Dear mummy Nature
I saw a horrible thing on tv last night, in a PBS show about the Kalahari. There are flamingos that nest in in an area of the Kalahari which slowly dries out during the nesting season, with the result that the chicks have to walk a hundred miles through the desert to get to water. They have to walk. A hundred miles. Through a desert. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds. They’re small, they’re feeble, it’s burning hot. It takes weeks.
250,000 leave; some years not one chick makes it.
Good planning! Wouldn’t you think the adults would manage to think ‘gee, maybe we should find a better place to nest’? Or that, failing to think that, they would all quickly die off because they couldn’t keep the numbers up? But apparently that’s not happening. So instead you get this disgusting trek of misery. One revolting detail is that the chicks’ wing tips pick up mud as they trudge along, and the mud hardens and just hangs there, so they’re all staggering along with these heavy blobs dragging them down. It’s a truly sickening sight – one wants to arrest all the parents for abuse.
Another tale for the Devil’s Chaplain.
The video footage of the birds is absolutely stunning, but it is hauntingly sad to see the birds having to slog it out on such a long journey and then for them to finally die.
I was looking at the other stuff and would love to download it onto my mp4 player. As one would never tire, over and over again of looking at the stunning images.
This reminds me of the way a certain brand of conservative Christians wildly misinterpreted the narrative of March of the Penguins into some sort of redemptive story of monogamistic loyalty, nature’s reflection of the nuclear family and a poster child for traditional marriage. Say what? How blind not to see the reality right in front of their eyes – a brutal trial of nature, one of eleventy-gazillion cruel tricks natural selection plays on its products.
Deserts and glaciers are cruel nurseries. Life is adaptive, but it is not adapted for any good end – just reproduction by any means necessary.
I know, that march of the penguins is such a nightmare.
Devil’s chaplain, devil’s chaplain.
Yes indeed, OB. What is the purpose of life?
At the level of the individual organism, survival; which involves feeding, not becoming another’s food, growing and reproducing. These continue at the species level and beyond. ‘Mother nature’ is neither in favour of or against any individual or species, merely indifferent to its fate. The competition for survival in turn involves natural selection.
What intrigues me is this. The fight for survival between organisms, species and so on right up to the ecosystem level is for the perpetuation not of physical bodies, cells or even actual DNA strands. As far as we know, it is for the code in those DNA strands; for the base sequence, however ultimately written out in descendent DNA.
The parallel is with literature and ‘texts’, including musical notation. It is only of minor consequence that Shakespeare’s original manuscripts are lost, as long as the subsequent editions of the plays are faithful copies of them. One can use any copy from any edition to stage a production.
On the other hand, no matter how good conservation techniques become, the Mona Lisa, Michaelangelo’s David, the Stradivarius violins and all other art originals will ultimately return to dust.
I may be wrong on this, but to me this is Hegel’s primacy of the idea in all its glory. Nature is ultimately about a battle of rival abstractions. The poor old emperor penguins, like the rest of us, just have to cop whatever we are born as, or into, as sweetly as we can.
Ian, perhaps the ‘fight for survival’ is not FOR the perpetuation of the DNA code, but just the cycling of a natural engine. The code is modified in nature and tested by the real world without reference to purpose. The idea of being ‘for’ something may only have meaning in the context of the thinking animal itself. We make up our own ‘for’, or at least can modify it ourselves as we develop autonomy.
I think your focus on the ‘code’, the algorithm, is a very good tool for getting away from older preconceptions in evolution which confne possible ideas on how it is working.
Re: March of the Penguins
The comedian Stewart Lee has a bit about March of the Penguins.
After seeing the Christianists embrace the film as proof that nature wants us to be in loving nukerler families he started reading up on Mallards. Mallards are the only species that reproduces exclusively by gang rape, and they have been caught on camera indulging in homosexual necrophelia. So the idea is to do a film called “March of the Mallards” as proof that nature wants us to be evil. Narrated by Morgan Freeman.
Check out ‘shock ovulation’ in rodents, and the mating-habits of orang-utans…
Something should be said about the pathetic fallacy… after all, these are just lumps of mobile DNA wandering about. OTOH, there is no denying a humane response to the sight of, e.g., an elephant detached from its herd, turned around in a dust-storm, marching resolutely back into the heart of a desert it has just struggled to cross, doomed.
“after all, these are just lumps of mobile DNA wandering about.”
I know; trouble is, the little bastards are sentient!
The elephant is a calf, and it goes faster and faster, hurrying to catch up with the herd. I’m not going to be able to watch that sequence…
Mark, mallards exclusivly reproduce by gang rape are you sure thats correct?