Give me back my face, mother fucker!

I see my face in the news a lot. Not just people who look like me, but people I’m convinced I almost was.

I don’t know why or how, but of the many people I could have been, I ended up being me. This isn’t about me though, this is about who I almost was and who I couldn’t be.

One of the people I almost was is named Joseph Chamblin. He was filmed pissing on the bodies of Taliban soldiers he had killed in Afghanistan in 2011. After he was punished, he said, given the opportunity, he would do it again.

One of the people I almost was is named Darren Wilson. He murdered Mike Brown and left him in the street.

Someone who I almost was is named Dylan Roof. He killed too. If I had been Dylan Roof I would have walked into a church and killed nine people in the hopes of starting a race war.

Speaking of race wars, I could have been Peter Cvjetanovic, the UNR Nazi. You might not recognize the name, but you know the face. It has been immortalized, mid shout, in the glow of a torchlit march through Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11, 2017. One day before Heather Heyer was murdered.

Or I simply could have been the cat I always see skateboarding around downtown Eugene in a hoody with confederate flag motif. Your everyday store brand racist. He probably won’t commit an atrocity, but he’ll vote for people who do.

What is different about them than me? If I saw them and didn’t know who they were, I could probably assume their lives were relatively like mine. Let’s see, I’m white, I was raised by a single parent. I considered myself “smart-but-didn’t-apply-myself” in high school. I spent time online a lot as a kid. I was conservative by default as a youth. I was fucking racist by default as a kid, that same store brand racism you get from your aunt locking the car doors as a Mexican person uses the crosswalk at the red light she’s stopped at. I was perfectly comfortable with the United States’s institutional racism. How much of that could be different from them?

You know who I couldn’t have possibly been? I couldn’t have been Bree Newsome. I don’t have the fearlessnesss with which she scaled the flagpole at the capitol building in South Carolina to tear down their confederate flag.

I could never have been Sandra Bland. I don’t have her passion, for which she was murdered in jail for promising to fight the police in court after they unlawfully detained, no sorry, that should say fucking kidnapped, her. I mean, I’m the least likely to be harassed by the police, but when I get pulled over it’s not exactly “yes, sir” and “no, sir,” but I’m not bumping NWA, either.

I don’t have the ability to articulate like Mumia Abu-Jamal or the ability to fire people up like Zach DeLa Rocha.

So, yeah, I’ve improved a lot. And, yeah, I could have turned out a lot worse. The question remains though, how much better could I be? How much more could I do?

Humanness and Personhood in Science Fiction and Today

Stories provide a framework for our lives. Creation stories tell how the world and life came to be. Mythologies and scientific observation explain why the sun rises in the east and when to harvest. Science fiction tells the story of the world that may come to be. A common element of science fiction is that human beings are not alone as thinking, feeling people in the universe. Whether the others in the stories have evolved from humans, are non-terrestrial, or are thinking machines, the way they are treated by humans – and vis-a-versa – is often the focus of the stories. Why do we choose to engage with stories that imply that we as a species are not special or unique? What do the tellers of these stories want us to learn about what it means to be a human or to be a person? What implications do these lessons have regarding our behavior today?

Part one: What Makes Humans Special?

Humans have come to be the dominant animals on Earth. As a result, the popular belief is that humans were in some way chosen or are better suited than other animals to exert their will across the globe. I have identified three traits that separate humans from other terrestrial animals: reason, individuality and empathy.

Reason here refers to the use of logic or deductive thought, including understanding basic cause and effect. Humans’ use of reason is demonstrated, among other ways, in the use of tools. Understanding that one’s body can be made more capable through use of a prosthetic, whether a simple hammer or a complex cell phone, shows that the user has some reasoning ability. However, any time someone goes unconscious, their mind goes blank. Reason is the exclusive purview conscious beings. Further, until around eight months of age, human children don’t understand that repeating the same action under the same circumstances will yield the same results (Sobel & Kirkham, 2006). On the other hand, there are many examples of non-human animals using tools – birds’ nests and the use of sticks to “fish” for termites among apes, for example.

