Author: ramsey affifi

Ecological and existential barriers to interdisciplinary

This blog post takes an ecological approach towards understanding interdisciplinarity, opening questions about the purpose and consequences of different ways of keeping disciplines separated, intermingling, or fused. By extension, I explore how an ecological approach might inform the kind of interdisciplinary thinking we might need to conceive, evaluate and respond to the inter/disciplinary challenges currently faced. Here, I am particularly concerned with the existential sides of engaging in interdisciplinarity and how these ‘ecologise’ with different facets of human and biotic worlds.

Interdisciplinarity is often promoted for the benefits new knowledges play in addressing social, economic or ecological problems. One concern is that siloed knowledge leads to actions and attitudes based on partial premises, and dialogue between silos can achieve a more holistic picture of phenomena. Undoubtedly the interdisciplinary conversation between, say, coral reef biologists and atmospheric scientists helps understand the causes of, and steps forward in addressing, mass bleaching of these wondrous systems. But does it follow that interdisciplinarity is always good ‘ecologically’? 

Through dynamic interactions between relata, ecologies maintain certain variables while changing others. They develop ‘dynamic equilibria’ (Kauffman 1993), patterns of stability across space and time, which become enabling conditions for the organisation and emergence of complexity. For example, while a species of bee and flower may in principle evolve in diverse ways, in practice they mutually specify the range and rates of change of the other (Maturana and Varela 1992) -at least until dependence relationships break down. 

Disciplines and interdisciplines are also involved in a range of ecological dynamics. They are not only patterns of knowing, they are also patterns interacting with the world. These interactions can become very complex, affecting, among many other things, the ‘psychology’ of the knower. Our epistemological and existential needs also regulate rates of being and becoming in the relationships they constitute. These may be dangerous (dysecological), healthful, or either or both, at different temporal and spatial scales.

An ecological approach to knowing suggests sometimes even false premises will be ‘used’ for the stabilities they produce. Plastic in the ocean becomes a niche for new ecosystems, a faulty theory may still be the basis for a prosperous academic career. In the ecological and existential dimensions of interdisciplinarity, errors can become true through the relations they come to sustain. But such scaling out eventually leads to laissez-faire relativism. We need to make a cut. Ought we see how different ecologies emerge on different scales, within and without, before we do so?  How do we learn to give up some cherished ecologies when we come to see others as more important? How can education approach these problems?

Some scholars have suggested there is a magical moment two disciplines cross boundaries and meet one another (Angerer). ‘Magic’ suggests positive qualities seen characteristic of an interdisciplinary experience: a sense of suspense, of surprise, of enchantment, perhaps a feeling the synthesis appearing before consciousness is the result of some subterranean sleight-of-hand work in our personal or social physiologies. I have felt something ‘magical’ in the arising of new ideas and insights when seemingly separated rivers come to ramble together. But I also sometimes feel resistance, and I remember that magic has long been associated with the dark arts, a space where people fear to tread.

A discipline is a habitual way of attending the world, where people, boundaries, concepts, logics, practices, and materials, ecologise into a self-reinforcing groove. Much has settled into the unconscious, because we stop thinking about what we know well or do often. But a vibrant edge of novelty remains,  like a magic froth on the invisible wave that carries us. As researchers, we may relish this edge; it gives opportunity to experience freshness, but within the safe contexts of a sensible matrix. We get our little adventures but we still get our home.

Interdisciplinarity demands a different psychology. What does it feel like to have the foundations of one’s home pulled away? Even the silent work sustaining our magic froth seems now at risk. Along with it, the decades of work invested into that way of worldmaking, the professional identities constellated around it, even the way it has simply given to the world a structure, a logos, a nest: there may even be inklings of a spiritual abyss gloaming in the distance. (Moreover, other people and perhaps species too have come to rely on the regularities arising from my habit, however ill conceived it may be). Add the pragmatic fact we have trained to see and act towards phenomena in a certain way, magnified our focus of a sliver of the world while backgrounding the unknown unknowns needed to sustain that gaze. Is it any wonder attempts at interdisciplinarity often have lackluster outcomes? 

Some educational questions arise from thinking about this existential ecology:

Maybe all new thought is magical. It involves the birth of the new from the old, and with it our participation in the creation of the world. The more difficult and unexpected the birth, the more astonishing it may be, -and so how do we respond to the dynamics of stability and change in interdisciplinary education? Perhaps the psychology guarding the well-disciplined mind against radical novelty produces and protects something sacred in its arising, and it would be somehow desecrating or improprietous to force such confluences. 

Nevertheless, it would be absurd to try to protect the ‘magic’ of an unexpectedly rare offspring when the cost of keeping disciplines separated is a thousand clumsy cuts into the also magical world outside of us. The ecologies of the mind retained at the expense of the ecologies around it. Cancer too is an ecology. Sustainability cannot concern solely with inner ecologies or outer ones, but with the interconnected dynamics between them. After all, hidden connections between things in the world are occluded by the disciplines, and the magic we experience in the novelty of knowing mirrors the magic felt at the revelation of the world. What kind of discipline or interdiscipline can perceive these dynamics and respond to them?

If current disciplinary structures need to be taken down urgently, what kind of disciplinarity follows, given ecologies necessarily sustain patterns and enabling conditions? What is an ecological approach to ecology? If there is no solution we must agree on, how to educate for pluralism in light of our existential needs? 

The Hogweed and the Tilia tree

“I love Hogweed,” I said to a friend a few days ago. But can people love whole species? A species is a category and, according to some, a humanly constructed one. Such a term creates a boundary of inclusion and exclusion, pulling us away from the particularity of this flower in this moment. What could it possibly mean to love a cold and divisive lattice of generality? On the face of it, it seems like a misdirected emotion— possibly a reflection of my own human-centeredness, my own failure to see the individuality of the plants themselves. Could this be this superficial speciesm masquerading as love? 

That I am endeared to Tilia trees on the basis of having one in the back garden of my childhood home is a betrayal of the depth of experience I actually had with that being. Doesn’t it seem unlikely that people would love all other humans through having had a deep connection with a specific one? And if that did happen, it would seem somehow wrong— dehumanising. You can only love a category to the extent to which you fail to see the differences of its members. And yet, my feeling of attraction to, and desire to care for certain plant species is greater than it is for others. 

And yet, and yet. A species also feels to me like something more than ‘just’ a category. It is also a recurrence. The growth and development of Hogweed is bound with the passing seasons. The pattern is real and very visceral: it is a yearly return of bright green hands splayed across the bare spring soil, frizzy white wrinkled leaflets skyward bound, a rapid acceleration towards the sun, the flower’s rupture from its papery sheath, the explosion of symmetry in pink or white, the spicy grapefruit and cardamom scented seeds left behind to dangle from dying stalks as the light and warmth recede. It is a return of associations with other plants, animals and with my memories too. Perhaps long-lived trees— those veterans seeped with centuries of idiosyncrasy— do not need to reproduce their pattern to keep these realities alive. We can simply wander back to the same tree again and again. But the return to annuals, and the way they stitch themselves into the memory of people and places, requires, it seems, the transcendence of the individual organism. After all, the bumblebee yearns for the Bramble blossom every July. 

