Friends, This is the ffith episode in a series of episodes on science and how science intersects with our lives in surprising ways. These episodes are not “scientific” episodes per se, but they aren’t scientistic either. Each one is an exploration of what science can bring into our lives. The series started with AEWCH 260, on which I talked with Marjolijn van Heemstra about connecting with the expansiveness of space to understand the challenges we face today. Then on AEWCH 261, I talked with bear biologist and the Tooth & Claw podcast co-host Wes Larson about our fascination with animal attacks. On AEWCH 262, I talked with culture and nature philosopher, Erica Berry about what wolves can teach us about being human. And on AEWCH 263 I did a deep dive into the work of rebel scientist (and scientism’s most notable heretic), Wilhelm Reich, with James Strick.
PREDRAG SLIJEPČEVIC, biologist,senior lecturer at Brunel University London, and author of the excellent new book, Biocivilisations: A New Look at the Science of Life (which features an introduction by Vandan Shiva).. Predrag is also a member of The Third Way, which is a group of scientists and thinkers who explore and work to popularize more accurate and evidence-based theories of evolution.
The question we mull over in may ways is how can having a more developed look at life, a developed look at our living planet, and a scientific outlook that puts life first save the world?
How can a life-focused science helps us live on an earth that is conducive to our flourishing and thriving?
These are ideas I’ve been working with for a long time – But Predrag’s new investigation is one of the best articulations of these concepts and incorporates new discoveries and new understandings.
I’m so excited to share this episode with you. It’s a big scope, multidirectional one with a huge vision forming.
PS: Please forgive me for messing up the pronunciation of his name… But I did get it right in the intro!
Friends, This is the third episode in a series of episodes on science and how science intersects with our lives in surprising ways. Across these episodes, we’ll be considering the healing and connective powers of the void of space, terrifying encounters with predators, the development of the concept of nature, reflections on our own animalistic violence, the truth and complications of the scientific method itself, and the ways in which we connect at the tiniest layers of existence. These episodes are not “scientific” episodes per se, but they aren’t scientistic either. Each one is an exploration of what science can bring into our lives. The series started with AEWCH 260, on which I talked with Marjolijn van Heemstra about connecting with the expansiveness of space to understand the challenges we face today. And then on AEWCH 261, I talked with bear biologist and the Tooth & Claw podcast co-host Wes Larson about our fascination with animal attacks.
On this episode, we stay close to predators. But one in particular: The wolf.
The wolf is both living myth and skulking shadow in our imagination. It’s also a flesh and blood animal that uniquely relates to both space — in their range, and encroachment and disappearance from territories — and also time — in reintroduction strategies and old fears that we hold onto but don’t make sense today.
We can learn a lot from wolves if we allow ourselves to sit with what they rouse in us. One of our great wolf-contemplators is my guest on this episode: cultural theorist and nature writer ERICA BERRY author of the excellent meditation on wolves and humans: Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell about Fear.
This conversation reveals that focusing on one beast leads us into a whole ecology of thought. Erica and I discuss desire, violence, communication (with people and animals), the experience of non-humans, nonfiction, and more.
I’m so happy to offer this episode, and I hope you love it!
Friends, This is the second episode in a series of episodes on science and how science intersects with our lives in surprising ways. Across these episodes, we’ll be considering the healing and connective powers of the void of space, terrifying encounters with predators, the development of the concept of nature, reflections on our own animalistic violence, the truth and complications of the scientific method itself, and the ways in which we connect at the tiniest layers of existence. These episodes are not “scientific” episodes per se, but they aren’t scientistic either. Each one is an exploration of what science can bring into our lives. The first episode in the series was AEWCH 260, on which I talked with Marjolijn van Heemstra about connecting with the expansiveness of space to understand the challenges we face today.
This is a very different episode… and it’s about animal attacks!
It’s an exciting and interesting for me on many levels – not the least of which is that it’s with WES LARSON, wildlife biologist and co-host of one of the only podcasts I listen to on a regular basis, THE TOOTH AND CLAW PODCAST, which he hosts with his brother Jeff Larson and their friend Mike Smith! Every week is just a different horror show, where the guys tell a true story about animals attacking people. As a longtime listener, I did have to ask myself, as any reasonable person would: Why am I so interested in animal attacks? Why is anyone, for that matter?