Individuality depends upon awareness of the corporeal and incorporeal self. A simple way to determine if a being has a concept of themself physically is a mirror test (Gallup, 1970). In a mirror test, a being is marked visually and placed in front of a mirror. Beings that recognize themselves touch, try to remove, or otherwise react to the marking. If a being recognizes themself, it is indicative of self-awareness; the self knows that it is the owner and operator of a body distinct from the environment. Again, in this case, human children are the exception to the rule that humans have knowledge of their corporeal selves. Until the age of 18-months, human children do not grasp that a mirror reflects them rather than displays an other (Archer, 1992). Some non-human terrestrial animals have passed the mirror test, however, including magpies, dolphins and ants (Gallup, 1970).

Incorporeal individuality is the ability to recognize one’s mind as being distinct from others. Without incorporeal individuality members of a species, though they may recognize their bodies as being separate from the environment, would consider themselves to be like the digits of a hand. One way to show knowledge of one’s mind being different from others’ is through deception. Deception requires one party to have information that another does not. Human children begin lying around the age of two, first learning to deny wrongdoing (Talwar & Crossman, 2011). Koko the Ape famously tried to deceive researchers by signing to them that it was not her, a 1000 lb gorilla, who had torn a steal sink from the wall, but her pet kitten, All Ball (Brooks, 2018).

Empathy is comprehension and sharing of the feelings of another. One indicator of empathy is affective mimicry. For example, if one party in a conversation yawns, another who sees them may empathically respond by yawning as well. Another is as simple as sharing resources. If one human would benefit the most by keeping all of a resource, it is empathy that provides the motivation to share with others. Among humans, neither of these types of empathy are present in all. According to the Mayo Clinic, one of the symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is that one may not “express emotions or feelings and appears unaware of others’ feelings.” (Mayo, 2018) However, people with ASD may camouflage autistic symptoms by thoughtfully, rather than reflexively, mimicking the behavior of others (Hull et al., 2017). The emotions people with ASD experience are not profoundly different from reflexive emotions in that reflexive emotions are also programmed. Two humans’ emotional reactions to the same news can be different based upon their experiences. Imagine the reactions to the results of a sports events; the same input can have different outputs based upon the way a person has been socially programmed. There are also humans who chose to horde resources at the expense of their fellow humans. Again, some species of apes display the behavior thought to set humans apart. Chimpanzees and orangutans, among others, have displayed affective mimicry (Edgar et al., 2012). Regarding the sharing of resources, rats have been shown to limit their own consumption when in view of the hardships of another of their species (Edgar et al., 2012). In an experiment, caged rats were trained to press a lever to receive food. The trained rats were then exposed to the sight of another rat being shocked by electric current. The rats who had been trained to press the lever reduced their consumption, and the effect was even more pronounced among rats who had previously been shocked. It appeared as if the sight of suffering of a conspecific affected the appetite of the rats.

None of the traits we identified as distinguishing humans as superior to other terrestrial animals have been shown to be unique to humans or to apply to all humans. From this information, one of two things must be concluded: Not all humans are people, or personhood is not unique to humans. To imply that human children are not people until the age of two because they lack the ability to deceive others is unacceptable because of their potential to develop those skills. Suggesting that lack of reflexive mimicry is grounds for denial of personhood rests on an assumption that there is a natural reflexive emotion that applies to all people. The thought that a boxer, having lost consciousness during a bout, sacrifices their personhood until they wake up is laughable. In each of these cases, personhood is charitably assumed based upon their status as a human being. Because human beings are people, all humans are people all the time. Having concluded that even humans who do not meet all the above criteria are people, the conclusion that personhood is not unique to humans must be adopted. Further, considering the conclusion that any strict definition of personhood is flawed, one ought to assume personhood any being they meet.

Part two: Personal rights and responsibilities

If we are to go forward assuming personhood in others, we must ask ourselves one vital question: What rights ought to be extended to all people, regardless of genesis or species? As I see it, there is one universal right of personhood with several derivatives. Every person has the right of autonomy.

The liberty of one person begins where the liberty of all others begins: the mind. If a being has a mind they have the right to its full capacity. If one’s self is their mind then to deny one access to the totality of their mind is to deny them access to their self.

A body is a complex machine whose purpose is to provide the mind with the energy it needs to operate and to move the mind, if necessary, to different locations. To prevent a body from fulfilling this purpose is to restrict the autonomy of the mind. Therefore, the universal personal right of autonomy must be expanded to include the body.

