Brave New World

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E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Still, except for the rare behavioral conditions approaching total genetic determination, heritabilities are at best risky predictors of personal capacity in existing and future environments. …  The message from geneticists to intellectuals and policy-makers is this: Choose the society you want to promote, then prepare to live with its heritabilities.  Never favor the reverse, of promoting social policies just to change heritabilities.  For best results, cultivate individuals, not groups.

And why would he do that?

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E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Perhaps God did create all organisms, including human beings, in finished form, in one stroke, and maybe it all happened several thousand years ago.  But if that is true, He also salted the earth with false evidence in such endless and exquisite detail, and so thoroughly from pole to pole, as to make us conclude first that life evolved, and second that the process took billions of years.  Surely Scripture tells us He would not do that.  The Prime Mover of the Old and New Testaments is variously loving, magisterial, denying, thunderously angry, and mysterious, but never tricky.

Who are we?

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E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture.  We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission.  The question remaining is how biology and culture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature.  What, in final analysis, joins the deep, mostly genetic history of the species as a whole to the more recent cultural histories of its far-flung societies?

Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer?

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Finals were over in early May, and I was looking forward to long, warm days with time to go to work and cook and dance and read.  Unfortunately, it’s been mostly in the 60s with cloudy and sometimes rainy weather nearly every day.  Having a migraine every afternoon has made me pretty miserable and kept me from accomplishing much of anything.

My summer work list is a lot more daunting now that I’ve got more than a month less to do it all than I’d planned.

And my mother is coming to visit, which I’m pretty concerned about.  My mother is a fundamentalist Christian and chooses to ignore the parts of my life that don’t agree with her beliefs.  The person she says she loves and misses doesn’t actually exist.  I’m wondering how long she’ll be able to maintain the delusion when directly confronted with the things and people I surround myself with.

Instead

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Instead of a bunch of links to depressing stories, I’ve got a depressing (but very very lovely) poem for you this Saturday.

Death of a Field
Paula Meehan

The field itself is lost the morning it becomes a site
When the Notice goes up: Fingal County Council – 44 houses

The memory of the field is lost with the loss of its herbs

Though the woodpigeons in the willow
And the finches in what’s left of the hawthorn hedge
And the wagtail in the elder
Sing on their hungry summer song

The magpies sound like flying castanets

And the memory of the field disappears with its flora:
Who can know the yearning of yarrow
Or the plight of the scarlet pimpernel
Whose true colour is orange?

And the end of the field is the end of the hidey holes
Where first smokes, first tokes, first gropes
Were had to the scentless mayweed

The end of the field as we know it is the start of the estate
The site to be planted with houses each two or three bedroom
Nest of sorrow and chemical, cargo of joy

The end of dandelion is the start of Flash
The end of dock is the start of Pledge
The end of teazel is the start of Ariel
The end of primrose is the start of Brillo
The end of thistle is the start of Bounce
The end of sloe is the start of Oxyaction
The end of herb robert is the start of Brasso
The end of eyebright is the start of Fairy

Who amongst us is able to number the end of grasses
To number the losses of each seeding head?

I’ll walk out once
Barefoot under the moon to know the field
Through the soles of my feet to hear
The myriad leaf lives green and singing
The million million cycles of being in wing

That – before the field become solely map memory
In some archive of some architect’s screen
I might possess it or it possess me
Through its night dew, its moon white caul
Its slick and shine and its prolifigacy
In every wingbeat in every beat of time

What We Killed Thursday

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Erythroxylum echinodendron

Erythroxylum echinodendron

Erythroxylum echinodendron was endemic to Cuba and was declared extinct in the wild in 1998.  Echinodendron means “spiny tree,” and you can see where it got its name in this herbarium specimen.  Erythroxylum is a tropical genus with about 250 species.

While this particular species was declared extinct in the wild rather than extinct, this damaged herbarium specimen is the only record I could find of Erythroxlym echinodendron.  There don’t seem to be any reintroduction projects in place or even specimens being studied in botanical gardens.

This is particularly sad since many Erythroxylum species are hosts for butterfly and moth larvae and some have powerful alkaloid compounds. Not only are we probably losing insect species with the loss of this plant, but we’ve lost a plant that could have contained chemicals for new medications.

While you may have never heard the word “Erythroxylum,” a large number of your tax dollars are spent trying to control a particular species in this genus.  You may have even used a product of  Erythroxylum coca.

While most people wouldn’t recognize this shrub,

Erythroxylum coca

Erythroxylum coca

everyone knows what its most valuable product looks like:

Our use of coal is very, very bad for the environment and everything in it – including us.  While we won’t stop using coal anytime soon, we can decrease the damage it does with stronger regulations.  Write a letter.