On the shared genetic memories between us, the cat and the fly | Aeon Essays
David Waltner-Toewsaeon.co
On the shared genetic memories between us, the cat and the fly | Aeon Essays
Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth — our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves o ff from these other voices, to continue by ... See more
Claudia Chwalisz • Governing with the more-than-human world
Thomas added
The main thing I keep coming back to is that nothing flourishes in isolation. Neurons first evolved around the same time that animals started eating each other: that is to say, the fact that we have thought at all emerges from an evolutionary necessity to be aware of the presence of other animals. That doesn’t mean intelligence has its origins in h... See more
Dark Properties – A quest to dig up bright ideas across shared ...
Andrei Stoica added
Once again, in imagining better ways of living with non-humans, computational or biological, we must be attentive to their own ways of speaking and making meaning, and not simply insist that they learn to speak, and think, and behave, in the ways that we do.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
He wondered whether certain animals might not share some kind of ‘group mind’, which he described as a ‘sort of psychic blueprint between members of a species’. Might not all species, he suggested, be linked together in a ‘cosmic mind’ that was capable of carrying evolutionary information through time and space?
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
“They move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” wrote the American naturalist Henry Beston. “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and tr
... See moreEd Yong • An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
How many illegible others, human and nonhuman, have perished because we did not attend to them properly? I think of the terrifying rates of species extinction, as well as the disproportionate death rates of queer, racialized, and otherwise marginalized bodies. How many have not perished, but are reduced in some way, smaller versions of the beings t... See more
Jasmine Wang • attending to the other
We are suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower life forms, perhaps because we are about to become one.