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mahir007's review
5.0
إن رؤيتنا للعالم الطبيعي من حولنا متحيزة للغاية . أهم تحيزاتنا هو فكرة مركزية الإنسان. هذا التحيز هو جزء عميق من حواسنا ونفسيتنا لدرجة أنه يمكن تسميته بقانون، قانون مركزية الإنسان. قانون مركزية الإنسان مبني على بيولوجيتنا ؛ كل نوع من الحيوانات لديه تصور للعالم مؤطر بحواسه الخاصة. إذا كانت الكلاب هي المسؤولة عن العلم، فسأكتب عن مشكلة مركزية الكلاب. لكن ما هو فريد مع البشر هو أن تحيزنا لا يؤثر فقط على الطريقة التي ننظر بها بشكل فردي إلى العالم الحي من حولنا، ولكن أيضًا على النظام العلمي الذي بنيناه لفهرسة العالم. كان المؤرخ الطبيعي السويدي كارل لينيوس هو الذي أعطى نظامنا قواعده، لكنه أعطى أيضًا زخم لفكرة مركزية الإنسان في النظام والجغرافيا الغريبة.
من المدهش أننا كنوع حققنا النجاح الذي حققناه على الرغم من جهلنا بالعالم البيولوجي ومنظورنا المتحيز لأبعاده. قال أينشتاين أن «اللغز الأبدي للعالم هو فهمه» ؛ بعبارة أخرى، ما هو غير مفهوم هو مدى فهمنا. لكنني لا أعتقد أن هذا صحيح تمامًا. أعتقد أن الأمر غير المفهوم أكثر هو أننا نجونا على الرغم من ضآلة فهمنا. نحن مثل السائق الذي يسير بطريقة ما على الطريق، على الرغم من كونه أقصر من أن يرى من النافذة، وهو مخمور قليلاً، ومولع جدًا بالتسارع.
منذ سنوات عديدة، قرأت قصة لكاتب علمي دخل فيها كهفًا مع مرشد ومجموعة من زملائه المسافرين. عندما دخلت المجموعة الكهف، بدأت الخفافيش تطير بأعداد كبيرة. كان الكاتب يسمع حركتهم ويهتف وكان بإمكانه أن يشعر بالرياح من أجنحتهم العديدة. قال المرشد: "لا تقلق، تعرف الخفافيش مكانك بالضبط بفضل قدرتها على تحديد موقع الصدى. إنهم يروننا في الظلام! "
عندما استدار المرشد ليمشي بعيدًا في الكهف، خفاش، يطير بسرعة في الليل، ضربه في وجهه - بقوة.
ما لم يعرفه المرشد هو أنه في حين أن الخفافيش لديها قدرات مذهلة على «الرؤية» في الظلام من خلال تحديد الموقع بالصدى، فإنها تستخدم أيضًا معرفة مفصلة بالمعالم والطرق المتكررة للعثور على طريقها، خاصة في الكهوف. كان الخفاش يطير على طول طريق مفضّل وفجأة واجه المرشد، الذي لم يكن من المفروض أن يكون هناك، وفقًا لنموذجه للعالم. صدم الرجل والخفاش معاً .
.
Rob Dunn
A Natural History Of The Future
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
من المدهش أننا كنوع حققنا النجاح الذي حققناه على الرغم من جهلنا بالعالم البيولوجي ومنظورنا المتحيز لأبعاده. قال أينشتاين أن «اللغز الأبدي للعالم هو فهمه» ؛ بعبارة أخرى، ما هو غير مفهوم هو مدى فهمنا. لكنني لا أعتقد أن هذا صحيح تمامًا. أعتقد أن الأمر غير المفهوم أكثر هو أننا نجونا على الرغم من ضآلة فهمنا. نحن مثل السائق الذي يسير بطريقة ما على الطريق، على الرغم من كونه أقصر من أن يرى من النافذة، وهو مخمور قليلاً، ومولع جدًا بالتسارع.
