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By Nik Money 15 Jan, 2024
If Kafka makes you laugh, this is for you: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/nicholas-p-money
By Nik Money 22 Oct, 2023
As Homo sapiens races toward extinction, there is solace in recognizing that the rest of nature will be relieved by our departure. Adapted from The Selfish Ape , published in 2019: If extraterrestrials had trained their microphones on Earth they would have detected a rise in the exclamations of animal life in recent millennia, building to a crescendo of moans and grunts from animals subjected to ritualized torture in stadia, bull rings and bear pits, augmented by the modern vivisection of rodents, cats and primates—terrified animals restrained in the lab and probed with instruments that would have taxed the pornographic inventiveness of the Catholic inquisitors. Factory farming is another way we torment the innocent. The philosopher Schopenhauer said: “Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.” Today’s justifications for our loathsome behavior include the economic burden of treating animals more kindly and the medical necessity of experimentation. We rest, as always, on staggering hubris. It is always about us.
By Nik Money 06 Jun, 2023
Begin by sprinkling a generous serving of planets around a medium-sized star; stir gently and allow the mixture to cool until rain begins to fall on one of the planets; keep stirring, be patient, and wait for the arms of an amoeba to reach into the water.
By Nik Money 05 Feb, 2023
In a Goldilocks mushroom, the gills are not too close, not too far apart, but just the right distance for the spores to be shot to the open midplane. The following figure from a forthcoming review article shows the reciprocal changes in gill separation and discharge distance that might have played out during mushroom evolution. (Too esoteric for a blog post? Yes.)
By Nik Money 16 Jun, 2022
Humans are on the fast track to extinction and the mess that we have made will take most of the larger animals with us. In our unenviable position as witnesses of the collapse of the biosphere, grace can be sought in the certainty of the peaceful afterlife of the planet. The death of the last human will mean the end of human anguish. Picking gorillas as an example of the nonhuman casualties, the death of the last one is also hopeful, because after two centuries of gorilla hunting and trapping, there will be no more of these beautiful creatures to be shot. Pick any species of animal and its extinction will end the misery of its members. When humans and other animals with brains are gone, Earth will orbit our star without fear and loathing for the first time in 500 million years. To explore this idea, we need to accept what is happening, seek absolution from our sins in the inevitability of the apocalypse, and be assured that the nightmarish character of zoology is almost over. Acceptance Since 1850, the human population has increased from one billion to eight billion and the level of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by 50%. Carbon dioxide traps heat on Earth and more of it makes us warmer. We pour billions of tons of this gas into the atmosphere every year by burning hundreds of tons oil, coal, and natural gas every second . What could possibly happen to change this picture? The pandemic shutdown reduced carbon dioxide emissions by a few percent, but they rebounded and are increasing in its wake. By 2100, the global average temperature will be 4 degrees Celsius higher than the end of the last century. This is the likeliest projection. Climate optimists will counter this scenario with examples of technological solutions. The effect of these remedies on extinction can be dismissed with a thought experiment. Imagine that we found a way to meet our energy needs without coal, oil, and gas. Once the burning stopped, the future would feel a little cooler, especially if methods for burying the existing carbon dioxide were perfected. But with the climate stabilized, the behavior that caused us to burn so much fuel would intensify, resulting in more humans, less forest and grasslands, and greater pollution of rivers and oceans. With or without climate change, our war with nature will proceed. Decades ago, Gerald Durrell, the famous conservationist, recognized, that “the human race is in the position of a man sawing off the tree branch he is sitting on.” Thirty years after Durrell’s death, the human population has increased by 2 billion and the damage has intensified. The branch will snap now whether we keep sawing or not. The timeline for extinctions is not known, but, sooner or later, the disappearing mammals will be joined by the other groups of animals. Almost everything will be leaving the metaphorical ark, creeping down the gangplank into oblivion. Millions of other species, seen and unseen, including plants, seaweeds, and fungi will be leaving too. The tiniest of organisms will inherit the planet, but great gulps of the microbial world will also disappear in the depths of this planetary holocaust. Absolution Look in the mirror and you will see a member of a species of African ape that has devastated the biosphere. You, personally, have caused a great deal of damage and are responsible for the suffering of many intelligent and sensitive creatures. Adults have left a trail of wreckage in their lives and children will participate in decades of future brutality toward nature. Vegetarians are not responsible for the suffering of farm animals, but they are culpable for the molestation of wildlife through