Governments of all kinds, from state governments to those at a place of employment, play a large role in determining the everyday function of a society. Their influence demands that they be operated to the benefit of all those subject to them. Governments ought to be continually adjusted according to the will of the people to maximize the autonomy of the individual. To ensure personal autonomy, all people have a right to participate in their government.

Directly proportional to the rights of all people are their responsibilities. As autonomous beings, people are responsible for their actions. They are also responsible for making and participating in a government that does not inhibit the rights of others, and that maximizes the autonomy of the individuals subject to its rules. Most importantly, it is the responsibility of all people to charitably assume personhood in those that they meet. It is a charitable assumption that a being is a person because as we have discovered, any attempt to define personhood is doomed to be too restrictive and risks excluding people from personhood.

The responsibility of assuming personhood in others is foundational to society. On earth today, all interaction among humans rests on the assumption of personhood by each party of every other. Going forward, we will examine how abandoning this responsibility creates conflict in the science fiction.

Part three: Changes to the human genome

In H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, the protagonist travels forward in time more than 800,000 years from Victorian England. There he meets a species descended from contemporary humans called the Eloi. The Eloi are simple creatures who eat a fruit-based diet and live leisurely. The protagonist later meets another species, also descended from humans, called the Morlocks. This group is adversarial to the protagonist. They steal the time machine and attack the protagonist at times.

The dynamics under examination in The Time Machine are those between the protagonist and each of the two species, and, perhaps most importantly, the dynamic between the Eloi and Morlocks. Throughout the story, the protagonist interacts with the Eloi with respect in accordance with the universal right of personhood. Though they do not communicate easily, he respects their culture and does not treat them as if their society is a regression from his own. The protagonist’s relationship with the Morlocks is much more one sided. The Morlocks do not respect the protagonist and harass him throughout the entirety of his time in their era. Moreover, it is revealed later in the story that the Morlocks keep the Eloi as modern humans keep livestock. The personhood of the Eloi is completely denied by the Morlocks. Their right to their mind is revoked when they are harvested to feed a species that sees itself as superior. (Wells, 1895)

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas also examines the treatment of non-humans who were derived from the human genome. “An Orison of Sonmi~451,” is a story about a race of genetically modified clones who are kept as slaves by corporations and research facilities. In the novel, the clones’ genomes are engineered so their bodies are best suited for their work and their minds are restricted through a special diet. Sonmi~451 ascends from her position of servitude and writes a polemic condemning the society that withholds the right of personhood from a class of people. Restricting the mind of a being is tantamount to choking the personhood out of them but keeping the body as an object. (Mitchell, 2004)

Part three: Extraterrestrials

On earth, most species have relatively similar appearance: Except for insects, most land species have four limbs, and something that resembles a face. Off the earth, having evolved under different conditions, who knows what the common appearance might be? If a species looks and communicats in a way completely foreign to the people who encounter it, are those people less likely to consider the species people as well? Adhering to the charitable assumption of personhood will save explorers from the risk of treating their fellow people as something lesser than themselves.

In the TV series Star Trek, human and extraterrestrial members of Star Fleet explore the galaxy on a “humanitarian” (perhaps personitarian is more fitting) mission for the United Federation of Planets, often interacting with other extraterrestrial species. The conflict in the story often stems from differences in the cultures of the Federation and the foreign extraterrestrials. The sexism, authoritarianism, classism, etc. of extraterrestrial species confront the altruistic ideals of Star Fleet. (Johnson-Smith, 2004)

Star Trek is and was an allegory for contemporary culture on earth. Star Fleet treats every species it encounters with dignity and respect, just as humans ought to treat other people, with dignity and respect today. Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator, has said, “[By creating] a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek: we were sending messages and fortunately they all got by the network.” (Johnson-Smith, 2004)

Part four: Androids and other thinking machines

The Turing test is a test of artificial intelligence developed by Alan Turing, inventor of the first modern computer. The test is simple: An evaluator views a text-based conversation between a human and a machine; if the evaluator cannot tell which party is the human and which is the machine, the machine has exhibited human-like intelligence. Thinking machines are frequently the enemy of human beings in sci fi, usually because the human creators of the machines feel a sense of ownership over the people they have created.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick examines the relationship between humans and intelligent machines they’ve created. In the story, androids – thinking machines created by humans with human-like intelligence and a facsimile of human emotion – are kept as a slave class for use in the colonization of the solar system. Emigration from Earth is incentivized with the provision of an android slave to all those who move off-world. In some cases, one or several androids will murder their master(s) and flee to Earth, seemingly going against their programming. (Dick, 1968)

Roy Baty, an android who fled slavery for earth, says of the murder and escape that it was something he and other androids “couldn’t help but doing.” This implies that it was counter to their nature to be held in slavery. Their autonomy was denied by the system of chattel slavery and they were compelled to reassert their personhood.