منذ سنوات عديدة، قرأت قصة لكاتب علمي دخل فيها كهفًا مع مرشد ومجموعة من زملائه المسافرين. عندما دخلت المجموعة الكهف، بدأت الخفافيش تطير بأعداد كبيرة. كان الكاتب يسمع حركتهم ويهتف وكان بإمكانه أن يشعر بالرياح من أجنحتهم العديدة. قال المرشد: "لا تقلق، تعرف الخفافيش مكانك بالضبط بفضل قدرتها على تحديد موقع الصدى. إنهم يروننا في الظلام! "
عندما استدار المرشد ليمشي بعيدًا في الكهف، خفاش، يطير بسرعة في الليل، ضربه في وجهه - بقوة.
ما لم يعرفه المرشد هو أنه في حين أن الخفافيش لديها قدرات مذهلة على «الرؤية» في الظلام من خلال تحديد الموقع بالصدى، فإنها تستخدم أيضًا معرفة مفصلة بالمعالم والطرق المتكررة للعثور على طريقها، خاصة في الكهوف. كان الخفاش يطير على طول طريق مفضّل وفجأة واجه المرشد، الذي لم يكن من المفروض أن يكون هناك، وفقًا لنموذجه للعالم. صدم الرجل والخفاش معاً .
.
Rob Dunn
A Natural History Of The Future
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
jdintr's review
4.0
Rob Dunn's A Natural History of the Future is a fascinating look at the present moment in terms of the vast scale of the evolution of life. And here's a spoiler alert: the future doesn't include humans.
This isn't a book about climate change, although that's the context for the book. Instead, it is about how species adapt: how some species, specialized to a specific host or environment, are vulnerable to go extinct--such as the Mammoth louse--while others have adaptive traits that make them ideal candidates to live beyond the Anthropocene Era. Species like crows, for example, and rats.
Dunn gets to his specialty the last half of the book as he moves into microscopic organisms, the individuals that make up the vast majority of "life" as we know it. Dunn shows there abilities to adapt and mutate make them the ideal survivors, even as their hosts face excinction.
In a final chapter, Dunn draws everything together effectively and thoughtfully. I'm smarter for having read this book. You will be too.
This isn't a book about climate change, although that's the context for the book. Instead, it is about how species adapt: how some species, specialized to a specific host or environment, are vulnerable to go extinct--such as the Mammoth louse--while others have adaptive traits that make them ideal candidates to live beyond the Anthropocene Era. Species like crows, for example, and rats.
Dunn gets to his specialty the last half of the book as he moves into microscopic organisms, the individuals that make up the vast majority of "life" as we know it. Dunn shows there abilities to adapt and mutate make them the ideal survivors, even as their hosts face excinction.
In a final chapter, Dunn draws everything together effectively and thoughtfully. I'm smarter for having read this book. You will be too.
blackoxford's review
3.0
A Flash in the Pan
According to Rob Dunn, the growth in the human population and its expansion to every climatic zone on the planet occurred more or less instantaneously (in evolutionary terms) over the last 12,000 years. This he refers to as “A train crash. An explosion. A mushroom rising from the wet ground of our origin.” No other species has ever accomplished this. According to the measure of ‘presence’ we obviously dominate the many losers in the Darwinian race for survival:
So our sense of entitlement, of having been given ‘dominion’ over the other life forms with which we share space, seems to be justified.
But it turns out we are size-ist, ageist, humanist, and somewhat Swede-ish when it comes to assessing our place in the world. The millions of insect species, the billions of bacterial species, and the trillions of species of phage that live off the bacteria make us less than amateurs in the long-haul adaptiveness required in order to continue our hegemony. And this doesn’t even count the unknown number of microbes which inhabit the Earth’s crust and which have life-spans of millions of years. We have been confident only because we have been ignorant:
For our blindness, Rob Dunn says, we can thank the great 18th century Swedish botanist and zoologist who was the first to attempt a systematic catalogue of life on Earth. He apparently missed a lot that didn’t exist for the naked eye in the North Woods. So it’s taken some time for science to catch up with our actual situation which, as many suspected, is not nearly as sanguine as conventional metrics might indicate. Since our appearance on the evolutionary scene, Dunn says, we have been breaking all the rules of ecology, and we ought to stop it now that we’re less ignorant.
