Monthly Archives: August 2025

The Genius of Survival

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Photo by Meldy Tameng (Wikimedia Commons).

By accident, my wife and I stumbled onto the convention of calling essentially every living being a genius. It started as a joke about our cat, because obviously—in our human-supremacist culture—superlative traits like genius can only be applied to humans! Soon enough, this practice migrated to squirrels, newts, baby birds, ants—and even plants, fungi, and microbes. I no longer think of it as a joke.

I’ve utilized this framing in other posts by noting that every one of these beings knows how to do things we haven’t the foggiest clue how to do ourselves—or how, in detail, they manage it. I’ll get to the nuanced nature of the word “know” in a bit. But for now we can at least admit that the world is overflowing with phenomena we haven’t even registered, let alone understood. Typically, we just scratch the surface at best.

What I’ll do here is explore the relative genius of Life as compared to the normal use of the term, in the way of cognitive prowess. Let the games begin!

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Views: 1749

The Worst Inventions

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A joke for Alex Leff; these don’t explicitly make the list (image from Wikimedia Commons).

Listening to a podcast conversation between Derrick Jensen and James Van Lanen (anthropologist), I was intrigued by their discussion of the “five worst” inventions. This would get anyone’s gears turning. But I was particularly energized because in the day or two before, I had considered for the first time the terrible power of one invention that I had previously never questioned as being anything but fantastic. I employ it constantly…right now, in fact.

I was excited enough to contact Derrick about this “dark horse” candidate to get his reaction, and he, too, was energized enough to suggest our own conversation on the matter, which has since been recorded and is available on Resistance Radio.

In this post paralleling the podcast conversation, I define what makes an invention bad in my view, preface with a trigger warning about inevitable attachments and fondness, and offer a few provisional “worst” inventions before getting to five that are less ambiguous in my book.

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Views: 3640

My Ishmael

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Photo of book cover by Tom Murphy.

Having first covered Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael in extensive fashion, then The Story of B in a mega-post, it was basically inevitable that I would finish the loose trilogy and offer a treatment of My Ishmael.

This third book in the series connects much more closely with the first book than did “B”—both in time and space. It follows the relationship between Ishmael, the wise gorilla teacher, and a precocious teenager named Julie who studies under Ishmael in overlap with an oblivious Alan Lomax (narrator/pupil from the first book).

As Ishmael customizes lessons to individual students, we see that Julie’s education is complementary to Alan’s—conveniently justifying a whole different book providing a new set of provocative insights.

Format

The book is arranged into 36 short, chronological chapters. Headings below reflect chapter titles and starting page numbers in parentheses (1998 printing). As I did for the other books, I mainly stay away from narrative elements—focusing instead on lessons. The exception in this case is in the setup. Part of my rationale is to encourage folks to read the original, treating this post as highlights of the “boring” portions—ideal for a refresher after having read the book.

All the chapter titles and page numbers are represented until the end of lessons, when the book shifts to more of a traditional novel. Note that the 20th Century Daniel Quinn often uses “man” to mean “humans” more broadly. As in the other treatments, I attempt to confine my own slant to [square brackets].

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Views: 1372