I’m a member of a natural sciences book group. We all share a mixed range of personal experiences as hikers, Gardners, horticulturists, ecologists, wildlife biologist and a fascination with the natural world. There are always so many good titles to choose from. I’ve written of several in the past. Our current book is Ed Yong’s, “An Immense World”, a look into the senses and perceptions of organisms, to understand how an animal ‘sees’ its world. of course, we can only do this from our own limited, human biased vision heavy view of the world. We should never assume animals ‘see’ the world as we do. Many animals primary sense isn’t vision at all. In this book Yong writes of how even when we share particular sense organs with other animals, our perception is very different. Perception is something beyond the senses. It occurs after sensing, an attempt to make sense of the world around us in a way that works for us with our needs and limitations…It is not the world itself. Perception gives us our personal understanding of the world. It is shaped by the combination of our several senses and our need to understand. In evolution what ‘works’ shapes us. We, the biological we, that is, all organisms, are in turn shaped by the world around us…our bodies, our sense organs and our understanding of the world around us. We are shaped by necessity and possibility. While discussing this Yong writes repeatedly of a species’ and an individual’s ‘Umwelt’, our individual view of the world around US. Each is distinct. Individual and limited, making it near impossible for us to imagine another’s, but this does not give us permission to dismiss that of others…any others. Continue reading
An Immense World: A Review of Ed Yong’s Latest Book
Leave a reply
I mostly read non-fiction, books on history, the ‘natural sciences’, about life. I get my fiction in the form of television and movies, graphic novels and no, there is a lot more out there other than the limited, repetitive genre of super-heroes from the DC and Marvel universes. I’m drawn to the speculative stories, alternative tellings of this world, of life lessons, attempts to reimagine the past, or invent possible futures, stories that question what we are generally taught in this life. But really, I’m a science guy, reading those authors who draw from the leading edge of science, and the scientists themselves, who are skilled enough communicators, not something that necessarily is companion to those ‘doing’ science, those who can clearly discuss what they’ve learned and present reviews of entire fields of study, which strive to show the reader how our understanding of the world is changed.
David Graber, an anthropologist, and David Wengrow’s, an archeologist, book, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”, is more than ‘just’ a history of humanity, which would on its own suggest a massive tome of thousands of pages. it is an examination of how we ‘do’ history drawing many examples of peoples and societies across time from the Paleolithic through the colonization of North America. It is not simple reportage, rather a look into the correctness or accuracy, of how we have been telling history. I enjoy such questions and their capacity to rock the academic and intellectual ‘boat’. My reading has spurred the formation of links to two other books I’ve read recently, Stephen Jay Gould’s, “The Burgess Shale” and Pekka Hamalainen’s, “Indigenous Continent”. All three of these call into question previously widely accepted thinking on their subjects. More than this, they question foundational ideas upon which the science they examine are founded. This appeals to me. But more than this, there is an idea central to them all which really rings ‘true’ for me. 
We live today in a very divided and polarized world. You can take almost any characteristic used to define a group of people today and it is now being used to separate and divide. We do this sometimes out of pride, others, out of fear and desperation. We thus define our individuality, or our ‘people’, in a process of reduction, eliminating variation and possibility. This is who I am. This is my world, the world that matters. When we do this our world shrinks. That outside of it, becomes a threat and ‘threats’ proliferate. The causes of our problems are commonly reduced to ‘them’. Most of the divisions are, however inconsequential. Having been pried open we find ourselves separated by seemingly giant rifts, animosities greatly exaggerating the actual differences. Too many ‘leaders’, in bids to gain power themselves and cement their own advantage, beat the drums of division, gaining followers, customers and believers to their cause…which is often something very different than what they may publicly say. A world built on such differences is a precarious one, as groups strive for security by focusing on the differences rather than on the infinitely more common shared links which join us. This country was, in many ways, built on such differences. 
GardenRiots 