And there are many such rules, all intellectually interesting and with fascinating implications. The rule of natural selection is the most well known but taken in isolation it has been used as evidence of human evolutionary superiority. Other rules are equally relevant and suggest that we may not be so well-placed in the evolutionary hierarchy. For example the “diversity-stability law, states that ecosystems that include more species are more stable through time.” So as we cause the extinction of untold numbers of species that failed to adapt to us (or simply put them at a safe distance), we reduce our own survivability. This is reinforced by “The law of dependence ‘which states that all species depend on other species.” Others like the species-area law, the law of corridors, the law of escape, and the law of niche are derivatives of the requirements for diversity.
What Dunn doesn’t mention, however, is a law from another discipline, that of cybernetics. This is the Law of Requisite Variety which in essence states that any living thing must be as flexible in its response to environmental change as the range of changes in that environment. In other words, unless the diversity of possible responses is at least equal to the diversity of the potential changes around it, the species will not survive. It seems to me that all of Dunn’s ecological laws are in fact subsets of this Law of Requisite Variety.
Dunn suggests that we must become more adaptable by reversing our insistent violation of the laws of diversity. The argument is that this will increase the level of environmental stability, thus reducing the range of conditions to which humans must adapt. But it seems to me that there is a fundamental issue with his logic, and indeed that of a number of well-meaning environmentalists. This logic presumes that human choice to stabilise the environment, even if that were politically possible, is a rational objective. It is at least possible that such efforts are merely whistling in the dark.
Look at the facts Dunn provides. The most adaptive species on the planet are those microbes living in the Earth’s crust. Their environment is very stable, they need do nothing to survive until an expanding and dying Sun consumes the entire planet. Then there are the bacteria and their phages. These adapt rapidly and effectively to every environment known on the planet, from the Arctic wastes to the deep sea vents of methane gas, even to the presence of human beings. Whatever the planet has thrown at them, they have been able to use to their advantage.
The species Homo Sapiens is another matter altogether. We have evolved relatively slowly into a relatively stable environment. Our adaptations to this environment are almost exclusively technological rather than genetic. We protect, feed, shelter, and multiply ourselves through our knowledge of the world, and our collective not individual abilities, that is to say, through language. Language is our fundamental technology through which we have managed to survive and thrive. It is language that allows Dunn to communicate his laws and to suggest what we have to do to stabilise the environment.
But isn’t this the ultimate in anthro-centrist arrogance? As Dunn says, “Most of what is knowable is not known.” Indeed, most of what is knowable will never be known, will never be brought into language. The complexity of interaction and dependencies among species makes theories of nuclear physics look like casual conversation. This quite apart from the fact that non-biological possibilities for environmental change - from sun spots and changes in magnetic polarity to large-scale volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes - can make any understanding of current dependencies irrelevant at a stroke.
Dunn’s proposition that knowledge is the key to species survival is in itself paradoxical. Such knowledge can only be obtained by technology, the very technology which promotes the violation of Dunn’s laws of evolutionary biology. Philosophically speaking, he is recommending that we dig the hole we are in even deeper. It seems to me that our “train crash” actually occurred when our species found/created/developed language. We have been able to exploit a very narrow window of environmental stability pushing that capability relentlessly. We have been temporarily successful with this unique evolutionary strategy which depends acutely on a continuation of that stability, a very unlikely scenario even without human involvement. Dunn wants to push the technological strategy even further.
