Paying Attention To The Sky

Thanks to the PBS series of the same name, this book is getting a second life. I found it fascinating when I read it several years back (before my conversion) and reviewing these reading selections I realize it still holds the same attraction for me, although now I tend to read it through the prism of God’s creation – something I tended to lack as a point of view before. Many of the stories here also have a theme of the corrupting influence of man’s stewardship of God’s creation – one thinks of the tulip bubble or the use of cannabis.

A few posts back I introduced Fr. Robert Barron’s explanation of the etymology of the word “sin,” how it was related to scattering and the product of sin,” over-and-againstness, separation, suspicion, mutual hatred, blaming” were all signs of the presence of that scattering power of sin. The current economic collapse we are experiencing and some of these stories (think of the story of the potato) seem to illustrate that better than the usual.

The potato (you’ll have to see the video or catch the PBS special) was first rejected by Europeans because it was a member of the nightshade family and was thought to cause leprosy — and it came from America. three strikes that made it fit to eat, only by the Irish( then considered European miscreants. The Irish soon found that the combination of protein and vitamins B & C made the potato a worthy, versatile staple.

Their dependence grew so strong, that when a fungus eradicated their crops in the late 1840s, it also decimated the human population by millions. We seem to have punished the potato with our own genetic engineering techniques: a modern potato like The New Leaf variety (the potato favored by MacDonald’s for its fries) has the ability to kill beetles with toxins from its own leaf. But consumers, fearing the unintended consequences of man’s messing with nature, rose to protest its introduction into the modern food chain.

Here are my reading selections, random stuff I pick up,  from the book:

Coevolutionary Relationship
Matters between me and the spud I was planting, I realized, really aren’t much different: we, too, are partners in a coevolutionary relationship, as indeed we have been since the birth of agriculture more than ten thousand years ago. Like the apple blossom, whose form and scent have been selected by bees over countless generations, the size and taste of the potato have been selected over countless generations by us — by Incas and Irishmen , even by people like me ordering French fries at McDonald’s. Bees and humans alike have their criteria for selection: symmetry and sweetness for the bee; heft and nutritional value in the case of the potato-eating human. The fact that one of us has evolved to become intermittently aware of its desires makes no difference whatsoever to the flower or the potato taking part in this arrangement. All those plants care about is what ever being cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself. Through trial and error these plant species have found that the best way to do that is to induce animals — bees or people, it hardly matters — to spread their genes. How? By playing on the animals’ desires, conscious and otherwise. The flowers and spuds that manage to do this most effectively are the ones that get to be fruitful and multiply.

Domestication
We automatically think of domestication as something we do to another species, but it makes just as much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done to us, a clever evolutionary strategy for advancing their own interests. The species that have spent the last ten thousand years or so figuring out how best to feed, heal, clothe, intoxicate and otherwise delight us have made themselves some of nature’s greatest success stories….Domesticated species don’t command our respect the way their wild cousins often do. Evolution may reward interdependence, but our thinking selves continue to prize self-reliance. The wolf is somehow more impressive to us than the dog. Yet there are fifty million dogs in America today and only ten thousand wolves. So what does the dog know about getting along in this world that its wild ancestor doesn’t? The big thing the dog knows about — the subject it has mastered in the ten thousand years it has been evolving at our side — is us: our needs and desires, our emotions and values, all of which it has folded into its genes as part of a sophisticated strategy for survival. If you could read the genome of the dog like a book, you would learn a great deal about who we are and what makes us tick.

Sweetness
…sweetness has proved to be a force in evolution. By encasing their seeds in sugary and nutritious flesh, fruiting plants such as the apple hit on an ingenious way of exploiting the mammalian sweet tooth: in exchange for fructose, the animals provide the seeds with transportation, allowing the plant to expand its range. As parties to this grand coevolutionary bargain, animals with the strongest predilection for sweetness and plants offering the biggest, sweetest fruits prospered together and multiplied, evolving into the species we see, and are, today. As a precaution, the plants took certain steps to protect their seeds from the avidity of their partners: they held off on developing sweetness and color until the seeds had matured complexly (before then fruits tend to be inconspicuously green and unpalatable), and in some cases (like the apple’s), the plants developed poisons in their seeds to ensure that only the sweet flesh is consumed. Desire then is built into the very nature an purpose of fruit, and so, quite often, is a kind of taboo. The vegetable kingdom’s lack of glamour by comparison (whoever heard of a forbidden vegetable?) can be laid to the fact that a vegetable’s reproductive strategy doesn’t turn on turning animals on.

