76, 91, 100, 126, 146, 169, 207, 208, 249, 258, 281, 297 Wittgenstein, L., 130 Woese, C.R., 88, 89, 195 Wolfe, T., 238, 239 Wolpoff, M.H., 101 Wordsworth, W., 59, 274 World Trade Organization, 224 World Wildlife Fund, 158, 160 Wrangell-St.Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska, 267 X Xenophanes of Colophon, 124, 280 Xenophyophores, 19 Y Yak herders (Eastern Bhutan), 66 Yarrow, D., 49 Yasuni Effect, 148–155 Yasuni National Park (Ecuador), 18, 45, 148, 149, 151 The Yearling, 245 Yeast, 6, 7 Yellowstone National Park, 266, 276, 277, 303 Yemen, 83, 122, 279, 289 Yeti, 90 Yggdrasil, 232 Yosemite National Park, 165, 277 Z Zacchaeus, 8 Zagros Mountains, 232, 288 Zahniser, H., 304 Zeno’s Paradox, 34 Zinsser, H., 150, 151 Zipf, G.K., 199 Zoomorphic representations, 119 Zoonomia: or the Laws of Organic Life, 115 Zweig, P., 73