Each spring, my backyard Tilia spreads out new shoots and the tree’s form shifts, from the canopy all the way down to its epigenetics. Some view a deciduous tree as a decentralised fury of annuals tied to a woody structure for ease of water and nutrient. So, perhaps we never return to the ‘same’ tree either. The idea of loving an individual and distrusting the love of a recurring pattern is perhaps not anthropocentric speciesism at all, then, but rather the conceit of those with central nervous systems! Perhaps. But I am not sure even this is quite right. Plants teach us about the reality of types, a kind of platonism that wraps its lessons back even into the human: is it not true that when we love another person, in some sense we love the recurrence of their pattern, too? Is this pattern not itself the collaborative recreation of countless beings and processes? Every cell is recycled, every memory and habit restored. Differences and repetitions, themes, and variations, through and through. 

It would be absurd to say that I only love my wife in a series present moments. I also love her overall person, even though this ‘her’ is not instantiated in any specific moment. I only experience her in individual moments, but those moments are part of an overall pattern which includes all the moments I have and will experience with her. I have never met that overall person, because I cannot experience all these moments simultaneously. But I love that person anyway. Loving a species is extended across instances in space, loving an individual person is extended across instances in time. All individuals are types, all categories are unique patterns of becoming. 

And love happens in the interplay between all these contradictions.

The circle and the square

Pure science is an erotic pursuit. Unlike applied research, which merely aims to create and control, the pure scientist’s quest is a reaching towards mystery. It is an attraction to what is glimpsed but hidden, felt but veiled, possibly elusive, and possibly untouchable. It is filled with risk and uncertainty and yearning. And like any erotic dynamic, its success is often deflationary. When first uncovered, scientific insights are earth-quaking— but quickly become quotidian. Who marvels much anymore that the earth revolves around the sun, or that humans are the product of evolution? Can you imagine how stunning these discoveries must have been when they first arose? The great insights science sometimes achieves are revolutionary moments of human communion with nature, moments of synchronicity— when our way of understanding meets the world. They ought to be lingered upon and revered, not shuffled into the minds of children as mere fact. What happens when schools or societies merely present the world without its startling or hidden aspects, without its fathomless depth? What ought we do to retain and enrich the erotic potential of existence? 

I ask these questions as I consider the work of plant scientists investigating the secret lives of the vegetal world. On the one hand, I am enthralled by such research and excited by where it may take us. I see it as a key of hope that might unlock the modern, anaesthetised mind to the wonder of the plant world. The plethora of books on plant intelligence, communication and behaviour certainly suggests a contemporary appetite for such insight. But I am also concerned this might be a deal with the devil. At what point have we gathered enough suggestions that the plant world is more than it appears to be? Does science need to rush in and bring every dark underside into the glare of its explicit light? Of course, plant explorations may be endless, in which case we need never worry about all these sacred question marks getting flipped on their heads. Each answer would always reveal new questions, and the erotic would be forever intact. Yes, perhaps everything in the universe has infinite sides to it— an insurance against the sloppy greed of reaching hands. It would be a gift we hardly deserve. 

But perhaps not. 

There was only one Copernican revolution. From that point on, progress has been about filling in details. Consider the discovery that Jupiter has moons. Fascinating to be sure, but not earth-shattering. That the sun itself spirals around the Milky Way, while still cool, does not have the same mind-bending significance as earth’s original displacement. It is a variation on a theme, as is the finding that the Milky Way is itself spinning around some even greater celestial centre. So, too, there was only one Einsteinian revolution, and one Darwinian revolution— even though people continue to discuss how spacetime works and evolution occurs. So, perhaps one day there will be no more revolutions left to be had. Perhaps after discovering plant learning and plant communication, we will continue to debate all the bits and pieces of how it happens, but in a sense, it will all be the equivalent of finding more moons orbiting Jupiter. 

I suppose I am beginning to wonder heretical things. Has the time come to ask if slowing down, or even stopping scientific research into plants might be needed? We have enough empirical data to meditate upon for decades to come. Perhaps we need to work out what kind of relationships are being asked of us given the insights gained, given the silences we can still feel, and to do more listening than quarrying. But we seem hellbent on pushing past what we have tasted rather than dwelling on it and allowing it into our minds and hearts. I have often argued that pure science is important, and been critical of what seems instrumentalising and corrupt about applied science. But would it really be all that bad if capitalism continued to claw away at pure science and succeeded in reducing all inquiry to technological research and development? If, in desecrating our capacity to uncover the glory, the churning economy accidentally protects it? I suppose the eros that drives me to pure science is the same eros that hesitates before it. 

One might counter: what you say about scientific progress might be generally true, but scientific facts that point towards and make more plausible the possibility of sentience in another creature are an exception. For hundreds of years, Western science has fixated on explaining the world through identifying underlying mechanisms and regularities. As a consequence of this way of thinking filtering down into society, many people see plants as no more than very complex molecules. Beautiful perhaps, but certainly not as having any inner life. One could see the explosion of interest in plant intelligence as an attempt to culturally recover from the grip of this worldview. The surprising complexity and responsiveness that science reveals makes it again conceivable to ask questions such as: ‘What is it like to be a plant?’ In this way, science may be saving plants from the effects of former science, of lifting itself out of its own limitations. By opening up the possibility of sentience in another, science is thereby birthing an unknowability into the universe it presumes to know. Further scientific insight into plants would become more beguiling the more we catch glimpses of the previously unknown because the sentience of another 

can only be inferred but not experienced directly. So, at least in this instance, science might be bringing the mist back to the mountaintops. 

But is this the antidote we need? I tend to think this gain is temporary and full of risk. It seems to me that intelligence, decision-making, communication, or behaviour revealed in plants by science invariably appears under the vice of mechanical explanations. Science cannot do otherwise. Its entire strategy is to create explanations that are reliably and physically observable. Even our brains, conscious if anything is, appear as but a dizzying network of chemistry and physics when looked at closely enough by science. Even if the organisation of the material world causes consciousness to emerge, no model of the brain leads intuitively from stuff to subjectivity. It is not clear whether neuroscience, let alone plant science, would be able to free anyone from the totalising clutch of scientific mechanism. The only reason we are able to defer this perspective in plant science or in neuroscience is because we have not yet discovered all the mechanisms. Here, remaining question marks provide a promissory note, a space where the objective and the subjective might paradoxically co-exist. But as long as science is the principle means of discovery, only objects will be pulled from that ever-diminishing pool of space. 

In any case, knowledge is too cheap in our era. We google it for a quick fix. The erotic is fragile, the mist on the mountain burned away by the sun. We run to the light in the glee of revelation, and the erotic becomes an ever more endangered experience. We must do what we can to nurture it. I suppose what I am suggesting is that human knowing should slow down and re-join the rest of the human spirit, get back into intercourse with the ecology in which it exists— which includes the heart, the body, and the world. I suppose I am suggesting we sit back and spend some time quietly with the plant world, rather than reading about it on the backs of their fallen ancestors. The meaning of recent insights needs to circle back into direct experience, so new intimacies and new questions can arise in encounter with the plant world around us.

Impatience with Impatiens

I was born and raised in a settler city sprawling through the middle of traditional Anishnaabe territory. Despite living and breathing land kept by Anishnaabe people, my education occurred within, and indeed maintained, a bubble separating me from this broader cultural world. I grew up with a love, admiration and care for the living world around me, and yet even here, my stock of concepts was influenced by people born to those across the Atlantic, not by the children and tenders of my own watershed. 