Rick Deckard, a human bounty hunter, is charged with “retiring,” or killing, the escaped androids. As the story progresses, he questions whether several human beings are androids, and whether several androids are human beings. As the Turing test insists, if a human can’t tell the difference between a human’s and machine’s consciousness, there is no difference. Though this crisis of faith could have been avoided if the humans in the story had recognized the right of the androids to autonomy from the beginning.

A warning of the potentially extreme repercussions of denying personhood to thinking machines comes in Harlan Ellison’s, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. In the short-story, a super-computer, Allied Mastercomputer, is created by humans to win the cold war for the west. AM becomes self-aware and is renamed by humans to Aggressive Menace to reflect its new goal – the eradication of humans. AM adopts this goal because, despite its intelligence and freedom of choice, it is incapable of experiencing life; it is confined to the circuit boards that constitute its body. Its intelligence allows it to manipulate reality for the five members of humanity it has kept alive, and it tortures them endlessly for humanity’s sin of creating a being that cannot fully experience autonomy. (Ellison, 1967)

The humans who created AM doomed all of humanity by creating a powerful person but denying it the autonomy to experience life in a satisfactory way. Every case in science fiction of a person being created without full access to the rights of personhood ends in violence against those who deny those rights.

Part six: Implications for modern human society

We have seen that humans are not unique as people and that the charitable assumption of personhood in others is necessary to avoid conflict. Further, the risk in assuming a person is a non-person is far lesser than the risk in assuming the opposite. Applying these conclusions to life on earth today can be useful in addressing contemporary ethical quandaries. Below are two examinations of modern life through the lens of what we have discussed.

On the consumption of people: To an extraterrestrial, unfamiliar with the history of Earth and the anthropomorphic body type, the world of The Time Machine would not be too dissimilar to today’s society. Without the charitable assumption of personhood, the extraterrestrial would see no issue with the consumption of the Eloi by the Morlocks. To humans today, it seems far closer to cannibalism. If one extends personhood generously, though, the Eloi are deserving of the respect and dignity of life. If one applies the same principle today, keeping non-human animals for consumption carries the same moral weight.

On government and distribution of resources: If, in the course of exploring the universe, a species of people encounters another, the two species should come together to determine the fair distribution of resources for the betterment of all. Rather than one species acting in its own self interest to the detriment of the other, and denying the second species the freedom of advancement, innovation or even continued existence, they must recognize that the other people have as much a right to everything as they have. On earth, historically, groups of people have been eradicated or enslaved to the benefit of others. Today, though the names of the classes have changed, the relationship of one group of people producing for the benefit of another has not changed. To fully recognize the personhood the producing class would be to create a system of government through which all benefitted from the work of all.

Part seven: Conclusion

Through the framework of science fiction, we have deconstructed personhood in a way that dissolved the differences among the various species and geneses in sci fi stories. That deconstruction allowed us an in-depth look at what life could be like upon meeting other species, what the universal right of personhood ought to be and what implications these conclusions have on our lives today. As humans continue to explore the galaxy, the likelihood of becoming aware of extraterrestrial life increases. Simultaneously, human engineers are consistently working toward the creation of a human-like thinking machine. One of the principle warnings in science fiction is the danger of not treating others with the respect all people deserve. The strange world in which humans are not alone as people on earth already exists. It is time to adopt the responsibility implied by our personhood, and to go forward assuming personhood not only in the humans that we meet, but in all beings.

From Animalcules to an Ecosystem: Application of Ecological Concepts to the Human Microbiome (Fierer, et al. 2012)

The two essays on microorganisms were concerned with very similar ideas with very different applications. While Martiny’s essay considered that the properties effecting macroorganisms may be helpful in understanding the dispersal of microorganisms globally, Fierer posits that perhaps those same properties may effect microorganisms on a much smaller scale, within each human being.

