Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

1. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Frank Brady, editor (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) (originally published in 1733–1734), Epistle I, “Argument of the Nature and State of Man, with Respect to the Universe,” p. 13, lines 221–226.2. An updating after Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds” (1934), reprinted in Claire H. Schiller, translator and editor, Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), pp. 6 ff.3. Six carbon atoms make up the ring in this molecule. Chemists number them in sequence from 1 to 6. The chlorine atoms are attached in the 2 and 6 positions. If instead they were attached in, say, the 2 and 5 positions, the tick of the opposite sex would not be interested.4. Ticks are arachnids with eight legs, like spiders, tarantulas, and scorpions. They’re a matter of practical concern because they are the vectors for the spread of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, and other illnesses—of livestock as well as of humans. We’ve described many of the essential sensory skills of a particular species, but other strategies and capabilities appear on closer examination or in other species. Some species have not one but three different mammalian hosts at different stages of their life cycles. Those ticks that live in caves may wait years for an appropriate host. Ticks chemically interfere with fibrinogen and other machinery that works to staunch the flow of their host’s blood, permitting some species to stuff themselves with a hundred times their unfed body weight in blood. Not only butyric acid is sensed in their quest for mammalian blood, but also lactic acid (CH₃HCOHCOOH) and ammonia (NH₃). Ticks use pheromones for purposes other than attracting the opposite sex—an assembly pheromone, for example, for a gathering of the tribes in cracks and crevices, or in caves. (See Daniel E. Sonenshine, Biology of Ticks, Volume 1 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]). Nevertheless, the basic sensory armamentarium of tick life still seems, as it did in the 1930s, very simple.5. J. L. Gould and C. G. Gould, “The Insect Mind: Physics or Metaphysics?” in D. R. Griffin, editor, Animal Mind-Human Mind (Report of the Dahlem Workshop on Animal Mind-Human Mind, Berlin, March 22–27, 1981) (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1982), p. 283.6. Thomas H. Huxley, “On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata, and its History” (1874), in Collected Essays, Volume I, Method and Results: Essays (London: Macmillan, 1901), p. 218.7. von Uexküll, op. cit., pp. 43, 46.8. Karl von Frisch, The Dancing Bees (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953).9. A provocative modern discussion, informed by neurophysiology and computer science, is Daniel C. Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). Optimistic assessments of the near future of artificial intelligence and artificial life include Hans Moravec, Mind Children (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Maureen Caudill, In Our Own Image: Building an Artificial Person (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). A more pessimistic assessment is Roger Penrose, The Emperors New Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).10. Quoted in Konrad Lorenz, “Companionship in Bird Life: Fellow Members of the Species as Releasers of Social Behavior,” in Schiller, op. cit., p. 126.11. René Descartes, letter to the Marquis of Newcastle, quoted in Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, Great Treasury of Western Thought: A Compendium of Important Statements on Man and His Institutions by the Great Thinkers in Western History (New York and London: R. R. Bowker Company, 1977), p. 12.12. Aristotle, History of Animals, Book VIII, 1, 588^a, in The Works of Aristotle, Great Books edition, Volume II, translated into English under the editorship of W. D. Ross (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952) p. 114.13. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.) (originally published in 1871) (Modern Library edition also contains The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life), Chapters 1 and 3.14. René Descartes, Traité de l’Homme, Victor Cousin, editor, pp. 347, 427, as translated by T. H. Huxley, in Huxley, Collected Essays, Volume I, Method and Results: Essays (London: Macmillan, 1901), “On Descartes’ ‘Discourse Touching the Method of Using One’s Reason Rightly and of Seeking Scientific Truth’ ” (1870).15. Voltaire, “Animals,” Philosophical Dictionary (1764), T. H. Huxley, translator, op. cit., ref. 14.16. Thomas H. Huxley, “On Descartes’ ‘Discourse Touching the Method of Using One’s Reason Rightly and of Seeking Scientific Truth’ ” (1870), and “On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata, and its History” (1874), in Huxley, Collected Essays, Volume I, Method and Results Essays (London Macmillan, 1901), pp. 186–187, 184, 187–189, 237–238, 243–244.17. J. L. and C. J. Gould, “The Insect Mind: Physics or Metaphysics?” in D. R. Griffin, editor, Animal Mind-Human Mind (Report of the Dahlem Workshop on Animal Mind-Human Mind, Berlin, March 22–27, 1981) (Berlin. Springer-Verlag, 1982), pp. 288, 289, 292.