Enchanted by the Sun

Hawk moths can dis­tin­guish the dif­fer­ent col­ors of stars. Bower birds invented per­spec­tive long before Renais­sance painters did. The old­est known human art­works are a col­lab­o­ra­tion with fungi and bac­te­ria.

Answer­ing ques­tions you never thought to ask, ecol­o­gist Peter War­shall gave a pre­sen­ta­tion on his work on color last Novermber 28, 02012 (that’s not a typo – it’s how the the spon­sor, Long Now Foun­da­tion writes dates). Enchanted by the Sun: The CoEvo­lu­tion of Light, Life, and Color on Earth, was hosted by the Long Now Foun­da­tion in San Francisco.

The mis­sion of the Long Now Foun­da­tion is to encour­age “slower/​better” think­ing and reverse the trend in our civ­i­liza­tion toward short-​sightedness. The atten­tion span they are talk­ing about is on the scale of 10,000 years or so. A curi­ous thing about this effort to think in 10,000 year spans is that com­put­ers can not cur­rently under­stand a date with five dig­its. (Ten thou­sands years from now the year will be 10013.)

Peter’s talk is part of a monthly series Sem­i­nars About Long-​term Think­ing (SALT), hosted by for­mer edi­tor of the Whole Earth Cat­a­log, and Long Now founder, Stew­art Brand.

Think­ing about time in blocks that go beyond one indi­vid­ual life span is rad­i­cal.; and very much in keep­ing with the kind of long-​term think­ing that botanists began to do at the Carnegie Desert Lab­o­ra­tory over a cen­tury ago, and later con­tin­ued by the UA and USGS Pale­o­bi­ol­ogy lab on Tumamoc Hill. Fur­ther­more, Peter is a neigh­bor liv­ing just out­side the Tumamoc prop­erty, at the base of A-​mountain, across from Tucson’s his­toric Mis­sion Gar­dens project. So this topic still remains with­ing my study area for this blog: Tumamoc.

Peter’s resume ranges so far and wide that it’s kind of sim­plis­tic to call him an ecol­o­gist. Another poet-​scientist that comes to mind, Henry Thoreau, kept two sets of note­books, one for sci­ence and one for poetry, feel­ing that because of the increas­ing spe­cial­iza­tion of sci­ence even in his day, he had to keep them sep­a­rate. Peter War­shall man­ages to find poetry under­neath and within the facts of what he calls “prag­matic sci­ence” and weaves them together seamlessly.

I have illus­trated a project here and there for Peter over the past few decades. Every­thing he does makes one pause to think because it’s just a lit­tle out­side the box, but both mind-​altering and prac­ti­cal. Con­sid­er­ing the glut of infor­ma­tion on the Web and my short atten­tion span (espe­cially by Long Now stan­dards), it’s sig­nif­i­cant that I watched the pre­sen­ta­tion all the way through imme­di­ately, and will watch it again.

War­shall defines his task as that of the clas­sic nat­u­ral­ist: to try to escape as much as pos­si­ble from the human bias and see things through the mind of the other species one encoun­ters. All things, from this per­spec­tive, are equally beau­ti­ful. And each species has their own ver­sion of beauty, which may be equal to or greater than ours in sophistication.

Out­do­ing the theme of the sem­i­nar series, Peter cov­ers the approx­i­mately 3.8 bil­lion years his­tory of the love affair between earthly life forms and light. Whether it is the work of a human painter or of another species, it’s all treated as one inte­grated process. An “aes­thetic com­mons,” shared by all species, is cre­ated by the fact that the sun shines on every­thing and every­one alike.

The story begins with the first bac­te­ria that learned to cap­ture energy from the sun, “the ini­tia­tor of all that is sweet,” to make the sug­ars that power life. Light even­tu­ally enters the liv­ing body and helps to shape it over time, even­tu­ally becom­ing part of the inner self as well.

Sun­light, in a sense, inspired antic­i­pa­tion as the mol­e­c­u­lar machin­ery of pho­to­syn­the­sis was put together to receive it, then yearn­ing, as algae devel­oped cilia and could move towards the light. Yearn­ing became desire, which becomes hope, the log­i­cal pre­cur­sor of tran­scen­dence. Light is even sim­u­lated by neu­rons in the brain, in the dark as we sleep. Images and pat­terns become icons, arche­types, or sym­bols. tran­scend­ing their orig­i­nal intent or mechanism.

This is all research for a new book War­shall has in process.

Peter is not phys­i­cally well and his exhaus­tion shows as he gets near the end of his hour-​long talk plus a period for ques­tions, extem­po­riz­ing through­out after a crash of his Microsoft pre­sen­ta­tion soft­ware. Yet one can see that his pas­sion for the sub­ject comes through so strong that it car­ries the evening despite those difficulties.

Stew­art Brand describes it this way:

Warshall’s talk, and his life, have been a con­ver­gence of art and sci­ence. Asked about how sci­en­tists could learn more about art, War­shall sug­gested they go to an art class and learn how to draw. As for how artists can learn more of sci­ence, he had two words:

“Out­doors. Look.”