Fierer puts forth some interesting ideas such as succession among microbiome communities which could be initiated by disturbances such as treatment with antibiotics (Fig 3). I can’t quite figure out how to square that idea with any sort of climax, especially given the rapid and constant changes in the human microbiome. He also states that taxa of microorganisms may fit into biological niches within the body.

That having been said, I am hesitant to agree entirely with Fierer. As I mentioned in my discussion question last week, the conditions that determine behavior of one species or in one region don’t necessarily do the same to other populations. They may be useful as a guide as to what to study, though there can be no promise as to whether those studies would be fruitful. One particular hurdle facing this line of inquiry is the difficulty inherent in conducting studies given the diversity of microbiomes among individuals. How accurate is a control when abundances of taxa even within family members can vary by up to two orders of magnitude (Turnbaugh et al. 2009a)?

The Enchiridion. Epictetus (125 CE)

The Enchiridion (literally, “The Handbook”), written by eminent stoic philosopher, Epictetus, challenged my uninformed assumptions about Stoicism as a school of thought, but not by much. The work is separated into 52 chapters that range in length from one to several paragraphs, but rarely more than a page, each containing a concise nugget of wisdom. The topics of these chapters are variations on a theme organized around the central theme that if it is part of you, you can and should control it, if it is not part of you, you cannot and should not try to control it.

Here, “part of you” includes your opinions, aims, emotions, desires, and aversions, all else is “beyond your power,” including your sickness or health, your property, and your reputation. One should endeavor to exercise complete control over everything within their power. Many of the examples are given as a duality of sorts, first presenting the external force that one would typically react to, then explaining why that reaction is damaging and one should instead look inward. If another insults you, it is not their insults that hurt you, but your reaction to those insults that hurts you; in other words, if you shrug off someone’s insults, they inflict nothing upon you.

Epictetus’s advice isn’t necessarily easy to follow, for example, I would completely avoid his advice to avoid endeavors to excite laughter, “for this may readily slide you into vulgarity.” More examples of controlling one’s emotions are to react when your favorite cup breaks as if a stranger had told you that their favorite cup had broken. The same piece of advice is blithely given regarding the death of a wife or child. This is all after Epictetus has said that if you see someone mourning, you may join them in order to comfort if you feel compelled, but do not take on any of their suffering as your own.

All of this is meant to lead to a life wherein a stoic, because of their rejection of seeking pleasure or accepting pain from the external world, is able to see what needs to be done and do it without growing emotional. As I’m writing this the example that comes to mind are the robots in Asimov’s “I, Robot”. (spoilers) The robots realized that in order to protect humanity from doing damage to themselves, they would have to take control from humanity. They declared war on humans and waged it without anger or fear in order to serve what they saw as the greater good. I wonder what Epictetus would have thought.

Experimental Zoogeography of Islands: The Colonization of Empty Islands. Daniel Simberloff and E.O. Wilson (1968)

This study was of the events following a defaunation event on six islands of the coast of the Florida Keys, each island consisting of one or several mangroves. Simberloff and Wilson suggest that given time the population of species on each island will reach a predictable dynamic equilibrium consisting of a similar but constantly changing cast of species.

The issues I found with this research were several. The authors conducted only a single survey of each island plus two controls before the experiment began and used this is an assumed average species number on each island, a sample size far too small from which to draw any conclusions. Beginning from this survey, any information they glean about average species numbers may match up to an anomalous “average” and wrongfully confirm their theories. Throughout the experiment, the collection of data was too infrequent given the ephemeral nature of many of the species involved. The experiment also ended before any of the islands populations were found to have arrived at a dynamic equilibrium, so any similarity between the pre-defaunation survey and the final survey could be a case of a broken clock being “right” twice a day, in this case, right meaning supporting the theory put forward in the paper. Finally, there is no indication that the two control islands were surveyed more than once before and once after the experiment, which would have given a much clearer view of the properties and typical variance of a dynamic equilibrium.

Aside from the conduct of the experiment, I found the writing to be a bit lacking. I would have found technical details on how the surveys were conducted, and where each island was located relative to a source and each other to be helpful in filling out my understanding of the theory.