I prefer to think of us as a fragile aberration in evolutionary history, a genetic blind alley of over-specialisation, in short a flash in the pan of life. Dunn claims a 20th century American entomologist, Terry Erwin, as creating a Copernican Revolution in biology through his de-centring of biology so that Homo Sapiens was no longer its implicit focus. Perhaps what is necessary now is a kind of Einsteinian Revolution which recognises not just that we are not the top of the evolutionary heap, but that we don’t even qualify in the heats for the evolutionary race.
Dunn’s “first law of palaeontology” is that we will one day be extinct. We are likely to conform with that law just as quickly as we rose from species-obscurity. Pity the poor cockroaches, rats and bedbugs that will go extinct with us. Do they not bleed?
Postscript 14Dec21: https://www.washingtonpost.com/rolex-partnership-content/climate-solutions/the-microscopic-life-forms-that-make-ice-melt/
According to Rob Dunn, the growth in the human population and its expansion to every climatic zone on the planet occurred more or less instantaneously (in evolutionary terms) over the last 12,000 years. This he refers to as “A train crash. An explosion. A mushroom rising from the wet ground of our origin.” No other species has ever accomplished this. According to the measure of ‘presence’ we obviously dominate the many losers in the Darwinian race for survival:
“By one estimate, 32 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass on Earth is now composed of nothing more than fleshy, human bodies. Domestic animals make up 65 percent. Just 3 percent is left over for the rest of vertebrate life, the remaining tens of thousands of boney animal species.”
So our sense of entitlement, of having been given ‘dominion’ over the other life forms with which we share space, seems to be justified.
But it turns out we are size-ist, ageist, humanist, and somewhat Swede-ish when it comes to assessing our place in the world. The millions of insect species, the billions of bacterial species, and the trillions of species of phage that live off the bacteria make us less than amateurs in the long-haul adaptiveness required in order to continue our hegemony. And this doesn’t even count the unknown number of microbes which inhabit the Earth’s crust and which have life-spans of millions of years. We have been confident only because we have been ignorant:
“As we confront the future, our collective bearings are off, and our perception of the world around us is deeply flawed. Nothing is where it used to be. We have begun to crash into things; we find ourselves blindsided by life.”
For our blindness, Rob Dunn says, we can thank the great 18th century Swedish botanist and zoologist who was the first to attempt a systematic catalogue of life on Earth. He apparently missed a lot that didn’t exist for the naked eye in the North Woods. So it’s taken some time for science to catch up with our actual situation which, as many suspected, is not nearly as sanguine as conventional metrics might indicate. Since our appearance on the evolutionary scene, Dunn says, we have been breaking all the rules of ecology, and we ought to stop it now that we’re less ignorant.
And there are many such rules, all intellectually interesting and with fascinating implications. The rule of natural selection is the most well known but taken in isolation it has been used as evidence of human evolutionary superiority. Other rules are equally relevant and suggest that we may not be so well-placed in the evolutionary hierarchy. For example the “diversity-stability law, states that ecosystems that include more species are more stable through time.” So as we cause the extinction of untold numbers of species that failed to adapt to us (or simply put them at a safe distance), we reduce our own survivability. This is reinforced by “The law of dependence ‘which states that all species depend on other species.” Others like the species-area law, the law of corridors, the law of escape, and the law of niche are derivatives of the requirements for diversity.
What Dunn doesn’t mention, however, is a law from another discipline, that of cybernetics. This is the Law of Requisite Variety which in essence states that any living thing must be as flexible in its response to environmental change as the range of changes in that environment. In other words, unless the diversity of possible responses is at least equal to the diversity of the potential changes around it, the species will not survive. It seems to me that all of Dunn’s ecological laws are in fact subsets of this Law of Requisite Variety.
Dunn suggests that we must become more adaptable by reversing our insistent violation of the laws of diversity. The argument is that this will increase the level of environmental stability, thus reducing the range of conditions to which humans must adapt. But it seems to me that there is a fundamental issue with his logic, and indeed that of a number of well-meaning environmentalists. This logic presumes that human choice to stabilise the environment, even if that were politically possible, is a rational objective. It is at least possible that such efforts are merely whistling in the dark.