Despite this all too familiar scenario, a number of concerns with the environmental narratives circling about crept into my consciousness. One concern was with the term ‘invasive species’, a label cast so casually by those within my bubble. Even if these creatures were shaking up existing ecological balances, it bothered me that adults taught children to vilify them under the guise of ‘education’. I wondered if the phrase victimised not only Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata), Purple Loofestrife (Lythrum salicaria) and countless other animals and plants, but also the young recipients of these words, replacing the possibility of enchantment in their story of the world with experiences of judgment and division. When the xenophobic language of the populist right in Britain and North America regularly hit my social media feed, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the stock of metaphors used in politics was being imported into ecology. I was struck by an apparent contradiction: many of my environmentalist friends were appalled at the use of such language in the human realm but adhered to it unflinchingly in the field of the green, the feathered, and the furry. 

How could the impulse to ‘other’ others be condemned in one context but taken up in another? I pondered whether something Jungian was at work. Even if invasive species were sometimes causing disturbance to local ecosystems, is calling them ‘invasive’, creating ‘eradication programs’ and all the rest of the militarism, really the best way to approach them? Are many of us settlers and globally mobile citizens unsettled in our depths about where we ‘should’ be living? Are environmentalists projecting onto other species a darkness within? What inner work do we need to do before treading into questions of how we might treat these prolific newcomers? 

Now living in the land where my grandfather was born, and still not feeling quite at home, I stand at the edge of the Water of Leith, watching its inexorable flow under the crisp, winter sun. I imagine clusters of Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) clambering along its edges sometime after the summer crests and the days start shortening again. The government has occasionally called the Royal Marines in to destroy this showy, pink flower, and researchers are investigating biological diseases to wipe them out. But bees have accepted this plant into their web of relations, delighting in what seems a joyous frenzy from its copious nectar. When does a plant— or a person —become native to a place? 

Newspapers regularly remind us of ‘pollinator collapse’ set in motion by a collision of threats; from pesticide use to habitat destruction. Might Himalayan Balsam’s flourishing be part of ecological rebalancing rather than disruption? Few questions so quickly furrow my ecologist friends’ brows. Perhaps their irritation is warranted. Alongside other local species, bees seem to favour Himalayan Balsam (Horsely, 2016). The presence of Himalayan Balsam may thereby reduce the pollination of other species, some already curbed by its fecundity. But like many ecological studies, how we bracket our vision turns out to be crucial. A study must have a beginning and an end, and conclusions are drawn from within these boundaries. While the results are in a certain sense objective, the decision of when to start and stop the study is not. In this case, as long as the Himalayan Balsam’s nectar exceeds the needs of the bee population, bees may well favour it to the detriment of other plants. But such a scenario is obviously temporary. At some point Himalayan Balsam’s plentiful supply will increase pollinator populations but can no longer supply the demand. Other less alluring food sources are then sought out. Davis (2011) calls this ‘the car dealership effect’. In recent years, some popular science books have argued that invasive species seem to cause fewer extinctions than previously assumed (Pearce, 2015; Thomas, 2018). Perhaps they jump in to fill opening niches and catalyse evolutionary change? 

Others point out many invasive species run rampant because they have no natural predators. Maybe so, but the best way to ensure a predator develops is to let a would-be prey expand its range. If there is any ecological rule, it is that an unexploited niche is an evolutionary opportunity. It is not clear how long we’d wait for animal grazers to step in, but we can be confident opportunistic microbes will quickly emerge. Again, the question is timescale. People are currently testing fungi that might infect Himalayan Balsam (Tanner et al., 2015)— but we know that if we didn’t, something would evolve anyway. What is the rush? What kind of hero story do we need to maintain? Why do we need to insist that the intervention restoring balance come from us rather than nature? And how does this hero story link up with the villain story? Is there a tragic feedback loop between guilt and hubris? Instead of revelling in a nature increasingly manipulated to fulfil an image we’ve concocted from the arbitrary past, might we not become careful students and attentive lovers of the process by which ecosystems adjust and accommodate change? Is nature an active intelligent process or a static process to be preserved? Might ecosystems’ self-regulation exceed our comprehension? The biosphere, after all, evolved myriad creatures in complex co-existence with all their countless fascinating features. Surely the arrival of new species— be it through hitching on the backs of birds, on logs projected into the seas by violent monsoon rivers, or through continental merging —is nothing new in the story of the Earth. What role does patience, indeed humility, play in conservation? 

With these thoughts in mind, I google how Anishnaabe people view invasive species. As many Anishnaabe people still live in intercourse with the land, I imagine invasive species might impact them more directly than urbanites who malign new species’ encroachments on their places of leisure. Reo and Ogden’s (2018) ethnography of indigenous Anishnaabe communities reveals some common features lacing through a wide variety of views and practices towards invasive species. Anishnaabe people are likely to view invasive species as migrating communities or, as they call them, nations. Many consider every nation to have gifts to share, and accepting their gifts fosters reciprocal responsibilities of care and respect. Human and more-than-human nations may not yet know or understand the gifts a new nation might bring to a place, but all have an active role in co-determining the new relationship that will emerge. So, whilst important food and medicines are often significantly affected by the arrival of a new species, for the most part the attitude is ‘let’s wait and see’. In other words, the process begins with listening. 

Perhaps we need not wait for fungi or bacteria to make food of Himalayan Balsam. It has been around the British Isles long enough for many of us to know how delicious its yellow seeds can be. To me, they taste a bit like watermelon. If more of us consumed this offering with gratitude, their numbers might be controlled but not eliminated, and our community made the better for it. That might be a better lesson for our children. 

References 

Davis, M. (2011) ‘Do Native Birds Care Whether Their Berries Are Native or Exotic? No.’ in BioScience, 61(7): 501–502 

Horsely, C. (2016) ‘Alien invasions! Himalayan Balsam, friend or foe?’ in Buzzword 32, November 2016 

Pearce, F. (2015) The new wild: Why invasive species will be nature’s salvation. Icon Books: London, UK 

Reo, N.J. & Ogden, L.A. (2018). ‘Anishnaabe Aki: an indigenous perspective on the global threat of invasive species,’ in Sustainability Science 13: 1443-1452 

Tanner, R.A.; Pollard, K.M.; Varia, S.; Evans, H.C. & Ellison, C.A. (2015) ‘First release of a fungal classical biocontrol agent against an invasive alien weed in Europe: biology of the rust, Puccinia komarovii var. glanduliferae,’ in Plant Pathology, 64(5):1130-1139. 

Thomas, C.D. (2018) Inheritors of the earth. Penguin: New York

Caffeine, consciousness and curriculum

This morning, I’m perusing articles on the origin of humanity’s favourite stimulant, sitting— obviously —with a coffee in hand. 

Dozens of plant species, across unrelated families, produce caffeine. This indicates it has evolved separately, many times. That seems surprising, but according to Huang et al. (2016), it really isn’t. Plants synthesize caffeine in different ways, but each start with a 100-million-year lineage of enzymes conserved for crucial but unrelated biochemical purposes. Co-opting these enzymes to synthesize caffeine is, therefore, always an ongoing possibility. If all caffeine-producing species went extinct, we can imagine caffeine would likely again evolve. 

I find that strangely consoling, perhaps due in equal measure to my joint addictions to both caffeine and to evolution. But what makes caffeine so valuable that it has repeatedly emerged? After all, producing it, like any metabolite, has costs. What kind of selection pressures would pull its synthesis, again and again, from mere possibility into actuality? Independent evolution suggests caffeine synthesis may have different roles in different contexts. There are two favoured theories associating caffeine with a plant’s defense system. One is that caffeine’s antifeeding and pesticidal properties protects it against herbivory. The other is that the release of caffeine into the soil inhibits germination of nearby seeds, reducing competition from neighbours. From my own experience with caffeine, I know its pleasant lift can quickly go awry, so it’s no shock that it would be detrimental to other creatures. I also know the slide from elation to irritation is dose dependent. Could a small hit have positive effects for any other animals? Perhaps even for those very insects— and competing plants —it seeks to debilitate?

