Walking through nature with John Palka, a neuroscientist who loves plants and ponders big questions
Both living things and the non-living world consist of molecules. The molecules that make up each one of us are largely the same as those that make up every other person and animal on the planet. Molecules make up everything in the world of our experience.
A change is coming to Nature’s Depths. I will use today’s post, the first in the site’s fourth year, to explain what this change is and why I am introducing it.
“Autumn is a season of great beauty, but it is also a season of decline: the days grow shorter, the light is suffused, and summer’s abundance decays toward winter’s death. Faced with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn? She scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring—she scatters them with amazing abandon.”
Sensitivity to light is so universally useful that many kinds of animals have evolved eyes. The structure of the eyes of diverse animals, however, varies considerably, and with this variation come differences in what information about the world the eyes can capture and convey to the brain. Thus, the role of vision in the lives of different animals cannot be assumed to be similar to our own experience. Let’s look at some examples.
Among the most spectacular fossils are petrified trees, some preserved in such exquisite detail that it takes more than a casual glance to realize that they have indeed been petrified—turned into stone.
It was April 20th of this year. We were sitting in our lovely three-season sun porch enjoying the coming of spring, I on the couch and Yvonne, opposite me, in her favorite gliding rocker. All of a sudden she exclaimed, “Look. There’s a duck on our railing!”