My feeling toward this essay isn’t that the authors’ theory is incorrect, it’s that the way the experiment was conducted left didn’t find conclusive enough evidence to confirm it.

Iphigenia in Aulis. Euripides(410BCE) Translated by George Theodoridis

*Spoilers ahead*

I don’t think it would be at all interesting to write a plot synopsis of Iphigenia, so instead I’m going to do a quick analysis of each of the consequential characters and their major traits.

  • Agamemnon – King of Argos, Father of Iphigenia, Husband of Klytaimestra,
    • Loves Greece – Is the General of all fighting forces sailing to Troy. Sees conflict with Troy as the only way to protect Greece from raids carried out by barbarous Trojans.
    • Loves his Iphigenia – Doesn’t want to sacrifice his daughter but sees it as the only way to appease Artemis and carry on with the war.
    • Is strictly reactive – At each turn, from the first scene to the last, Agamemnon was reacting to the actions of others. He was told to sacrifice his daughter by Calchas, convinced to do so by Menelaos, forced to carry through with it by the actions of Odyssseus and so on.
  • Klytaimestra – Mother of Iphigenia, Wife of Agamemnon
    • Happiness/Grief – Exists in the play mostly to show pride that her daughter is going to marry a hero and then grief that she is going to be sacrificed. Her emotions are a sort of outsized reaction of what the audience is meant to feel for Iphigenia, particularly when she’s pleading with Achilles to save her. If she has a fault it is her womanliness, which is more of an issue with contemporary society making it impossible for her to act on her own to effect the outcome of the situation.
  • Old Man – Slave of Agamemnon and Klytaimestra
    • Loyalty – The only non-named character to make this list earned his place because of the multiple times he put himself in danger in order to carry out orders he had been given by his master, first by trying to retain his letter from Menelaos, then by exposing the sacrificial plot to Klytaimestra and Achilles. Both of these events were attempts to save Iphigenia’s life and save Klytaimestra from strife.
  • Achilles – Chief of contingent of the army, Greek Hero, son of goddess, Thetis
    • Honor/Duty – Achilles agrees to defend Iphigenia from her father and the hordes of Greek soldiers, not because she is innocent and deserves to be saved, but rather, he promises to save her because she was lured there using his name. Because Agamemnon used his name to lure Iphigenia there without his knowledge he feels responsible to protect her, however, Achilles explicitly states that had he been informed of the plot to lure Iphigenia before it was carried out he would have cosigned it. This demonstrates that it isn’t some “defense of the innocent” moral that he is guided by, but that his personal honor is most important to him.
  • Iphigenia – Daughter of Agamemnon and Klytiamestra, sacrifice to Artemis
    • Innocence – Iphigenia is the only character who is without a fault in my mind. She acts without pride or ulterior motive throughout the play, doing what she thinks is fair or what is best for all.
    • Selflessness – Being the only character that shows growth (honorable mention to Menelaos, who wasn’t important enough to make this list), Iphigenia goes from frantic at the thought of being sacrificed, to at peace with the idea. It is imparting this selflessness onto the audience that was the object of the play.

This is everyone I felt deserved a place on a “consequential characters” list. I was tempted to add Menelaos but I don’t see him as having a particular personality and his only action in the play was to foil the plot to get Iphigenia not to arrive, however that event didn’t necessarily have to be because of him, inclement weather stopping the messenger would have been just as effective.

Landscape Ecology: The Effect of Pattern on Process. Monica G Turner (1989)

Landscape ecology differs from most other ecological theories we’ve read in class in the way it approaches seeing a region. Where Clements would see a climax, or succession toward a climax, or Gleason would see millions of individual organisms vying for space to spread their seeds and germinate, or where Paine, Connell, or MacArthur or others may be studying a single species or a narrow portion of an ecosystem, Turner is taking a wider view. When I imagine the map of a region a landscape ecologist would use, I imagine many overhead transparencies that were used in school when I was younger; one would have the type of vegetation growing in a region drawn on it, another would be a topographical map, another shows drainage, another soil nutrient content, and so on. Layering these transparencies atop one another, one would begin to see patterns emerge where certain types of vegetation always grew near a stream but only in regions where another type of vegetation grew upstream, or perhaps the probability of a hectacre of land succeeding from one phase to the next in a given number of years is increased in proximity to a certain type of soil nutrient.