Some ingenious experiments on bees shed light on this question. In a story all too convenient for punsters across the world, it turns out caffeine gives bees ‘a buzz.’ Bees on caffeine become more energetic and are more likely to remember the location of caffeinated nectar in complex environments (Wright et al. 2013). This is totally remarkable. According to Evogeneao’s Tree of Life Explorer, humans and bees’ closest ancestors are simple blob-like entities that lived about 630 million years ago. Could it be that virtually all of the species between us and bees, and even that blob, can get high on this stuff? Or is the response to caffeine similar to caffeine itself— evolvable should a species be lucky enough to land in situations where its own endogenous possibility for botanical exhilaration strums into existence? 

As I look further, it seems a whole range of insects and molluscs fall for effects Homo sapiens know only too well: they get hyperactive on caffeine, but succumb to tremors and lose their appetite and their focus on larger doses (ex. Nathanson 1984). Mustard’s (2013) review of studies administering caffeine to insects, molluscs and mammals concluded its effect on behaviour is conserved across animal species. Meanwhile, at least one study sees this pattern repeat in another kingdom entirely. A small dose of caffeine stimulates the growth of sunflower plants, but inhibits it at larger concentrations (Kursheed et al. 2009). Indeed, cases of immunity to caffeine seem the rare consequence of deft symbiotic mergings— such as those of the Coffee Borer (Hypothenemus hampei), who conspire with gut microbes like Pseudomonas fulva (Ceja-Navarro et al. 2015). In this case, the bacteria consume the caffeine and allow the Coffee Borer to live its life burrowing into a bean containing, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2015), a lethal dose equivalent to 500 shots of espresso. The Coffee Borer seems to be missing out. But do these other organisms really get high? 

Biologist Jakob von Uexküll is well-known for launching a research programme aimed at gleaning insights into other species’ lived experiences (ex. Uexküll 2010). According to him, by carefully observing an organism’s behaviour, we can see what ‘shows up’ in its environment as relevant and what is ignored, and use these to make inferences into how the world appears to that being. His intention was to create a science interrogating the subjective experience of the biotic world. He was well aware humans would never really know what it is like to be a bee. After all, we cannot really know what it is like even to be our own spouse or child. But we can get ever closer, especially if we try. For example, many people are familiar with studies revealing that bees see a different spectrum of light, and hence floral patterns invisible to our eyes. This is an example of an insight falling within an Uexküllian focus. 

Does caffeine tell us anything about the lived experience of other creatures? As far as I know, Uexküll never asked this question. Some would deny it, arguing that another species gets hyperactive and jittery when on caffeine does not indicate they consciously experience it. It merely shows that caffeine produces stereotypical physiological reactions. If a conscious organism ingests caffeine, then it obviously would experience those physiological reactions. However, the majority of the biotic world is not conscious. The reactions just happen with their consequent ecological effects. Such a perspective forms the basis of a dominant assumption in biology research and it suffuses biology education too: if a biological system can be understood mechanistically, there is no need to appeal to consciousness. It is at best pointless; at worst, it is dangerous and anthropomorphic. 

But, of course, those very same chemical changes occur in human physiology too, and the behaviour of a human on caffeine can also be understood mechanistically without appealing to human consciousness. And yet, human consciousness clearly exists. A double standard seems baked into biology. I am keen to find a way out of this. Perhaps if we figure out what role consciousness plays for humans, we can infer whether it is also active in other species. This turns out to be a difficult job, and one I am hoping another cup from my French press will help facilitate.  

I’ll continue on my loosely Uexküllian trajectory. As humans go about their lives, they are generally trying to do things. To accomplish those things, some things matter and others do not. Our bodies filter out what does not likely matter, presenting only what is deemed relevant. These relevant features can then be seen in relation to one another. For instance, I am aware of a small subset of things right now: that the coffee is starting to scatter my focus, and that this conflicts with my writing deadline. Because I am conscious of these two things, I am able to realize that I should slow down my drinking. Consciousness is like a map of important features in ongoing play, a global representation of relevant internal states vis a vis relevant external features. Given the complexity and contingency of dynamic environments, it is likely all organisms would be faced with a similar situation: a lot more things are going on than a creature can attend to, and there is a need to respond only to what is relevant, instead of getting buried in details. Consciousness is that porous map.

I do not see other species waffling about, as we might expect if a global map did not exist to simplify the relationship between the organism and its world. Instead, I see other species’ focus directed by what is relevant to them. If caffeine interrupts or enhances that focus, it makes sense that this would show up too, as it would be relevant for the creature that its capacities had changed. Different decisions might be needed.

The consciousness of other animals is increasingly acknowledged by scientists (see for example the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness [Low et al. 2012]), and is even posited by plant scientists (ex. Trewavas 2015), but Uexküll’s vision remains totally eclipsed in biology education. The assumption that life is nothing but mechanism pervades even apparently ‘progressive’ school provision, such as Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence’s steadfastly mechanistic biology learning outcomes. What is the reason for this, and what effect does it have on the way children see the world? Who benefits and who loses when education is the buzzkill at the party? Some historians claim caffeine accelerated the Enlightenment (Pollan 2020). Could investigating its role in the biosphere enlighten schools too?

References 

Ceja-Navarro, J.; Vega, F.; Karaoz, U. et al. (2015) ‘Gut microbiota mediate caffeine detoxification in the primary insect pest of coffee,’ in Nature Communications 6, 7618 Evogeneao https://www.evogeneao.com/en/explore/tree-of-life-explorer#bees-and-humans 

Huang, R. ; O’Donnell, A. ; Barboline, J. & Barkman, T. (2016) ‘Convergent evolution of caffeine in plants by co-option of exapted ancestral enzymes,’ in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(38), pp. 10613-10618 

Khursheed, T.; Ansari,M. & Shahab, D. (2009) ‘Studies on the effect of caffeine on growth and yield parameters in Helianthus annuus L. variety Modern T,’ in Biology and Medicine 1 (2), pp. 56-60 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2015) ‘Gut microbes enable coffee pest to withstand extremely toxic concentrations of caffeine,’ July 14, 2015. Retrieved on November 21, 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2015-07-gut-microbes-enable-coffee-pest.html 

Low, P. et al. (2012) ‘The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness’. Publicly proclaimed in Cambridge, UK, on July 7, 2012, at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals. 

Mustard, J. (2014) ‘The buzz on caffeine in invertebrates: effects on behavior and molecular mechanisms,’ in Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences 71(8), pp. 1375-82. 

Nathanson, J. A. (1984) ‘Caffeine and related methylxanthines: possible naturally occurring pesticides’, in Science. 226(4671), 184–7 

Pollan, M. (2020) Caffeine: How coffee and tea created the modern world. Audible Original. 

Trewavas, A. (2015) Plant behaviour and intelligence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 

von Uexküll, J. (2010) A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Exploring time with Nya Falang

My first encounter with this startling plant was during my years in rural Laos. Wong’s youngest, Kongngeun, was halfway up a ladder poised against a mango tree. With machete in hand, her tiny bare feet toddled on its rickety bamboo rungs. I lifted her down and put away the ladder. Scarcely understanding the consequences of what was to transpire, she bumbled towards me, her bright eyes sparkling and her great blade swinging. To this day I wonder what she was feeling. Her two-year old face seemed full of innocence, without a speck of anger. And yet, the machete arced fatefully towards my protesting hand. 

