Why life should amaze everyone.

[Kai]

(Ready to be posted to the PD.com blog, whoever wants to)


This line of thought started from a blog post about algae-animal endosymbiosis.

http://www.seaslugforum.net/showall.cfm?base=solarpow

ProTIP: Most corals are "solar powered" too. All lichens are.

Its algae living inside other organisms, and its awesome. It doesn't surprise me that some nudibranchs (marine flatworms) are doing it. What surprises me is the storage, not of the whole algae, but just of the plastids, the cell organelles that convert solar energy into simple sugars. The reason it surprises and excites me is because this is the way plants evolved, through ingesting photosynthetic bacteria. Thats how algae came about, and then other types of animals ate that type of algae and made a NEW type. Srsly, there are some algae that came about from eating another algae that ate another algae that ate photosynthetic bacteria. Anyway, the nudibranchs in the blog post may eventually keep the plastids and  transfer them during reproduction. Its pretty incredible.

There are some microorganisms that still do exactly what those nudibranchs do.  There is so much weird stuff out there.

I mean, think of diatoms here for a second. First of all, they're photosynthetic by secondary endosymbiosis, so a photosynthetic bacteria was eaten by a brown algae was eaten by some organism that became a yellow-green algae which later led to diatoms. Diatoms then evolved this hard exterior frustule which is composed of glass. The frustule is in two parts, a bottom layer and a top layer. The two parts overlap each other like a petri dish. And you start thinking about how these things move, they actually excrete a fluid that pushes them along, a sort of microscopic slime trail like a slug almost. And THEN you start looking at all the amazing shapes and surface structures of these frustules, pits, ridges, grooves, pores. Its so completely beyond weird, its bizarre, yet most people never consider it.

Do I need to talk about lichens? Do I need to go into the fact that a fungus is basically a mat of hair like cells that dissolves dead or decaying material, and then creates these elaborate reproductive structures which we then eat (mushrooms)? Do I have to talk about catepilars that build underwater nets to filter food, or snakes that can flatten their bodies to glide through the air? Should I even consider mentioning fungus that feeds off of radioactive decay, tubeworms that live around thermal vents several kilometers down in the ocean, or tardigrades, tiny mite like organisms that enter a seed like state, alowing them to survive without food, water or even in outer space?

This world is bizarre and wonderful and wild and evolution is a beautiful game that shows the best that the emergent creativity in the universe has to offer. I don't know how ANYONE can fail to be entertained, amazed, intrigued, engrossed, or amused with this planet. I don't know how anyone can be bored with living things. Every time I LOOK I hear about Acacia trees that have sugar glands and hollow horns so that ants will nest and protect, or colossal squid 8 meters long with huge claws on their suckers, or orangutans fishing with spears, or FUCK even bacteria or turfgrass or CORN is interesting if you look hard enough. Barbara McClintock pretty much put the period on that idea. I could go on and on for hours about these things.

I don't know how anyone can't.


No no no, I'll go on. I'm inspired now. Theres this caddisfly larva in the family Polycentropodidae. It makes this tube like web and lines of silk running outward from the edges. It senses when its prey is near, feels the vibrations on the threads and darts out to grab its prey, and this is all going on underwater.

Dragonfly young have a hinged and fanged lower jaw that shoots out alien style to catch food, sometimes fish sized organisms.

Back to the algae again, there are these organisms called Euglenoids. They are photosynthetic but get some of their food by feeding from the environment, just like the nudibranchs above. They can make food  and they can eat stuff. Plus, they have this weird exoskeleton that can change shape from a sphere to almost any sort of spheroid.

Or maybe to grasses. Grasses have some of the most amazing and complex flowers you will ever see, and include everything from woody bamboo to kentucky blue. They are almost all wind pollinated too.

And speaking of pollination, no really. Think of all the species of insects and plants that are made possible by the pollination symbiosis. First just consider directly all the plants that have flowers that are pollinated in some way by insects, and the insects that directly pollinate them. So, this includes most flowering plants excluding those that are wind pollinated, as well as thousands of species of insects.