Flowers and Beauty
Most of humankind for most of its history have been in the same irrational boat as the seventeenth century Dutch — crazy for flowers. So what is this tropism all about, for us, and for the flowers. How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the deeper mysteries of beauty — what one poet has called “this grace wholly gratuitous”? Is that what it is? Or does beauty have a purpose?.. Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression. It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person’s mind, that mind’s connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.

Flowers and Natural Selection
Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices — visual , olfactory, and tactile — to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals. In order to achieve their objectives, many flowers rely not just on simple chemical signals but on signs, sometimes even on a kind of symbolism. Some plant species go so far as to impersonate other creatures or things in order to secure pollination or, in the case of carnivorous plants, a meal. To entice flies into its inner sanctum (there to be digested by waiting enzymes), the pitcher plant has developed a weirdly striated maroon-and-white flower that is not all attractive unless you happen to be attracted to decaying meat. (The flower’s rancid scent reinforces this effect.)

Flowers Avoid Self-Pollination
Though many flowers, like the lilies, possess both male and female organs, they go to great lengths to avoid pollinating themselves. That would defeat the floral point, which is the mixing of genes that cross-pollination ensures. A flower can avoid self-pollination chemically (by making its ovule and pollen grain incompatible), architecturally (by arranging stamen and pistil in the flower so as to avoid contact), or temporally (by staggering the times when their stamens produce pollen and their pistils are receptive.

The Love of Their (Flower’s) Lives
For many flowers the great love of their lives now is humankind. Those daylilies leaning expectantly forward? Their faces are in fact turned toward us, whose favor now ensures their success better than any bug’s can. That peony with the salacious pubic stamens? Blame the Chinese for than one: for thousands of years their poets, discerning manifestations of yin and yang in the garden, likened peony blossoms to a woman’s sexual organs (and a bee or butterfly to a man’s); over time Chinese peonies evolved, by means of artificial selection, to gratify that conceit. Even the perfume of certain Chinese tree peonies is womanly, a scent of flowers tinged with briny sweat; the flowers smell less like perfume of the bottle than a scent that’s spent time on human skin. It may still attract the bees, but by now it’s our brain stems the scent is meant to fire.

Beauty and Health
Evolutionary biologists believe that in many creatures beauty is a reliable indicator of health, and therefore a perfectly sensible way to choose one mate over another. Gorgeous plumage, lustrous hair, symmetrical features are “certificates of health” as one scientist puts it, advertisements that a creature carries genes for resistance to parasites and in not other wise under stress. Among birds, the species most susceptible to parasites are the ones with the most extravagant plumage — probably because these are the ones that most need to advertise their fitness. A fabulous tail is a metabolic extravagance only the healthy can afford. In the same way a fabulous car is a financial extravagance only the successful can afford. In our own species, too, ideals of beauty often correlate with health: when lack of food was what usually killed people, people judged body fat to be a thing of beauty. though the current preference for sickly-pale, rail-thin models suggests that culture can override evolutionary imperatives.

The Canonical Flowers
What sets these canonical flowers [rose, peony, orchid, lily, tulip] apart from the run of charming daisies and pinks and carnations, not to mention the legions of pretty wildflowers? Perhaps more than anything else, it’s their multifariousness. Some perfectly good flowers simply are what they are are, singular and, if not completely fixed in their identity, capable of ringing only a few simple changes on it; hue, say, or petal count. Prod it all you want, select and cross and reengineer it, but there’s only so much a coneflower or a lotus is ever going to do. Fashion is apt to puck up such a flower for a time and then drop it — think of the pink or gillyflower, in Shakespeare’s day or the hyacinth in Queen Victoria’s — since it won’t let itself be remade in some new image once its first one is passé. By contrast the rose, orchid, and the tulip are capable of prodigies, reinventing themselves again and again to suit every change in the aesthetic or political weather.