It stirred up, well, quite a bit actually! So Wes and I talk about all that and more at length.
I’ve got to say, I don’t often get a chance to talk with my favorite podcasters, so I’m so excited to share this episode with you.
A new journey. This is the first episode in a series of episodes on science and how science intersects with our lives in surprising ways: through the healing and connective powers of the void of space, terrifying encounters with predators, the development of the concept of nature, our own animalistic violence, the truth and complications of the scientific method itself, and connection at the tiniest layers of existence.
Just as the connections are surprising, so, I hope, will be the picture of science. I don’t mean science in the dull and deadened way science is spoken about, mostly today; that is, a science drained of its vitality through economic and political struggle. Because right now, science primarily finds our way into our consciousness through confrontations: whether they’re about pharmaceuticals or AI or climate change, science lives most squarely in tensions and the low hums of everyday anxiety.
Instead, this is a science that is completed by our engagement with it. A science that connects its offerings with our moral impulses, with love, and with enthusiasms.
When I was in grad school, I studied science primarily in small in organismic and evolutionary biology seminars with the great and groundbreaking scientist Lynn Margulis. The most important thing my science education gave me was the ability to be critical of science. But the second most important thing was the inspiration of loving it.
So these episodes will not be “scientific” episodes, exactly, but they will be about science without falling into the merely scientistic.
Marjolijn and I talk about the ways in which the overview effect – that is viewing earth from space – can be brought into our lives. We discuss the power of walking in the night – in fact Marjolijn runs night walks in the Netherlands – and the way it connects those with disparate political beliefs We talk about the fragmentation and the whole of existence, the Hubble telescope, and the need to be expansive, not just contracted or even only “mindful” in our moment to confront and live along with the challenges facing us.
Marolijn also reads from her book and also a poem, “The Middle”.
I’m so happy to share this first episode on how the sciences find their ways into our lives.
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Friends,
What an honor to finally meet scientific genius James Lovelock. I write “finally” because James has been a huge part of my life and education and way of thinking, though I’ve never met him. His major theoretical contribution, the Gaia theory, was co-developed with my main mentor, Lynn Margulis. In fact, you can view this as a companion episode to AEWCH 91 with Lynn Margulis (it’s the last recorded conversation with her before her death), who developed the Gaia theory with Jim. And I’ve released this episode to coincide with Lynn’s death, in 2011 – 10 years ago to the day, just one day before I’m releasing this episode with Jim.
So…what is Gaia?
Gaia is the work of the relational loops of push and pull between bacteria, other organisms, and the environment. The clouds, the atmospheric gasses, the pH and salinity of the ocean, and other Earth systems express the “dialogue” between the organisms and the Earth. This dialogue is Gaia Theory. Particularly relevant to these relational (often called “feedback”) loops are the smallest living beings, the bacteria. In this dialogue, the information yielded from and received by the bacteria and environment is absolutely crucial to the existence of life on this planet. Remove the bacteria and everything dies. The world becomes a Mars or a Venus, overtaken by harshness or billowing clouds so thick that everything is obscured.
The theory was long-resisted especially by biologists, even though the science behind Gaia, particularly that found in Lovelock’s formulations, is complex and detailed, not guesswork.Lovelock named it after his friend – novelist William Golding’s – suggestion: Gaia. While many people – especially journalists, it seems, try to trace resistance to Gaia theory to its mystical and religious sounding name, the truth is, Gaia is just hard for people to understand because it requires interdisciplinary and systems thinking.
A bit on the difficulty below, but before that, let me not skip past the arrogance and laziness of a lot of people in the scientific community who just said it was just magical thinking – many without actually reading the research that Lovelock had done.