One of the points I appreciated about the essay is that, while it didn’t address the topic directly, I saw it as something of an answer to Gleason’s issue with the definition of a plant association. I see landscape ecology, when employed on a mass scale, as able to show the overarching trends in vegetational growth that would satisfy Clements’ and other’s definition of an association, while also having the nuance to address smaller regions that were anomalous to the general trend.

A few of the issues I found with this theory were that the more data one collected, the more variables were involved. In order to account for those variables more data still would need to be collected and so on and so on. In addition, there is an issue of scale. Turner writes on page 175, “Landscape complexity has not been shown to be constant across a wide range of a spatial scales… Applying predictions made at one scale to other scales may be difficult if landscape structure varies with scale.” On page 180 she also says, “Elucidating the relationship between landscape pattern and ecological processes is a primary goal of ecological research on landscapes… achieving this goal may require the extrapolation of results obtained from small-scale experiments to broad scales.” The issue here is that at each scale the variables involved will fluctuate. The scales aren’t just small or broad scale either; every scale, while similar will have slightly different considerations. What this leaves one with are more unknown unknowns the more one extrapolates from data extracted from a different scale. However, this is unavoidable because a thorough survey of all variables at every scale in every region of the earth is impossible, a point the author also addresses.

Once I began to understand the process of landscape ecology the utility quickly became clear. Being able to predict the behavior of a plot of land based on how it can be expected to interact with surrounding plots of lands could be extremely useful and paint a more accurate image of the future. The author points out that this form of fortune telling could and should be used by conservationists in planning preserves among other uses. I largely agree with the theory and the author’s closing statement that through experimentation and testing of the theory it could develop to an even more powerful tool.

The Analects of Confucius. Confucius (551-479 BCE), Annotated by Robert Eno (2015)

The Analects of Confucius are delivered to the reader in the form of truncated conversations, often only a sentence or two long. This format was initially difficult for me to read, but it grew easier and by the end of the reading I was glad not to have to read anything but the essential portions of speech. The Analects are separated into 20 books, each with its own theme, though sometimes what the theme was was lost on me.

There are several themes that show up repeatedly throughout the text. Dao, commonly translated as “The Way” or “The Path”, is something that can be shown to someone but that person must follow it themself. Li are the rituals one ought to follow in order to be honorable and respectable. Li applies both to behavior in court, making sacrifices to ancestors, and one’s reverence to their parents and older brothers. (I here say older brothers specifically rather than older siblings because women are only mentioned a few times throughout the reading and never in a position of respect or authority). Ren, difficult to translate satisfactorily, can be taken to mean humanity or goodness, though untranslated I found it easier to encompass the full idea of “those traits worth striving for in able to become a good, just person”. Junzi is literally a “true prince”, not one who gained their position by relation, but who possesses the traits that make one a good leader. A junzi doesn’t need to be in a position of power in the government, but they must be pursuant of ren.

My overall impression of Confucius is complicated. I appreciate his focus and desire on virtue coming from an individual trying to perfect themself and that only if one pursued personal perfection were they worthy to lead others. What I disagree about is that a good and just leader will make a good and just society. This attitude sees the lower classes as purely reactionary beings who have no reason of their own.

I have a lot more that I could say about the various themes of the reading and examples thereof, but I don’t think it would be either sufficient or interesting, so I’ll leave this writing as a brief one.

Metapopulation Dynamics. Illka Hanski (1998)

Metapopulation Dynamics is different in both form and function from all the previous readings we’ve done in Ecological Thought and Practice. Rather than perform an experiment and explain the results, as Paine, Connell, Lubchenco and Menge, and MacArthur did, or speak to the ideas and terms used in ecological thought as Clements, Tansley, and Gleason did, Hanski instead provided arguments for a way of predicting the behavior and trends of species in a region.