Natural vs. Artificial Selection
From the chance mutations thrown out by a flower, nature preserves the rare ones that confer some advantage — brighter color, more perfect symmetry, whatever. For millions of years such features were selected, in effect, by the tulip’s pollinators — that is, insects — until the Turks came along and began to cast their own votes. The Turks did not learn to make deliberate crosses till the 1600’s; the novel tulips they prized were said simply to have “occurred”. Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is a distinction without a  difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with ore offspring. Though we self-importantly regard domestication as something people have done to plants, it is at the same time a strategy by which the plants have exploited in us and our desires — even our most idiosyncratic notions of beauty — to advance their interests….Mutations that nature would have rejected out of hand in the wild sometimes probe to be brilliant adaptations in an environment that’s been shaped by human desire.

Flowers, the Crucible of Beauty?
Human desire entered into the natural history of the flower and the flower did what it has always done: made itself still more beautiful in the eyes of this animal, folding into its very being even the most improbable of our notions and tropes….we gazed even further into the blossom of a flower and found something more: the crucible of beauty, if not art, and maybe even a glimpse into the meaning of life…the heart of nature’s double nature — that is, the contending energies of creation and dissolution, the spiraling toward complex form and the tidal pull away from it. Apollo and Dionysus were  names the Greeks gave to these to these two faces of nature, and nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid passing. There, the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe abandonment. There, the perfection of art and the blind flux of nature. There, both transcendence and necessity.

Lessons of Coevolution
One of the great lessons of coevolution is that the all-out victory of one species over another is often Pyrrhic. That’s because a powerful, death-dealing toxin can exert such a strong selective pressure for resistance in its target population that it is quickly rendered ineffective; a better strategy may be to repel, disable, or confound….some plant toxins such as nicotine, paralyze or convulse the muscles of pests who ingest them. Others such as caffeine, unhinge an insect’s nervous system and kill its appetite. Toxins in datura (and henbane and a great many other hallucinogens) drive a plant’s predators mad, stuffing their brains with visions distracting or horrible enough to take the creatures’ mind off lunch….compounds such as flavonoids change the taste of plant flesh on the tongues of certain animals, rendering the sweetest fruit sour or the sourest flesh sweet, depending on the plant’s designs. Photosensitizers present in species such as the wild parsnip cause the animals that eat it to burn in the sun; chromosomes exposed to these compounds spontaneously mutate when exposed to ultraviolet light. A molecule present in the sap of a certain tree prevents caterpillars that sample its leaves from ever growing into butterflies.

Catnip
Catnip contains a chemical compound, called “nepetalactone” which mimics the pheromone cats produce in their urine during courtship. This chemical key just happens to fit an aphrodisiac lock in a cat’s brain and apparently no other.

Types of Marijuana
Cannabis Sativa, an equatorial species poorly adapted to life in the northern latitudes. Sativa can’t withstand frost, and… usually won’t set flowers (sinsemilla) north of the thirtieth parallel…American hippies traveling the “hashish trail” through Afghanistan returned with seeds of Cannabis indica, a stout, frost-tolerant species that had been grown for centuries by hashish producers in the mountains of central Asia…it rarely grows taller than four or five feet (as compared to fifteen for the stateliest sativa) and its purplish green leaves are shorter and rounder than the long, slender fingers of sativa. Indica also proved to be exceptionally potent, although many people will tell you that its smoke is harsher and its high more physically debilitating than that of sativa.