To counter this, Jim came up with an understandable and accessible metaphor in the form of a computer program called Daisyworld. Daisyworld is not the “proof” of Gaia but a powerful model and metaphor: Lovelock and his colleague Andrew Watson devised the program to see if living and environmental factors could theoretically interact without intention. This was a rebuff to the many criticisms that Gaia had to act through some sort of new age benevolence.In Daisyworld, there are black daisies, which absorb the sun’s heat, and white daisies, which reflect heat. Both flowers grow and produce offspring, and both have the same thresholds for life and growth — they cannot grow at a low temperature and die at too high a temperature. The black daisies, which absorb heat, grow faster in cooler conditions; since the heat accumulates in their petals. White daisies, which reflect the heat, need warmer conditions to produce more offspring and thrive. The sun that shines on Daisyworld is dynamic. It grows in luminosity over millions of years. Here is Lynn Margulis, quoted at length to make clear the results:“Without any extraneous assumptions, without sex or evolution, without mystical presuppositions of planetary consciousness, the daisies of Daisyworld cool their world despite their warming sun. As the sun increases in luminosity, the black daisies grow, expanding their surface area, absorbing heat, and heating up their surroundings. As the black daisies heat up more of the surrounding land surface, the surface itself warms, permitting even more population growth. The positive feedback continues until daisy growth has so heated the surroundings that white daisies began to crowd out the black ones. Being less absorbent and more reflective, the white daisies begin to cool down the planet…Despite the ever-hotter sun, the planet maintains a long plateau of stable temperatures.”
Many additional factors have been added into subsequent Daisyworld models. Because people were still skeptical, “cheats” – factorss that could have thrown the model off – were introduced; and even with the cheats, Daisyworld has always displayed a deep relationship between species selection and planetary temperature regulation.After Daisyworld, much less the mountains of observable evidence gathered afterward, the environment could no longer be seen as a tyrant, lording over selection; it was now a co-evolving field. And by implication all the organisms on the planet are connected by this vast system of regulation and dynamism. Gaian processes are real and observable (and sometimes referred to as “biogeochemistry”, a term more acceptable to mainstream science).
Because of this, Gaia theory is an intense examination of natural selection, since Gaia’s processes of regulation are the “natural selectors.” The push and pull of the biota (the total sum of all organisms) and the inorganic — their weaving and separations, their gestures of relationship — set the framework of regulation. There is no need to be vague about “fitness” and just what the environment “selects” with Gaia in the picture. Gaia’s processes of regulations are what is at play here.We should resist funneling this into a “purpose” in a new age way – whether it’s the scientistic new age of neo-Darwinists misunderstanding Gaia as a living organism. Or the standard new age (think the Gaia network) line that Gaia is a “goddess” trying to contain Gaia’s complexity in a simple and inadequate metaphor.
Lynn Margulis expressed her solution to the error once by saying, “Gaia is not merely an organism.”
Gaia is beyond stale conception. It is more magnificent and active than we can imagine. Gaia is object and process. Gaia houses geosystems and the beings – people – who thought up the organizing principles behind those geosystems. It houses volcanos and every book, every word on volcanos ever written, and at the same time is those volcanos. It is where our greatest loves live, and where every human heartbeat has ever rhythmically pulsed.
And if Gaia is conscious, it possesses a consciousness of a different magnitude, probably of a different order all together. People like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne are just ill-equipped to understand complexity like that because it not only doesn’t fit in with their linear and reductive understanding of life, it also exposes their understanding as false.So: We are part of Gaia, and Gaia lives through us. This also has huge implications for “climate change” which Jim has been writing about now for years. If we are part of Gaia, that means our decision-making and our thought processes are also part of it. Which ultimately in a way means that morality – the way we approach Gaia – is a selection pressure.Morality is not shaped by evolution so much as it shapes it now.
But just to be clear Jim’s picture of climate change is much more complex even than the one we’re constantly presented with with charts and graphs and a dose of guilt constantly. Jim does lay the blame on humans in a way, but sometimes in surprising ways – it’s not just industrialism that has caused all of the problems before us, but our very exhalations are a massive part of climate change. Furthermore, there are factors beyond our control – the sun heating up contributes, as well as other geosystems.
Rather than feel guilty and helpless, we should recognize ourselves as part of Gaian processes. And where he goes from there in his latest book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, is controversial and also moving: computer-beings are evolving into life as a result of our actions. And rather than being here to destroy us, these computer-beings will help Gaian homeorhesis along as well, since it will be in their best interest to regulate the climate along Gaian lines.It’s a challenging but ultimately positive view of technology that dismissed the reductiveness of “singularity” thinking and also anti-tech sentiment. It’s one that echoes statements made by occultist Rudolf Steiner – who I talk about with Jim on the episode (including Steiner’s influence on Rachel Carson, who used one of Jim’s inventions) – about a hundred years ago, around the time of Jim’s birth. Yes, he’s 102 now!