Moments stretched out—in vain —as its metal edge approached and then lodged itself into the top of my thumb. Her face melted into fear. Wasting no time to scold, Wong sprinted to a nearby pineapple field and emerged seconds later with a clump of bright green leaves. I recognised the plant immediately as Nya Falang; that sticky, pungent plant I had spent months weeding in a nearby Mulberry orchard. He chewed it into paste and slathered it onto my gushing wound. The bleeding stopped immediately. Thumb bandaged, I later reflected on what had happened. 

Speeding up platelet aggregation (the mechanism I supposed in play), slows down bleeding. Two opposing rates of change held together a single process. In scientific articles, I later learned Chromolaena odorata accomplished this hemostatic feat by changing the rate of activity of some genes in my thumb’s fibroblasts (Pandith et al, 2013). Different temporal shifts coordinated across different biological scales. The protagonists in this timeshifting wizardry are stigmasterol, scutellarein tetramethyl ether, flavonoids, and chromomoric acid, which seem to serve antiherbivory and antibacterial roles in the plant’s defense (Vijayaraghavan et al, 2017). Incidentally, these chemicals are likely toxic to the plant itself, and so are normally stowed away in the plant cells’ vacuoles. Wong’s teeth had to cut the cells open so the plant could heal my own cut open cells. 

C. odorata’s regional names hint at its sharp and then hemorrhagic arrival into various people’s natural history. Known as ‘French Weed’ (ຫຍ້າຝະຣັ່ງ, Nya Falang) in Laos, but as ‘Herbe de Laos’ in France, C. odorata is actually native to Central America, the Caribbean, and the Northern part of South America. Since the mid 20th century, it has spread rapidly, with now pan-continental distribution in tropical and subtropical climates (though apparently with minimal presence in Australia). When I google ‘world’s worst tropical weeds,’ C. odorata comes up ahead of other notorious troublemakers of the global South, including Imperata cylindrica, Cyperus rotundus, Commelina benghalensis, and Eichhornia crassipes. Its prolific habits damage cropland, lay waste to pasture, and ruin plantation productivity. The same chemicals that saved me a long and bumpy journey to a local health centre and perhaps a serious infection, undoubtedly contribute to its ecological success and its reputation as a scourge. 

Emerson’s (1880) notion that ‘a weed is a plant whose virtues have never been discovered’ will seem naive and dangerous to most farmers. I have seen enough family crops cramped and cluttered into oblivion to sympathise with those who despise C. odorata. Nevertheless, I have benefited from the virtues of this pungent coagulator. Not only did it heal my hand, it thrust into consciousness the surprise of discovering hidden powers in commonplace things. The humdrum prevalence and perhaps even the menace of highly successful plants sets them up to shatter our preconceptions all the more forcefully. We should be grateful for these ruptures and, indeed, seek them out. 

I do not mean to suggest there is no place for controlling this or any other weed. Agriculture, in any foreseeable future, depends on it. But I wonder if it is possible to appreciate even the vigorous plants we commit to weaken or kill, that their life be taken through acts that pierce hatred with gratitude, to speckle their tedious annihilation with flecks of wonder. 

References 

Emerson, R.W. (1880) Fortune of the Republic, in Prose Works. Boston, MA: Houghton, Osgood & Co. 

Pandith, H.; Zhang, X.; Liggett, J.; Min, K-W, Gritsanapan, W. & Baek, S.J. (2013) ‘Hemostatic and Wound Healing Properties of Chromolaena odorata Leaf Extract’, ISRN Dermatology Article ID168269, pp. 1-8. 

Vijayaraghavan, K.; Rajkumar, J.; Bukhari, S.N.D.; Al-Sayed, B. & Seyed, M.A. (2017). ‘Chromolaena odorata: A neglected weed with a wide spectrum of pharmacological activities’, in Molecular Medicine Reports, vol.15:3, pp. 1007-1016.

Vegetal bebop

In normal times, the genes peppered across a plant’s DNA function more or less according to the common metaphors of popular science. Here, they look very much like ‘instructions’ used to build the plant’s body and direct its behaviour. But when a plant encounters an unexpected circumstance, things get wild. The instruction metaphor breaks down, and a new insight into the interconnected nature of genes, organism and environment is revealed.

I will zoom in on one wild phenomenon here, to make the point. Forty years ago, cracks in the genes-are-instructions metaphor had already appeared with the discovery of ‘alternative splicing’ (Berget et al, 1977). Alternative splicing occurs when a gene gets transcribed differently than ‘usual’. One way to think about what this means is to imagine a gene to be a paragraph of text. Under normal circumstances, the gene is expressed by pulling specific words and sentences from the paragraph and putting them together to be read. But in certain conditions, some of those words or sentences might be omitted, or others put in. In language, this amounts to a change in meaning. In genetics, this means changed physiology and behaviour.

Gene transcripts are shuttled away to get translated into long stringy molecules called proteins. Different parts of proteins push and pull at each other, and the strings often fold into complex but very specific shapes that then specify how the protein interacts. A dizzying array of different protein shapes enable and participate in an equally dizzying array of functions. If alternatively spliced transcripts are translated, these proteins —known as protein isoforms— have a different shape than their regular counterparts, and so can interact differently.

Some protein isoforms seem like well-established alternatives that can be pumped into action in the face of common disturbances, such as drought. But not all alternative proteins are evolutionarily conserved ‘Plan Bs’ waiting idly in the toolkit (Mastrangelo et al. 2012). For better or worse, it appears the number and nature of protein isoforms is not prescribed. A door is opened for the creative role that chaos plays in plant life. Some isoforms turn out to be nonfunctional. They are quickly degraded and their building blocks re-used. Others wreak havoc in the form of deformity and disease. Still others end up assisting the plant in new ways.

It turns out that alternative splicing in plant genes is especially prolific when a plant is encountering a novel stress. Why would a plant bother creating all these variants, with nonfunctional or unpredictable effects, at a time that requires urgent coordinated response? The answer turns out to be exquisitely Darwinian: in precarious times, it may be advantageous to produce a lot of new possible solutions to a danger. To do so, it adopts a randomization strategy. In risky times, it pays to take risks. Doing so, the plant increases the odds of an adaptive response. By generating variations of its gene products, the plant is increasing its repertoire, brainstorming without a brain.

This is roughly the same thing that happens in species at the population level in the process known as ‘natural selection’ (Darwin 1859): diversity in a population of organisms increases the likelihood that when given an environmental disturbance, at least some organisms of that species will survive long enough to pass on their genes. At the organism level, alternative splicing increases the chance that some behavioural response to a stress will be beneficial for the plant’s survival.

So, plant genes are more likely to produce predictable proteins when living conditions are stable, but the plant quickly generates creative chaos out of its genes when it needs to. With this insight, what happens to the ‘instruction’ metaphor? It seems to me this: the plant regulates and deregulates its genes, streamlining their effects in some contexts, relaxing those constraints in others. When genes behave in a streamlined way, it looks like they are deterministically instructing the plant cells. But alternative splicing during stressful conditions shows that if such determinism sometimes exists, it is only because the plant is determining it. The instructor is the organism, shifting how it uses its cellular resources in response to its shifting environment. In some situations it relies on routine, in others on creativity.