Now consider all those organisms that live on and around those plants.

Now consider all those organisms that feed on those plants.

Now consider all those organisms that feed on the organisms that are feeding on those plants, or are feeding on the pollinators of those plants, or are feeding on the organisms that live and feed on those plants, etc etc etc, ad infinitum.

Ecology is fucking amazing and wild and FUCK.

YOU start thinking of all the connections begining with one species and increase the bounds outwards until it includes everything living on this planet and all the interactions with the environment RIGHT NOW, and then extend that forward and backward in time and see if you don't start sobbing like a little child at the immensity of it like I am right now, like I am whenever I consider it, like people do when they stare at the stars and consider the distance. YOU start looking at the connections, and maybe the reason I wrote The Process will become clear and obvious, because when you reach that threshold, when you consider the cell to the biosphere, a single organism to world ecology, bacteria to all the complexity, the past workings of creativity, the future workings of creativity, the innate capacity for creativity and tie it all together you are standing at the door of infinity, and you glimpse the Process that overlies it all and it destroys you and rebuilds you from the inside out until you are whole. Once you start considering THIS immensity, the stars seem close, and the distances small, because the innate emergent creativity here, on this planet, is greater than anything we have found out there, or daresay will ever find.

You want amazement, you want awe, you want eternal excitement? Do you want to see GOD every day in every single drop of water, every single dust mote or grain of soil?


Go into Biology. Srsly.

[Brotep]

Oh also, uh...Music is pretty cool too guys.

[Kai]

O.o

[Cramulus]

This is a good piece. I like the fine technical froth you work up to towards the end, overwhelmed by how vast it all is. You should consider submitting this for the Weirdness issue of Intermittens (that RWHN is editing).

If I could offer some suggestions - the first five or so paragraphs were way over my head. To be honest this took me two tries to read - the first time I multitasked away after paragraph three because I figured this wasn't written for lay people. But your attention to the absurd beauty of nature saves it in the end.

  So if you were to edit this, I'd suggest reworking the intro to frame the frenzy you're building towards.

overall, good piece

[Reginald Ret]

i would prefer it to stay the same, but i see where youre coming from Cramulus.
Also this looks very familiar... didn't you already post part of this?

[Kai]

i would prefer it to stay the same, but i see where youre coming from Cramulus.
Also this looks very familiar... didn't you already post part of this?

It was in the science news post. I wrote it in several posts on a night when I just had some....SOMETHING going on in my head and had to get it out. Its one of those thought trains you have to see through to the end, that sort of feeling.

[Kai]

This is a good piece. I like the fine technical froth you work up to towards the end, overwhelmed by how vast it all is. You should consider submitting this for the Weirdness issue of Intermittens (that RWHN is editing).

If I could offer some suggestions - the first five or so paragraphs were way over my head. To be honest this took me two tries to read - the first time I multitasked away after paragraph three because I figured this wasn't written for lay people. But your attention to the absurd beauty of nature saves it in the end.

  So if you were to edit this, I'd suggest reworking the intro to frame the frenzy you're building towards.

overall, good piece

The first five paragraphs? Sure can do.

Somewhat better. Clarified some stuff, removed some stuff, moved some stuff around.

[CynicalCichilid]

That was really good Kai. This is a piece of writing that I've got to show to some of my friends.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Holy shit dude. This is so badass.

I've only had a year or so of biology and it was fucking mindblowing.

Love it.

[Xooxe]

Go into Biology. Srsly.

Hell yeah. I'm really fascinated with molecular biology at the moment. I know so little and it's already doing so much to my insight.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Lol, three thousand views.

[Faust]

Lol, three thousand views.

What the....

EDIT: hehe
awesome kai, someone stumbled you thread.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php%253Ftopic%253D18996.0

[Kai]

Lol, three thousand views.

What the....

EDIT: hehe
awesome kai, someone stumbled you thread.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php%253Ftopic%253D18996.0

Holy shit.



Maybe I need to write more often. Fuck. 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

You clearly do, as you are an excellent writer.