Marijuana’s Genetic Revolution
Marijuana’s genetic revolution recalls an earlier horticultural watershed: the introduction of the China rose (R. chinensis) to Europe in 1789, an event that made it possible for the first time to breed roses that would flower more than one  a season…for both the rose and marijuana, human mobility coupled with human desire — for a rose that would rebloom in august; for sinsemilla that would grow in the north –  led to the reunification of two distinct evolutionary lines of a plant that had diverged thousands of years before… the smoother taste and “clear, bell-like high “ associated with the best equatorial sativa.. Could be combined with the superior potency and hardiness of an indica… the result.. “a great revolution” in cannabis genetics…

Cannabis Genetics
By judiciously manipulating the five main environmental factors under their control — water, nutrients, light, carbon dioxide levels and heat — as well as the genetics of the plant, growers found that the marijuana plant, this remarkably obliging weed, could be made to perform wonders….cannabis genetics improved to the point where it was no longer unusual to find sinsemilla with concentrations of the THC, marijuana’s principal psychoactive compound, as high as 15 percent…(THC in ordinary marijuana ranged from 2 to 3 percent…for sinsemilla 5 to 8 percent)…nowadays THC levels of 20 percent are not unheard of.

Indoor Growing of Cannabis
Indoors… the gardener is mother nature but even better. ..growers discovered they could speed photosynthesis by supplying plants with all of the nutrients, carbon dioxide, and light they could handle — vast amounts, as it turned out (Cannabis is, after all a weed.) Gardeners found that their plants could absorb hundreds of thousands of lumens — a blinding amount of light — twenty four hours a day. Later on by abruptly slashing their diet of light to twelve hours daily (and changing from metal halide to sodium lights, the frequency which more closely mimics the autumn sun), growers could shock their plants into flowering before they were eight weeks old. With the right equipment, an indoor grower could create a utopia for his plants, an artificial habitat more perfect that any in nature…

Female Marijuana Plants
As long as the female marijuana plant remains unpollinated, it will continue to produce new calyxes, steadily adding to the length of its flower. in this state of perpetual sexual frustration, the plant also continues to produce large quantities of THC-rich resin. But even a few grains of pollen to reach the plant’s flowers, and the process abruptly stops: bud and resin production shuts down, the plant commences producing seeds and the sinsemilla is ruined

A Regimen of Encouragement For Cannabis
The grower had chosen this particular town because it is home to a candy factory, a bakery, and a chemical plant. Marijuana plants, and indicas in particular, emit a strong, acrid odor; he was counting on the cacophony of smells produced by these three neighbors to cover the telltale stink of his plants…he flung open a tightly sealed door and I was hit squarely in the face first by a blast of white, white light, and then by a stink so powerful tit felt like a punch. Sweaty, vegetal, and sulfurous, the place might have been a locker room in the Amazon…I stepped into a windowless chamber not much bigger than a walk-in closet, crammed with electrical equipment, snaked with cables and plastic tubing, and completely sealed off for the world. More than half the room was taken up by the gardener’s Sea of Green: a six foot square table invisible beneath a jungle of dark, serrated leaves oscillating gently in an artificial breeze. There were perhaps a hundred clones here, each barely a foot tall, yet already sending forth a thick finger of hairy calyxes casting about vainly for a few grains of airborne pollen. A network of narrow plastic pipes supplied the plant with water, a tank of CO₂ sweetened their air, a ceramic heather warmed their roots at night, and four 600-watt sodium fixtures bathed them in a blaze of light for twelve hours of each y. The other twelve, they were sealed in perfect darkness. The briefest lapse of light would ruin the whole crop…in exchange for a regimen of encouragement the likes few plants have ever known, these hundred eager demonic dwarves would oblige their gardener with three pound of dried buds before the month was out — some $13,000 worth of flowers.

One Culture’s Panacea Is Another’s Panapathogen
But the reason cultures give for promoting one plant and forbidding another are remarkably fluid in both time and space one culture’s panacea is another’s panapathogen (root of all evil).Think of the traditional role of alcohol in the Christian West as opposed to the Islamic East…Tobacco smoking and coffee drinking  were taboo in the West before the Industrial Revoliution. The German historian Wolfgang Shivelbusch, suggests that the two drugs became socially acceptable because they aided in industrialization’s “reorientation of the human organism to the primacy of mental labor.”