Alternative splicing is common in all eukaryotes, not just plants. But because plants cannot escape threats by running, slithering or flying away, the capacity to generate novel possible solutions seems especially crucial to the way they make a living. Readers of this journal will know that the ‘secondary metabolism’ of a plant is the set of processes whereby plants generate those complex chemical orchestras that so define their unique contributions to ecology as much as to economy. Consider the deluge of alkaloids, polyphenols, and terpenes that plants bring into the world: it is these chemicals that are used to ward off pests and attract allies, but that are also concentrated into tinctures and suffuse our aromatherapies. Notably, the secondary metabolism of plants seems highly susceptible to alternative splicing. For instance, 75% of Solanum lycopersicum (tomato) genes associated with producing secondary metabolites undergo alternative splicing (Clark et al. 2019).

In humans, there are more genes getting alternatively spliced —and spliced in more different ways— in the brain than anywhere else in the body (Yeo et al 2004). Just as animals employ alternative splicing to increase the problem- solving versatility of their neurons, plants use it to improvise volatile variations on their favoured fragrant themes.

Welcome to jazz ecology.

(originally published in Herbology News)

Christmas tree philosophy

Holiday season behind us, I walk down the street. Christmas trees are strewn across the pavements for collection. Well, that is the way we talk about it, at least. Their root systems lobbed off doesn’t seem to bother holiday merrymakers, perhaps because that part of the tree is invisible anyway. But roots are complex structures comprising a significant quantity of a tree’s mass and volume. And so, it must be asked: in what sense do we really decorate ‘trees’? Soaked in water, the tree continues to perform in minimal ways we think make it a tree; it sits there, stays green for a while, and emits fragrance from its resins. But like believing a corpse is merely sleeping because his nails and hair are still growing, are we oblivious to a macabre spectacle? What is lost when roots are cut off? 

In his last decades, Charles Darwin was increasingly devoted to studying plants. He wrote a number of illuminating but less well-known books on flowers, plant evolution and behaviour. Co-written with his son, On the power of movement in plants (1880) was his penultimate study. Its last few pages propose an arresting hypothesis that laid largely buried for over a hundred years. After conducting several experiments— pressing or burning root tip apices and examining subsequent changes to plant growth —they noticed an interesting phenomenon. If burnt on one side of a root tip, the plant’s aerial parts would grow the other way, even though this response would not occur were it burnt anywhere else (including further up the root). Injured plants seem to respond as a whole to local impacts on individual root tips. The root tips, they surmised, therefore play a special role in picking up relevant information and centralising a coordinated whole-organism response to it. The Darwins concluded root apices functioned analogously to a simple brain. 

Is it absurd to use neural analogies to understand plants? Some assert it is plainly so (e.g., Alpi et al., 2007). But many metaphors used to describe neurons and their synapses were themselves borrowed from botany. Consider ‘arborisation’, ‘dendrite branching’ (double whammy there), and neural ‘pruning’: if plants prove an effective source to describe aspects of neurons, why deem it anthropomorphic (or animal-centric) to go the other way and investigate how neural thinking might better help us understand plants? 

The Darwins’ intriguing idea remained uprooted until the rise of contemporary plant behaviour and signalling research (Baluska et al, 2009). According to these authors, plants are analogous to animals with their heads buried in the soil. Superficially, this seems to make sense— at least according to our mental image of the typical animal and the typical plant —roots, like mouths and nostrils, are where plants take in nutrients and gases from the air, while leaves and flowers are excretory and sexual organs respectively. However, the more important question is not to what extent the upside-down analogy is roughly true, but how much the root system really does coordinate responses to information a plant receives. 

One way to approach this question is anatomical. Is the root system organised (or not) ‘like’ a brain? The point is not to find specific similarities. For instance, a chemical that serves as a neurotransmitter in an animal might be doing things broadly served by a different chemical in a plant. On the other hand, that neurotransmitter might exist in plants but be involved in totally unrelated activities. The anatomical approach seeks correlations in structure and function between brains and roots. 

This approach immediately leads to a problem. Root system architecture tends to be vertical. Roots break into smaller roots, and so on, without evident channels between them— in obvious contrast to the messy, circular and interconnected nature of neurons in a brain. Lateral connections between parts of the brain are reinforced or atrophy— facilitated, reinforced or softened through use and disuse. It seems intuitive that lateral connections between roots would be a minimum structural requirement for an organ whose function is to coordinate information, because otherwise it would seem hampered by the siloing constraints of its shape. Can something like this be found between a plant’s roots? Perhaps we ought to look at root hairs (and their associated mycelia) as such flexible lateral structures. Like neurons, root hairs are usually long single-celled structures. Their copious 

growth means they certainly come into contact with other hairs of their own, or other roots. Root hairs grow and atrophy relatively quickly and easily. Looking at the growth of root hairs might be analogous to dendrite branching, while volatile organic compounds released in the soil regions between root hairs might be roughly synaptic. One concerns transmission along linear tissue, the other across spaces between such tissue. Sadly, research into communicative activity in root hairs is virtually non-existent. 

Nevertheless, there is no point in looking for anatomical structures that might be organised like neural networks if no behaviour warrants the search for these structures in the first place. For this reason, a second area of research has to do with plant behaviour. It is certainly the case that coordinated plant responses are well-detailed and commonplace. A lot of plant coordination is owed to the release of hormones, such as jasmonate and auxin. This is not the kind of integrated activity we would be looking for in an organism with something brain-like about it. Instead, we would be looking for a globally coherent activity that involved differentiated responses amongst its parts. For instance, we might look for electric signals transmitted between cells, leading to local but coordinated responses. Electric signalling has been known in plants since even before Darwin’s experiments. Like Darwin’s root apices, its significance was also downplayed until evidence could no longer be ignored (Davies 2006). Action potential, for example, is now recognised as pervasive in plants. More detailed studies into signal transduction in roots, cambium, and other tissue that extends throughout the plant body is needed. 

A second issue is that coordinated plant responses do not appear to be as coordinated as, say, those in vertebrates. In investigating plant responses to stimuli, what level of centralising is needed to deem it ‘brain-like control’? Plants may be more decentralised than vertebrates, responding to their worlds more like a confederacy than a dictatorship (Firn, 2004). Response may be either at the cellular level, the tissue level or something more global— depending on the situation. An organism is likely to centralise its response to the extent it needs to, and plants may not need to— or at least not need to as much. But we should be wary of drawing dichotomies across kingdoms. Animal behaviour is not equally centralised across its phylla, either. By any anthropocentric measure, octopuses are highly intelligent— but they have more neurons in their arms than in their heads. On the other hand, citing Shomrat and Levin (2013), mycologist Merlin Sheldrake (2020) points out that flatworms are able to regrow brains once their heads have been cut off, and retain memories of their prior experiences. 

When very young, some conifer cuttings can grow new roots, but not once the tree is big enough to wrap with tinsel and adorn with red balls. It would seem only small and simple bodies can get by without brains— or roots —long enough to sprout fresh ones. With or without an artificial supply of nutrients, such trees slowly die. Whatever it is, something more fundamental than a flatworm’s brain was taken from these firs and pines, their colours dull and bodies brittle, awaiting pick-up above pools of dry dead needles. 

References 

Alpi, A. et al. (2007) ‘Plant neurobiology: No brain, no gain?’ TRENDS in Plant Science 12 (4): 135-136 

Baluska, F.; Mancuso, S.; Volkmann, D. & Barlow, P. W. (2009) ‘The “root-brain” hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin: Revival after more than 125 years.’ Plant Signaling & Behavior, 4(12): 1121–1127 

Darwin, C and Darwin, F. (1880) On the power of movement in plants. John Murray: Edinburgh 

Davies, E. (2006) ‘Electrical Signals in Plants: Facts and Hypotheses,’ in Volkov A.G. (ed.) Plant Electrophysiology. Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg. 

