{"id":9560,"date":"2022-09-19T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-19T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9560"},"modified":"2022-09-18T18:23:41","modified_gmt":"2022-09-18T22:23:41","slug":"an-immense-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/19\/an-immense-world\/","title":{"rendered":"An Immense World."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ed Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Writing last year for his articles in the Atlantic <\/em>(not my employer) about the COVID-19 pandemic, which I called way back in May of 2020<\/a>, 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><\/em>, 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 <\/em>mosquitos with the Wolbachia <\/em>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<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yong\u2019s latest book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us<\/a><\/em>, is a big departure from anything he\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t. It\u2019s a view that fails on its face, as just about everyone who\u2019s been around a dog knows that canines can hear sounds we can\u2019t \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019t advanced our skills in that area to the same extent because we haven\u2019t needed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

Yong also describes the handful of species that can sense the Earth\u2019s 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\u2019t, but there are also substantial portions of the animal kingdom that don\u2019t see the world in the same colors we see \u2013 which is why waving a red cape in front of a bull is just a silly tradition, as bulls don\u2019t 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\u2019t 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 \u201ctetrachromats,\u201d which Yong also discusses.) If you don\u2019t have those cones, you see the world completely differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yong ends with what is probably the most important part of An Immense World \u00ad<\/em>\u2013 an examination of how humans are screwing all of this up. You\u2019re 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\u2019 ability to communicate with each other, to find mates or identify predators. Humanity\u2019s 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<\/em>). There are also some examples of species adapting to these changes \u2013 birds that have learned to hang out near streetlights to eat the moths attracted to the illumination, for example \u2013 but they\u2019re 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\u2019t lose any more than we\u2019ve already lost, especially not before we\u2019ve learned more about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, Ed will be my guest this week on the Keith Law Show. The episode should be up on Tuesday, 9\/20.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Steve Silberman\u2019s Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[938,161,163,225,799],"class_list":["post-9560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books","tag-highly-recommended","tag-history-of-science","tag-non-fiction","tag-science","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9560"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9561,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9560\/revisions\/9561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}