Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species
E. O. Wilson, Harvard University Press, 1984
Image credit: Megumi, Red Maple, Matts Bonsai Blog
This book is full of inspiration, and quotes so good they should be etched in stone:
- In the Prologue - Biophilia - the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.
- Also in the Prologue - existential = exotic - "The word extraterrestrial evokes reveries about still unexplored life, displacing the old and once potent exotic that drew earlier generations to remote islands and jungled interiors."
- On an ecosystem he observes, and on "the uncounted products of evolution" - "Their long cenazoic history was encyphered into a genetic code I could not understand." (p7)
- Caprophage (eat, shit)
- "Penetralia of the soil" (things in the dirt) (p9)
- "Coexistence was an incidental by-product of Darwinian advantage that accrued from the avoidance of competition." (p9) "During the long span of evolution the species divided the environment among themselves so that now each tenuously preempted certain of the capillaries of energy flow. Through repeated genetic changes they sidestepped competitors and built elaborate defenses against the host of predator species that relentlessly tracked them through matching genetic countermoves. The result was a special array of specialists, including moths that live in the fur of three-toed sloths." (p9-10)
- But further - "The unique operations of the brain are the result of natural selection operating through the filter of culture." (p12)
- New York, greatest of machines (p12)
- On Superorganisms and Agency-Flipping (a la What Technology Wants and the Extended Phenotype) - The leafcutter ant colony is a superorganism. ... The social master plan is partitioned into the brains of the all-female workers, whose separate programs fit together to form a balanced whole. ... The superorganism's brain is the entire society; the workers are the crude analog of its nerve cells. ... Through a unique step in evolution taken millions of years ago, the ants captured a fungus, incorporated it into the superorganism, and so gained the power to digest leaves or perhaps the relation is the other way around: perhaps the fungus captured the ants and employed them as a mobile extension to take leaves into the moist underground chambers. (p36-37)
- On Sudden Perception: "One commanding image synthesized from several units, such that a single complex idea is attained not by analysis but by the sudden perception of an objective revelation." (p67) ... He then goes on to explain how science is a combination of creative imagination and scientific process. "Through the repeated alternation between flights of the imagination and the accretion of hard data, a mutual agreement of the workings of the world is written, in the form of natural law." (p67)
- On the First Stages of Original Thought (a la Fleck) - "It is controlled growth, a disciplined spread of the mind into hidden recesses where concepts and linkages are still embryonic or non-existent." (p78)
- The 20% Redundancy Rule?! - Using electroencephalograms in the study of response to graphic designs the Belgian psychologist Gerda Swets found the maximal arousal (measure by the blockage of the aplpah wave) occurs when the figure contains about 20 percent redundancy. That is the amount present in a spiral with two or three turns, or a relatively simple maze, or a neat cluster of ten or so triangles. Less arousal occurs when the figure consists of only one triangle or square, maze or an irregular scattering of twenty triangles. (p79) (This is some art theory I've never heard of.)
- Culture in turn is a product of the mind, which can be interpreted as an image-making machine that recreates the outside world through symbols arranged into maps and stories. (p101)
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