Firn, R. (2004) ‘Plant intelligence: an alternative point of view,’ in Annals of Botany, 93(4): 345–351 

Sheldrake, M. (2020) Entangled Life. The Bodley Head: London 

Shomrat, T. & Levin, M. (2013) ‘An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planarians and its persistence through head regeneration,’ in The Journal of Experimental Biology, 216(20): 3799 LP – 3810 

Trewawas, A. (2015) Plant behaviour and intelligence. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK

A job offer: A lesson in empathy and pedagogy

I was recently offered an Assistant Professor job in a (mostly) online sustainability-focused doctoral programme in the US state university system. The position had much going for it. Most important to me was that my would-be colleagues were passionate, caring, thoughtful, and open-minded, and that I would have a lot of opportunities to develop my subject of interest. At the time, I was on a precarious one-year teaching contract in a programme at University of Edinburgh where I felt a bit out of place, often giving courses to teach well outside my area of knowledge or concern, and to deliver these courses in ways that did not make sense to me. I also felt constricted in what was possible. The programme at the American university was emergent and developmental, which really suits my preference for fluid co-evolution between teaching, curriculum, and students. By contrast, a favourite moaning point amongst colleagues in Edinburgh is that this university is highly bureaucratic and managerial. Forget allowing space for ambiguity and emergence! Even proposing course changes is such an elaborate affair that few bother to do it. Hence a culture of firing through unchanged powerpoint slides in courses year to year.

I was heading to class one morning after too many nights in sleepless indecision. It would be the first class I would teach since the job offer. The class was on quantitative research methods, a topic I know little about practically or theoretically. I was nervous about how it would go. The day before, I was busying myself trying to understand the meaning of ANOVA tests and the relationship between p values and standard deviation. I felt dislocated, and felt as sorry for my soon-to-be-students as I did for myself. I found myself veering heavily towards accepting the job offer. My interests and enthusiasm are not being made use of here, I concluded, to the detriment of my students, my programme, and my own life as a teacher.

Everything changed within 5 minutes of entering class. I felt a swell of energy rising from within as I submerged in the whirlpool of teacher-student interactions. A cluster of new faces, new people behind them with their unique hidden depths, new relationships between us, and so much growth awaiting! As I started explaining something about statistical significance, I felt a heaviness in my body when a young male student to my left starting slouching absentmindedly in his chair. When asking questions to check the class’ understanding of the concept, I welled with excitement when another student attempted an answer with bright, sparkling eyes. I realised at that moment I would rather be teaching a subject I knew nothing about (and, frankly, had some concerns about) face to face than my favourite subject online. I thrive in this dynamic space, where the currents of feeling circulate. Here is an ecology of emotions, spreading, evolving, co-evolving, eliciting my thoughtful attention and responsive experimentation. It is as alive and real as it is dynamic and complex. It is a space that terrifies me and thrills me, and is one I cannot live without. How might I engage that young man? How will I enthuse others?

I turned down the job. This led to an attempt to articulate semi-conscious aspects of my pedagogy, aspects that are coming into clearer apprehension through this whole experience. It is now becoming clearer to me how much I depend on (and enjoy) empathy as a way of knowing and interacting with students. The term “empathy” is used and thought about in many different ways. Perhaps I should attempt a sketch of what it might mean to me.

I am influenced by those working on the phenomenological descriptions of empathy that acknowledge the primacy of intersubjectivity (e.g. Zahavi; Thompson). When one is empathetic, one is feeling the emotion that is being felt by another. This feeling is not a projection or a theory. We do not form a hypothesis of what the other person is feeling based on an interpretation of their body language and disposition and then feel the consequences of that hypothesis (this is the “theory-theory”). Nor do we simulate the experience after having received our sense impressions of the other. Instead, I assert that the experience of empathy is co-emergent with the perception. It is simultaneous because the perceiving the other’s boredom or sadness or joy is our experience of these similar states emerging within us. I see boredom wash over the student’s body as I feel heaviness wash through my own body. The meaning of the outer experience and the inner experience are given significance by one another. We may be variously conscious of these affective flows, and sometimes not aware of them at all (as when your tired yawn makes me tired and yawn). But they are there. Our bodies gear into a sociality that is fundamental to perception itself, conditioning and enabling the possibilities for thought and action, lending situations a shared tone, a shared ground, a context.

In other words, empathy is part of how we know and interact with people. It is only when we are incapable of empathy that we need to piece together the various bits of information about another person to cobble an hypothesis of what they are experiencing. Void of context, the mind is left to its own scattered devices, analysing a situation with no horizon to give bearings or direction. This happens, and is experienced as a lack of connection, but when it is commonplace it becomes pathological. Thankfully, most of us can get better at empathy through learning. Even if it is such a fundamental pre-cognitive and embodied condition for experience, the capacity of empathy remains open to the world. It provides a context, but is not an impermeable framework. As Evan Thompson puts it, human empathy is open to “pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity” (2001, p. 1). And so we can learn new emotions as we experience new perceptions; the world outside us and the world inside get richer and more nuanced in tandem. The development of our self and our capacity to be affected by those around us are aligned not opposed. This is crucial for pedagogy but also in understanding and participating in the world more generally.

Once I feel empathy, I am now in some sense on a similar path as the other person. I don’t feel “exactly” the same thing that my bored student feels, but this may not matter because they do not feel the same thing from one moment to the next either. The important thing is that an affective feedback loop is occurring, where my empathy is continually calibrating and re-calibrating as I continue to perceive my student. We share a path, perhaps at first a vague synchronisation, but one which is a condition for our respective experiences to hone in on one another with more particularity. With boredom as a shared context, a shift in their chair is felt as an alert break from disengagement and I feel myself suddenly attending to the student’s next move. On the other hand, a continued slouch is also new information because of context; it is felt as a more prolonged boredom. With the passage of time, our immediate perceptions are always put into context. Empathy is the condition for shared experience but is also conditioned by such experiences. The shared path dilates or constricts. Sometimes it brings others into it. Sometimes it dissolves in an instant of total incomprehension.

The meaning of particular statements that students make or do not make is always couched in contexts. The more perceptive I am to these contexts, the more empathic I am to them. The more I feel, the more I see.

Without context, particular statements can be interpreted in many different ways. Our focus shifts from the relationship between the statements and the context to the multitude of semantic possibilities that reside within the utterance. This can mislead us into thinking that it is the nature of language to be infinitely ambiguous and open to interpretation. But textual meanings and their ambiguities result from dissociating statement from context. We hone into nothing but sterilised font, and the contexts at play are only between previous and present words. People who read too many books might be susceptible to forgetting that the meaning of words emerges within and contributes to a more-than-worded world. Those analytic philosophers obsessed with the meaning of words divorced from situation come to mind.

In the case of my job offer, I realised the subtle and dynamic dimensions of the body would disappear: the reams and realms of empathic feedback that accompany the shared words of the classroom. Not only could I not engage in the kind of pedagogy that makes most sense to me as an educator, I would be constantly fighting the quiet but pervasive meta-lesson that we must succumb to, instead of mend, the problem of abstraction. I do not want to contribute to reductionistic assumption that events can be abstracted from their contexts, even if (especially if) I teach that such abstraction is dangerous, leading to instrumental thinking, stereotyping, automaticity, a lack of receptivity, a lack of growth, the logic of standardised solutions, and much of what is contributing to personal, social, ecological destruction widely. (Quite the claim). In other words, I don’t want enact the assumption that form and content do not have to be congruent in pedagogy, itself a miseducative lesson in context.