Look at the facts Dunn provides. The most adaptive species on the planet are those microbes living in the Earth’s crust. Their environment is very stable, they need do nothing to survive until an expanding and dying Sun consumes the entire planet. Then there are the bacteria and their phages. These adapt rapidly and effectively to every environment known on the planet, from the Arctic wastes to the deep sea vents of methane gas, even to the presence of human beings. Whatever the planet has thrown at them, they have been able to use to their advantage.
The species Homo Sapiens is another matter altogether. We have evolved relatively slowly into a relatively stable environment. Our adaptations to this environment are almost exclusively technological rather than genetic. We protect, feed, shelter, and multiply ourselves through our knowledge of the world, and our collective not individual abilities, that is to say, through language. Language is our fundamental technology through which we have managed to survive and thrive. It is language that allows Dunn to communicate his laws and to suggest what we have to do to stabilise the environment.
But isn’t this the ultimate in anthro-centrist arrogance? As Dunn says, “Most of what is knowable is not known.” Indeed, most of what is knowable will never be known, will never be brought into language. The complexity of interaction and dependencies among species makes theories of nuclear physics look like casual conversation. This quite apart from the fact that non-biological possibilities for environmental change - from sun spots and changes in magnetic polarity to large-scale volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes - can make any understanding of current dependencies irrelevant at a stroke.
Dunn’s proposition that knowledge is the key to species survival is in itself paradoxical. Such knowledge can only be obtained by technology, the very technology which promotes the violation of Dunn’s laws of evolutionary biology. Philosophically speaking, he is recommending that we dig the hole we are in even deeper. It seems to me that our “train crash” actually occurred when our species found/created/developed language. We have been able to exploit a very narrow window of environmental stability pushing that capability relentlessly. We have been temporarily successful with this unique evolutionary strategy which depends acutely on a continuation of that stability, a very unlikely scenario even without human involvement. Dunn wants to push the technological strategy even further.
I prefer to think of us as a fragile aberration in evolutionary history, a genetic blind alley of over-specialisation, in short a flash in the pan of life. Dunn claims a 20th century American entomologist, Terry Erwin, as creating a Copernican Revolution in biology through his de-centring of biology so that Homo Sapiens was no longer its implicit focus. Perhaps what is necessary now is a kind of Einsteinian Revolution which recognises not just that we are not the top of the evolutionary heap, but that we don’t even qualify in the heats for the evolutionary race.
Dunn’s “first law of palaeontology” is that we will one day be extinct. We are likely to conform with that law just as quickly as we rose from species-obscurity. Pity the poor cockroaches, rats and bedbugs that will go extinct with us. Do they not bleed?
Postscript 14Dec21: https://www.washingtonpost.com/rolex-partnership-content/climate-solutions/the-microscopic-life-forms-that-make-ice-melt/
stevienicole777's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
I don't think I'm the target audience for this book, but I appreciate what it was expressing.
figandturtle's review
challenging
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
4.0
The first half of this book needs a good copy edit to remove repetition and duplicate concepts, but ultimately this was a fascinating read that gives a clear view into our future. If you want to take the stance that life on this planet will ultimately be better without humanity, then it’s quite hopeful. This is a perspective book. Some of what humanity has done to the world will have irreparable consequences, but meanwhile, nature has and will continue to adapt through life forms we may never know. Dunn dives into some fascinating research here, though I did want a sense of dissenting opinions and alternate angles. The research may be somewhat cherry-picked. But the science is super accessible with an engaging writing style.
mwmakar's review
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
Lots of great examples, studies, with sharp-minded wit and logic to synthesize. Most memorable are the contextualizations around us: how needy we are for environment and climate, how relentless life is at hanging on, how unique but not special humans are.