We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how li
Rebecca Solnit
In my last book, I argue that the transformation of ideas, beliefs, and values is so profound it amounts to the dismantling of a civilization and its replacement (by one that I like much better and that scares the socks off those who want to perpetuate straight white Christian male hegemony and find that to do that they have to get more and more extreme including in how they distort the facts around science and nature and reality themselves). Here's three essays I've just come across demonstrating that we are rethinking nature itself -- and since nature has been for centuries a touchstone for what is legitimate, normal, meant to be, etc. the definition of nature is crucial for everything, from how we understand sex and gender to how we think about economics and society. Huzzah! Links in captions to screenshots.
Willow Schenwar writes, "Excluding insects, 33 percent of all animal species are predominately hermaphroditic. Some of these animals start out as one sex and change to another. Clownfish are an iconic example: They begin their lives as male and have the ability to transform their bodies to become female when the alpha female of their social group leaves or dies. Other fish, such as wrasses, exhibit this same sequential hermaphrodism, but in the other direction. Many invertebrates—such as worms and snails—possess the reproductive structures of both sexes at the same time. Some species have more than two sexes; splitgill mushrooms have over 23,000 different sexes, or mating types."
Rowan Hooper writes about his excellent new book, "In my new book Togetherness, I make the case that symbiosis – which means “living together” – has been neglected in our explanation of biology and ecology. It’s not just that I think it’s a shame that its significance has been unappreciated; it’s that recognising symbiosis is vital to help us understand who we are and how we came to be. Complex life – all those things you see around you – exists only because of a deep form of cellular symbiosis, and all plants rely on symbiosis to grow and to produce all the food we eat. But this isn’t widely recognised. Since before Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, and even more so afterwards, we have emphasised the role of competition in the evolution of life, fuelled by the idea of nature being “red in tooth and claw”. What I didn’t expect to find when researching my book is that the growing understanding of this togetherness, and the way it forces us to look at the world anew, is helping to demystify one of the greatest and oldest questions in science: how did life begin? The picture that is coming into view is set to reshape our definition of what life is – and inform the search for alien life."
The ideas of survival of the fittest and winning at all costs are closely entwinned with Darwinism, but they shouldn’t be. A rethink from a
The vast majority of life on earth exists outside of sex and gender binaries—despite what the right likes to claim.