I do not mean to suggest that there is no place for abstraction. But abstraction is only half of thinking. On its own it can lead to models, theories and hypotheses. It can also lead to concepts and ideas available for analogical transfer into new situations, such as when I parcel out a ‘story’ of my experience and tell it to others with the hope that it resonates for them (it sometimes does!). But the more we apply abstractions, the more we think they work, and the less we are open to remembering that they were in fact abstractions. We must pair our skills in abstraction with skills in contextualising. When and how do the abstractions breakdown? What situations do we invite such that other people and the world might nudge these mental constructions into better coherence, or discount them entirely? For me, it is in face to face situations that my abstractions (such as my cognised hypotheses about what the other person is thinking or feeling) are recontextualised by the ongoing flow of the interaction. Through computer screens, this would forever be an upward swim. Perhaps it would be full of insights about the nature of these problems, maybe even a catalytic opportunity to reconstruct “distance learning.” But this work for another.

The rejoining of abstraction and contextualisation is an important pedagogical project. But it is more than that. The same problems that lurk in our fractured classroom pervade our fractured world, so the rejoinder is an epistemological and ontological project as well.

It is epistemological because it concerns the process and nature of knowing, suggesting that any knowing is incomplete unless it goes back and forth between these two registers. Its ontological significance lies in the fact that this is a necessary way to engage the world. If we pay attention to any phenomenon closely enough, we find it asks us to avoid the extremes of surgical reduction and wooly holism.

Things have parts and these parts interact to form wholes. That is why breaking things down into components and analysing their properties and interactions leads to knowledge. But the wholes also have a sort of “downward causation” because they set the contexts for local interactions in the form of organised relations, boundaries, and relative interconnections and disconnections. There are a lot of wholes and parts in such circular causal organisation in between the smallest and largest phenomena. It is within this meso-world that we live and is here where our actions are meaningful or meaningless, wise or misguided. Empathy is a perceptual response to an ontological whole, the global feeling of another being that pervades and unifies a person’s various behaviours. This whole is not simply created by a set of separate local interactions, as though the eyes, nose, back’s behaviours were all causally effective on their own and the whole body merely an epiphenomenon. No. The whole body sets the conditions for the local parts. People are wholes. And empathy teaches us teaches us there are also wholes in social co-ordination, dynamically whirling between people who co-emerge together like starlings in murmuration or the infectious bellowing of howler monkeys.

Daoism, differential equations, and death: Offerings from the seasons

February is ending, 56 degrees latitude, east side island, eastside Atlantic. The world is still shivery but from sky to sky it is blossoming, and my inwardliness is also unfolding outward. The crocuses are sending orange and violet flames from the grass, but this time of growth does not belong to the plants. This blossom is of the Sun and the swift elemental energies it circulates into expression. An aggressive vigour develops the air, hurtles windy momentum, and light breaks new angles between buildings, new geometries cast almost daily now onto the city’s granite floor. My eyes can feel it even if my skin is attuned to a different spring, one that will only appear once lakes and oceans embrace these energies and contribute to them in turn.

Days have been getting longer with the northern tilt’s accelerating plummet toward the fire orb. The stretching of daylight is at first undetectable to my eyes and nose. Measured in seconds added to the day, the solstice holds winter in what seems a catatonic lull, ambiguous in its beginning and end -until one day it isn’t. The shift is felt in ways I live but do not always acknowledge. The alleyway I pass on my morning walk now glitters in light rather than shadow. The difference is felt but not cognised, the stroll feels brighter even if I do not pinpoint why.

The first climax of light will come this year on March 20th at 9:58 pm, but this climax like all celestial transitions, comes with its paradoxes.

Between March 10th and March 26th, days will be getting longer by 4 minutes and 40 seconds every day. Between winter solstice and this time, days were getting longer more and more quickly, after march, days will be getting longer more slowly. We are now rushing towards this peak in vim, after which will be its ageing and senescence. The official first day of birth is the first day of death. Ostara is an inflection point.

Growing up, our summer break always seem to coincide with my father grumbling that autumn had arrived: the days were now getting shorter (his unsolicited astronomical realism never seemed to raise its head during winter solstice). But as I contemplate the hurtling unfolding before me, it seems summer solstice is already the second autumn of the year (my father might be proud of this pessimistic observation). The rate at which days get longer begins to slow in March, decelerating to a standstill in June.

In other words, we are observing changes, and we are also observing changes to the rate of changes. The latter is what mathematicians call “first derivatives” of differential equations. The first derivative of velocity is acceleration. Let’s follow the seasons with an eye on such rates of change. From June until September, death will gain increasingly in vitality, days not only getting shorter but getting shorter increasingly quickly (and like the initial hiddenness of January’s Spring, this death is hidden for awhile by the slow transition and the lagging heat). When the heat begins to catch up a bit, the loss of light is in free fall and Mabon lurks. His first Spring a hidden bloom: beneath the autumnal gloom, with everything about us is withering back into the ground, the accelerating darknesses pivots and pulls away.

But does it end there?

The cos x curve depicts the rates of change of the sin x curve

If changes in daylight hours etch a sine curve into the galaxy, high school mathematics tells us that changes to these changes is a cosine curve. This is represented as f’(x)sin x = cos x. But the rate of change of the cosine graph is an inverse sine curve (-sin x). There is a technical term for this. The rate of change of acceleration is called “jerk” -a term which is almost certain to confuse any intuitive sense we have of what is going on in the passage of the seasons. Because all derivatives of the sin curve are oscillate with the same amplitude and frequency as the original curve, the only difference we should expect is phasic. But can we experience this?

I think we can. In fact, I have already alluded to it above. Between March 10th and March 26th, days get longer by 4 minutes and 40 seconds every day. This approximation hid the fact that the rate of change at which days were getting longer was itself changing extremely slowly. Days are getting longer more quickly, but longer more quickly more slowly. Compare this to the difference between December 23rd and 24th last year. On December 23rd there was 9 seconds more light than the 22nd. On December 24th, there was 17 seconds more light than on the 23rd. The rate of change in March is almost constant even though it is dramatic. The rate of change is in rapid flux in December even though it is imperceptible. There is a lull at the equinoxes too, but unlike the lull during the solstices, it is a lull where we stop feeling the days accelerating. For a week or so, they just seem to be in an almost steady acceleration.

I believe this is the end of what can be perceived (and this only with some difficulty). Who knows what if further derivatives are picked up on and responded to by other creatures? But the mathematics suggest that the extent to which life and death are intertwined in the seasons goes well beyond what has so far been suggested. The derivative of -sin x is -cos x, and the derivative of -cos x is sin x. After four derivatives, we return full circle. Although this cannot be felt or witnessed, it suggests something very powerful and subtle. Superficially, it evokes the four seasons that are themselves also indications of cyclicity. But the more luminous point is that with sin curves there are an infinite number of rates of rates of change, each an oscillating wave. There is no end in sight. In March, the rate in which the rate of change in daylight is changing, is itself changing too, this rate too is changing, and so on ad infinitum. Wrapped into the dynamics of the sine curve is an infinitely intricate conjoinment of slowing downs and speeding ups. Every inflection point is a turning point governed by a new inflection point.

The fourth derivative of sin x is sin x

The solstices and the equinoxes are all moments where solar expansion and withdrawal switch hands, one birthing process now dying, but within that dying another birth. This reveals in the most acute way a concrete and infinite dialectical contradiction.