What an honor to speak with Jim after years of being influenced by his work.
FRIENDS: Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Buy the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 164 on bookshop.org! Bookshop.org sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
Friends,
I’m so happy I got to talk about animals at length on the show, given their importance in my life. And one of the best people to have a conversation about animals with is undoubtably Philip Hoare, an interdisciplinary writer and artist, whose books include his moving and almost unclassifiable memoir/nature writing/philosophy book, Risingtidefallingstar: In Search of the Soul of the Sea, his recent book about the evolution of art and how we think of animal, Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World, and what is probably his most famous book, The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea , which weaves together beautiful passages on cetaceans and images of whales in popular culture, particularly in the work of Herman Melville.
This was a beautiful and moving discussion for me, I hope it will be for you, too.
• Here’s a bit on selkies – seal fairies that shed their skin to walk around in human form.
• I’ve been working on utopia with my friend Una Mullally, who appeared on AEWCH 151 and AEWCH 87.
• I’m still so taken by Phil’s statement in this interview: “I could list all those things (that hurt me most about the way we treat the ocean) here but I’d rather anyone reading this went out to their nearest water and prayed.”
FRIENDS: Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib onPatreon! Thank you so, so much.
Buy Michelle’s book, Beloved Beasts, and all the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 156 on bookshop.org. Bookshop.org sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
The tensions between environmentalism and conservationism (and why I’m more pro-conservationism)
Conservationism as globalization and/or a transformation of space
The need to erode the centralization of environmentalism
The need for science to be met with the social sciences and humanities
The death of the Earth
Conservation as a protection of possibility
The problem with “deadline mentality”
How Michelle talks about climate change with her daughter
What a non-materialist climate change would look like
The reason why “religion versus science” is almost a straw man argument
How the core of cryptozoology has become a mainstream conservationist message
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Michelle, go to her website, which has an extensive listing of her (many!) article. And here’s Michelle’s discussion with Judith Lewis Mernit (about Jonathan Franzen’s essay, “Carbon Capture”) which captures the tensions between environmentalism and biodiversity quite well. Here’s her essay on the book about color that influenced Darwin.
Some episodes of AEWCH on science and the environment:
• When Michelle was talking about how we are bound to consume the environment, I kept thinking about the Friends theme-esque song “Someone Has To Die” by a band I love, The Maritime.
• The Quagga Project is one of many initiatives to re-engineer species back from extinction. Sort of.
• John Dupré‘s excellent essay, “Are Whales Fish?” appears in the anthology Folkbiology.
Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Buy all the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 155 on bookshop.org.Bookshop.org sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
No show notes this time, just enjoy the ride, if you can!
This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib onPatreon! Thank you so, so much.
Wanttobuy the booksmentionedonthisep? To buy Diana’s books, and books related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 144 on bookshop.org. It will help supportindependentbookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
Friends,
Everyone who listens to this show knows that I’m interested in the intersection of spirituality, politics, and philosophy. Not in some sort of parapolitics or conspiracy way, of course – which I generally find plays out a bit shallow, even when there is truth there – but in the way the aforementioned currents play out in our inner lives, in our spiritual understandings, in our desires and drives, in our ethics and morals and activism.
Of course, this means, more and more, that I find myself contending with technology and the scientistic worldview that accompanies it.
At the top of this episode, I also spend a bit of time pulling apart something that comes up, and that’s the topic of AI, and how it relates to political economy and UFOs (phew!).
I’m still reeling from this conversation with Diana. She’s warm and thoughtful, and she’s mediating a lot of the intensities of the world that we need mediated. Ethics, morals, spirituality, science, tech, religion, and more.
I’m so excited to share this conversation with you.
(PS: As a bonus, this is coming out just before St. Patrick’s Day and has some St. Patrick’s lore in it! So it’s a sort of holiday episode!)
ON THIS EPISODE
Why do we not believe the things we don’t believe
Stopping ourselves from saying “that was weird” and “that was crazy”
The language of art as a way of knowing and learning
St. Patrick’s revelation
Diana’a UFO initiation process and academia as a site of false initiation
Academia’s resistance to supernatural and paranormal phenomena
Interacting with the dead in study and research
What’s the difference between Purgatory and limbo, and where is Purgatory (hint: Ireland)
When did physical evidence become a necessary aspect of making spiritual claims?