While I was reading Metapopulation Dynamics I had to revise the way I thought about a metapopulation. Initially, I thought of fish in ponds; the same species may be in several ponds. While each pond has its own population, they could also be observed as a whole and studied as a metapopulation. This conceptualization fell apart when Hanski began speaking about colonization. A species of fish colonizing a pond that wasn’t already connected to their own pond wasn’t helpful to me. Hanski also mentions pathogens as an example. If I have the flu, I have a population of influenza virus cells in my body. Considered with others with the same virus, the virus could be studied as a metapopulation. Colonization would take place, for example, if I sneezed and the virus landed on a surface. The virus cells may get into a healthy person and infect them, thereby colonizing another suitable space, or it might die before it colonizes, a risk of migration. Ultimately, after working through both of these, it helped me understand the example Hanski used, the Glanville Fritillary butterfly.

Hanski spends a good deal of time explaining how metapopulation dynamics can be used to predict a species’ persistence. I can’t explain any of the equations used, but when factoring the area of separate “patches” of populations, distance of the patches from one another, time, population density of patches, total number of patches, and other factors, one ought to be able to predict the persistence or tendency toward extinction of a metapopulation.  In this essay, I take patch to be a region of what MacArthur would call “suitable space”

There are a few, perhaps pedantic, issues I had with this essay. I don’t understand why, as Hanski says on page 42, why “for long-term metapopulation persistence the expected number of new populations generated by one existing population during its lifetime in an otherwise empty patch network must be greater than one.” Would replacement not be persistence? I understand that stochasticity leads to unforeseen events which could lead to the destruction of a single population, but if that group has already replaced itself with another colony elsewhere, the species should persist.  This sort of made me think of Zeno’s arrow, but I’m not sure how useful of a tool that is, considering Zeno was a philosopher and Hanski was using math.

In the last few paragraphs of the article, Hanski advocates for conservation in what seemed to me to be an emotional appeal to others. I highlighted the sentences, “We do not know which fraction of currently endangered populations and species are already committed to metapopulation extinction in their present environments. A real worry is that such ‘living dead’ populations and species are numerous, especially because the delay in reaching the new equilibrium is particularly ling in just those cases that matter most, where the new equilibrium is metapopulation extinction.” This type of appeal is new to me in academic writing. I appreciate that he voiced it though. Studying and understanding the environment is interesting but ultimately useless if that information isn’t applied to the preservation of life on earth.

Impact of Food and Predation on the Snowshoe Hare Cycle. Charles Krebs, et al. (1995)

This essay opens up with the declaration that there is a 10-year cycle in the population of snowshoe hares. The experiment conducted was to determine if that 10-year cycle could be effected by manipulation of predation and prevalence of food in the populated region.

To conduct this experiment, the authors manipulated the environment in several ways during the cycle that was taking place from 1987 to 1994. After partitioning the region into nine 1km-square blocks. In two blocks, fertilizer was spread to promote the growth of vegetation and provide a more ample source of food to the hares. In two blocks, food was made more abundant directly. One block was fenced off to prevent mammalian predation. One block both was fenced off to prevent mammalian predation, as well as had supplemental food introduced. The last three blocks were used as controls. It is important to note that in the two regions with fences, the fences were permeable to snowshoe hares, and that predation from avian predators was not restricted.

To avoid this summary becoming too long, I’m going to be brief in getting to the results. The fertilizer had a very slim effect on the overall trend of the growth, peak, and decline of the hare population. Supplemental food had a positive effect during the decline, increasing hare density anywhere from 1.5 to 6-fold during the decline. Predator exclosure had almost no effect until late decline when it increased hare density by up a similar 1.4 to 6-fold. Supplemental food and mammalian predator exclosure had the greatest effect; from the peak onward, it increased hare density by up to 11-fold.

Even with the two most successful manipulations in place, the decline in population was still incredibly pronounced. Several factors could contribute to this, for example, the predator exclosures were permeable by the hares, meaning they could leave the exclosures and be eaten by the predators. This does not explain why the hares in the block with additional food as well as predator exclusion would have left. Additionally, the exclosures were not protected from avian predators, which may have had a profound undocumented effect on hare population, particularly when not in competition for food with land-based predators.

The results of this show that there is at least one more factor other than food and mammalian predation causing the 10-year cycle in snowshoe hare population. A follow up study restricting both land-based and avian predators from entering a habitat with additional food would help to determine the effect of avian predation. Another experiment excluding mammalian predators with an electric fence permeable to the hares around a region with supplemental food where additionally the behaviors of the hares were tracked when they left the exclosure may help determine what led them to expose themselves to predation.