Ed Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Writing last year for his articles in the Atlantic (not my employer) about the COVID-19 pandemic, which I called way back in May of 2020, over a year before the award announcement. I was already a fan of his work after reading his tremendous first book, I Contain Multitudes, a thoughtful, detailed look at the importance of the microbiome, and how so many of our actions and policies work against our own health because of our fear of bacteria. (He also described the experiment to infect male Aeges aegypti mosquitos with the Wolbachia bacterium, which makes the eggs that result from their mating activity fail to hatch. It has since been used to reduce mosquito populations in areas where dengue fever is endemic.)
Yong’s latest book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, is a big departure from anything he’s written before, although he retains both his commitment to scientific accuracy and the sense of wonder that permeated his first book. This time around, he’s exploring an area I would guess most readers have never contemplated: How animals sense the world, often in ways that are beyond the reach of our senses, or even rely on senses that humans don’t have.
Yong begins with some discussion of the erroneous historical view, one that still persists today on a smaller scale, that non-human animals are less cognitively capable than we are, because we have evolved consciousness and they haven’t. It’s a view that fails on its face, as just about everyone who’s been around a dog knows that canines can hear sounds we can’t – hence the dog whistle, at least in its literal sense. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that there are examples across the animal world, and in some cases in other biological kingdoms as well, of senses more powerful than our five senses, and examples beyond those.
One of the best-known colloquial examples, although I would say probably not a well-understood one by laypeople, is echolocation in bats. Bats are nearly blind, but their powers of echolocation, using what we now call sonar to determine not just where objects are around them, but to find food and distinguish, say, something to eat from the leaf on which it’s sitting, involve a mental processing speed that is hard for us to comprehend. And it turns out humans are capable of echolocation as well, although evolution hasn’t advanced our skills in that area to the same extent because we haven’t needed it.
Yong also describes the handful of species that can sense the Earth’s magnetic field, a sense humans do not have at all, to find their way back to the beach where they were born, in the case of some turtles. There are animals and insects that can see parts of the infrared spectrum that we can’t, but there are also substantial portions of the animal kingdom that don’t see the world in the same colors we see – which is why waving a red cape in front of a bull is just a silly tradition, as bulls don’t have the red cones in their eyes to detect that color. Indeed, few animals see the world in the same colors that we do, which comes down to the fact that color isn’t something inherent in nature; it is how our eyes perceive vibrations of molecules in nature, because we have red, green, and blue cones in our retinas that send signals that our brains convert to color. (And some people, almost all women, have a fourth cone, making them “tetrachromats,” which Yong also discusses.) If you don’t have those cones, you see the world completely differently.
Yong ends with what is probably the most important part of An Immense World – an examination of how humans are screwing all of this up. You’re probably aware of how climate change and overdevelopment are already threatening habitats around the world. Light pollution threatens many species that rely on natural light sources to find food or shelter, or to migrate; noise pollution interferes with many species’ ability to communicate with each other, to find mates or identify predators. Humanity’s rapid rise in the last 200 years has been an unmitigated disaster for everything else on the planet, and Yong points to even more threats to biodiversity than those we already know about (e.g., those explained in The Sixth Extinction). There are also some examples of species adapting to these changes – birds that have learned to hang out near streetlights to eat the moths attracted to the illumination, for example – but they’re too few to make up for the losses. We have to be the ones to adapt, to live with less light, less noise, less everything, so that we don’t lose any more than we’ve already lost, especially not before we’ve learned more about it.
Also, Ed will be my guest this week on the Keith Law Show. The episode should be up on Tuesday, 9/20.
Next up: Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.