Are we all in Purgatory/limbo in quarantine?
My undergrad Geocities site as evidence of me speaking in tongues
When Diana’s social media was destroyed by bots
The burden and adventure of seeing what you see in the world
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Diana here’s her first and second appearance on Rune Soup. Here she is on a long (almost 3 hours!) podcast that often has… less interesting guests, the Lex Fridman show (I like Lex himself, no comment on him!). Here’s her CV on her university’s site.
• I talked about creating the new symbolic forms and language in the first episode of 2021, AEWCH 136. And here’s my discussion about metamodernism and theosophy with Jason Josephson Storm on AEWCH 141.
• The review of Diana’s book American Cosmic that was…not exactly positive, but still worthwhile in its critiques was from hermeticist Poke Runyon (who also identified the initiation event in Diana’s life).
• The shaman who said “you’ve graduated into a new danger” to me was Malidoma Some.
• I did a whole series on spirituality, politics, and tech – AEWCH 112 with Peter Berbergal an occult technology, AEWCH 113 with Duncan Laurie on the magical tech of radionics, AEWCH 114 on destroying Silicon Valley, and AEWCH 115 with Joanne McNeill on the inner experience of the internet.
• Here’s the trailer for Host, which, though flawed, is a really enjoyable horror film. Watch it on your laptop, for full effect!
Thank you for your support in this time, friends. This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. If the show is keeping you company and making you think or inspiring creativity, please give what you can.
Contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? Go to my booklist for AEWCH 115 on bookshop.org. It will help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
Friends,
In my final episode (at least for now) in my mini-run of episodes on the challenges of tech, I thought I’d turn the lens a bit: What does tech feel like for us? What is the experience of it, particularly using the internet?
To answer this question in a deep and engaging way, I talk with author, cultural critic, and internet historian Joanne McNeil. Joanne’s book, Lurking: How a Person Became a User, is unlike any book on the internet that you’ve ever read. Why? Because it’s not a book of praise or even condemnation of social media founders, or a journey through start-up-dom. Instead, it’s an exploration of what it’s like for us to be on the internet. What were and are the contours of our experiences on Myspace, Hotbot, Friendster, Google, writing and reading blogs, and (ugh) Facebook? What kind of people do we become engaging with these “spaces?” And perhaps most challengingly, what’s good about them?
(NOTE: Joanne and I had some sound challenges in the episode, so you’ll notice a few quality discrepancies, but nothing terrible. Just a heads up that you’ll get the glitches. mid-ep.)
ON THIS EPISODE
Respecting the interactions on the internet
What the internet has done to memory
The way pop culture just before the internet hit got lost
The gay history of the internet
The shaping of love on the internet
What sort of relationships are forming in quarantine conditions?
The fulfillment of wandering and lurking on the internet
Craigslist’s lost potential
The asymmetricality of anonymous users and open users
How twitter acts like capitalism
The difference between caring about wrongs and being involved in the stories of them online
The three times I had twitter pile-ons
Why we need to get rid of facebook and not replace it
Where to go from here and all this mess
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Joanne, here’s her website, which has tons of links and a great HTML aesthetic. And here’s a great interview with her just after the release of Lurking.
• Have you seen Brainiac: Transmissions After Zero? Also, did you know that there’s a severely distorted sample of a Brainiac song in the AEWCH theme? Well, there you go.
• The Tech Won’t Save Us podcast featuring Joanne is here. And they have a patreon!
• I wrote a bit about my trip to Florida to meet Ron in my essay “Gay For Pay, Part 1”
• Who else remembers the Pet Shop Boys’s 2002 song about falling in love via online text, “Email“?
• Here’s my old essay on hookup apps as pornography, “Facing The Torsos“.
• SESTA/FOSTA was passed years ago now, but I and other workers fought against it. Here’s a review of what it is.
• Yes, I was really into Unwound, and I still like them a lot!
• Yes, I’m changing my twitter in the next few days. We’ll all be okay, promise!
• Melissa Gira Grant comes up a couple of times in the episode, so check out her writing via the twitter link and her website!
Conner Habib 