A Natural History of Religion
A natural history of religion would show that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi. Karl Marx may have gotten it backward when he called religion the opiate of the people…somewhere in that volume we would surely find a chapter on the place of the opium poppy and cannabis in the romantic imagination…It’s well known that many English romantic poets used opium, and several of the French romantics experimented with hashish soon after Napoleon’s troops brought it back with them from Egypt… Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the imagination as a mental faculty that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate,” an idea whose reverberations to Western culture haven’t yet been stilled, simply cannot be understood without reference to the change in consciousness wrought by opium….Not just poetry but modernism, surrealism, cubism, and jazz have all been nourished by Coleridge’s idea of the transforming imagination….Lenson writes “We have to face the fact that some of our canonical poets and theorists, when apparently talking about imagination, are really talking about getting high.”

Meme
A meme is simply a unit of memorable cultural information. It can be sas small as a tune or a metaphor, as big as philosophy or religious concept. Hell is a meme, so are Pythagorean theorem,  A Hard Day’s Night, the wheel, Hamlet, pragmatism, harmony….Dwarkin’s theory is that memes are to cultural evolution what genes are to biological evolution…Memes are culture’s building blocks, passed down from brain to brain in a Darwinian process that leads by trial and error, to cultural innovation and progress. The memes that prove themselves best adapted to their “environment” — that is the ones most likely to survive and replicate and become widely regarded as good, true, or beautiful. Culture at any given moment is a meme pool in which we all swim  — or rather that swims through us.

Cannabis “High” is a Creation of the Mind?
Andrew Weil contends that cannabis does not itself create but merely triggers the mental state we identify as “being high.” The very same mental state can be triggered in other ways, such as meditation or breathing exercises. Weil believes that it is an error of modern materialist thinking to believe that the high smokes experience is somehow a product of he plant itself (or THC), rather than a creation of the mind — prompted perhaps but sui generis.

The Cannabinoid Network
On the assumption that the human brain would not have evolved a special structure for the express purpose of getting it high on marijuana, researchers hypothesized that the brain must manufacture its own THC like chemical for some as yet unknown purpose. The scientific paradigm at work here was the endorphin system, which is tripped by opiates from plants as well as endorphins produced in the brain….Raphael Mechoulam found…the brain’s own endogenous cannabinoid. He named it “anandamide’” form the Sanskrit “inner bliss”…the effects of the cannabinoid network: pain relief, loss of short term memory, sedation, and mild cognitive impairment …”All of which is exactly what Adam and Eve went after being thrown out of Eden. You couldn’t design a more perfect drug for getting Eve through the pain of childbirth or helping Adam endure a life of physical toil. …cannabinoid receptors had been found in the uterus, of all places, and speculated that anandamide may not only dull the pain of childbirth but help woman forget it later. The sensation of pain is curiously one of the hardest to summon from memory…

High With Carl Sagan
“There is a myth about such highs, the user has the illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny until morning. I am convinced this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved while high are real insights; the main problem is putting those insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day…If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I’m high, I know about this disbelief.”
Marijuana Reconsidered, Lester Grinspoon

The Importance of Forgetting
What a curious thing ..for the brain to do, manufacture chemicals that interfere with it own ability to make memories…forgetting is a mental operation, not a breakdown of one….think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn’t quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember…oru mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered. The cannabinoid network appears to be part of that mechanism, vigilantly sifting the vast chaff of sense impression from the kernels of perceptions we need to remember if we’re to get though the day and get on with what needs to be done. Much depends on forgetting.

Transcendence
Nietzche is describing a kind of transcendence — a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer. ..It is a state that depends on its effect on losing oneself in the moment, usually by training a powerful, depthless concentration on One Big Thing (Or, in the Eastern tradition, One Big Nothing). If you imagine consciousness as a kind of lens through which we perceive the world, the drastic constricting of its field of vision seems to heighten the vividness of whatever remains in the circle of perception, while everything’s (including our awareness of the lens itself) simply falls away…Some of our greatest happinesses arrive in such moments, during which we feel we’ve sprung free from the tyranny of time — clock time, of course, but also historical and psychological time, and sometimes even mortality…in the Eastern tradition: “Awaken to this present instant,” a Zen master has written, “we realize the infinite is the finite of each instant.” We can’t get there from here without first forgetting.