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If nothing else, school teaches that there is an answer to every question; only in the real world do young people discover that many aspects of life are uncertain, mysterious, and even unknowable.
The more you watch, the more mysterious the natural world becomes, and the more you realize how little you know. Along with its beauty, you may also come to experience its fecundity, its wastefulness, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, parasitism, and its violence. These qualities are not well-conveyed in textbooks. Perhaps the single most important lesson to be learned by direct experience is that the natural world, with all its elements and interconnections, represents a complex system and therefore we cannot understand it and we cannot predict its behavior.
Human beings interact with complex systems very successfully. We do it all the time. But we do it by managing them, not by claiming to understand them. Managers interact with the system: they do something, watch for the response, and then do something else in an effort to get the result they want. There is an endless iterative interaction that acknowledges we don’t know for sure what the system will do—we have to wait and see. We may have a hunch we know what will happen. We may be right much of the time. But we are never certain. Interacting with the natural world, we are denied certainty.
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A quarter of all known species were beetles. Years ago, a reporter had asked the famed biologist J. B. S. Haldane what could be deduced about the Creator from the creation, and Haldane had answered, “He has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”
Bombardier beetles got their name from their ability to fire a hot, noxious spray in any direction from a rotating turret at the tip of their abdomen. The spray was sufficiently unpleasant that it stopped toads and birds from eating them, and it was toxic enough to kill smaller insects immediately. How bombardier beetles accomplished this had been studied since the early 1900s, and by now the mechanism was well understood. “The beetles produce boiling-hot benzoquinone spray,” she explained, “which they make from precursors stored in the body. They have two sacs in the rear of the abdomen—I’m
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“We already know the basic situation,” she said. “There are 300,000 known species of plants in the world, and 900,000 species of insects, and many of them eat plants. Why haven’t all the plants vanished, chewed down to the ground? Because all plants long ago evolved defenses against insects that attack them. Animals can run away from predators, but plants can’t. So they have evolved chemical warfare. Plants produce their own pesticides, or they generate toxins to make their leaves taste bad, or they release volatile chemicals that attract the insect’s predators. And sometimes they release
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Peter went over to Danny. “A hand-waver,” he said, “is somebody who hasn’t worked out his ideas and can’t defend them. So when he presents at a colloquium, and he comes to the parts he hasn’t worked out, he starts waving his hands and talking fast. Like the way someone waves their hands and says, ‘Et cetera, et cetera.’ In science, hand-waving means you don’t have the goods.”
What is it about nature that is so terrifying to the modern mind? Why is it so intolerable? Because nature is fundamentally indifferent. It’s unforgiving, uninterested. If you live or die, succeed or fail, feel pleasure or pain, it doesn’t care. That’s intolerable to us.
The balance of power lies in the hands of the entity that always holds the balance of power—nature. Nature, Danny. Not us. All we can do is go for the ride and try to hang on.”
Nature was not gentle or nice. There was no such thing as mercy in the natural world. You don’t get any points for trying. You either survive or you don’t.
The spider venom was Ebola in thirty seconds.
“There is a Zen saying that a wise man can live comfortably in hell.