the great net of international commerce. Throughout history, we have helped ourselves to huge helpings of hubris about the brilliance of humans and have avoided the truth of our nature—namely, that Homo sapiens is a uniquely destructive animal that has been active in the business of extinction since it dispersed from Africa 100,000 years ago. In addition to killing animals for food, or to make space for more of us, we have bred and imprisoned animals for entertainment and for medical experimentation. To obviate our unpleasantness, we have decided that other species lack the capacity for terror. In this century, all but the cruelest of philosophers have moved on from the Cartesian fantasy that the absence of conversation implies the absence of emotion, but we cling to the fantasy of the heightened sensitivity of humans. While a chicken lacks a great repertoire of expressions of grief, it feels panic and experiences pain to the full extent of its avian brain, and we heighten the horror by keeping birds in factory farms in conditions of exquisite unpleasantness. There is no excuse for the way that we ruin the lives of animals on farms and in labs, but we are pardoned from killing them in nature and destroying the biosphere. We are guiltless because animals are powered by the transfer of energy from one organism to another. The nightmare of zoology began when this fundamental rule of life was coupled with the evolution of brains and the necessity of suffering. This happened long before we arrived. Sentient life is designed for suffering because the avoidance of it is what keeps an animal alive for long enough to propel its genes into the future. When brains evolved, avoidance became conscious and with consciousness came fear. Our absolution for ruining the planet comes from the same evolutionary source: we need to eat and we seek to reproduce, and by being good at both things we have extracted too much energy from the planet. Nature was designed in this way. Assurance Animal sensitivity is the foundation of the great tragedy of the biosphere, the overarching sadness of earth, which will end when the species with brains are gone. Human extinction will mean no more animals in laboratories to dread the sound of the opening door and the sight of the approaching white coat, and, over a longer time span, injuries, illnesses, and starvation in nature will disappear, species by species as the planet gets hotter. This is not much to go on, but the end of suffering is the best news about the end times. Happiness will end too, of course, but contentment is fleeting and an animal that is never born will not miss the moments of satisfaction and joy. Humans have always caused the suffering of other animals; we have destroyed most of the pristine ecosystems, and the rapid change in climate is our fault too. Most of these actions were hard baked into human nature. The apocalypse was inevitable because the cost of being human has always been extracted from the rest of nature. What do we do with this clarity of vision? I suggest that part of the answer lies in recognizing the fact that these are the last decades of pain. As terminal illness encourages many people to embrace the relief that they know will come with their departure, so we may feel some grace in these end times. The way we spend our lives in the absence of hope for the future of humanity is a matter for the individual. The best that any of us can do until the sky falls, is to be kinder to each other and humane towards the rest of nature as it suffers with us on this watery globe. The sooner the biosphere collapses, the sooner that the brainy animals will be liberated from suffering. When we are gone, the biosphere is likely to repopulate with new species with brains, and the suffering will resume in millions of years. But at least things will be quiet for a while, and nothing will be horrified by existence as Earth spins on her soft axle.
By Nik Money 27 May, 2022
Why are the color patterns of the fly agaric mushroom and the netted rhodotus mushroom similar, and why do both resemble the corpse flower? Does the interruption of the background color of these organisms stimulate the compound vision of flies? Is there any similarity between the patterning of these species and the mottled appearance of animal cadavers? Are some natural instances of white detailing on red backgrounds examples of Batesian or Müllerian mimicry? What is the meaning of this distinctive form of coloration among fungi and plants?
By Nik Money 10 Apr, 2022
& a second recent musical homage: 
By Nik Money 10 Mar, 2022
The answer, fellow mycologists, is blowing in the wind. Stalked mushrooms with gills beneath their umbrellas evolved in the Jurassic. This is the rough timing that we infer from the DNA clocks in fungi that appear to have been ticking for more than 150 million years. Jurassic forests were filled with prehistoric Chilean pines, or monkey puzzle trees, cycads, and other cone-bearing conifers. The first birds launched themselves from branches, small mammals crunched on insects, and ferns grew under the open tree canopy where the sunlight warmed the forest floor. Mushroom colonies spread in the leaf litter and established mycorrhizal symbioses with tree roots. The openness of the forests left them as windy as the surrounding grasslands which was perfect for mushrooms that relied on breezes to spread their spores. There was no need for any of these fungi to attract the attention of animals. This self-sufficiency was challenged in the Cretaceous as carbon dioxide levels increased and the climate warmed. The flowering plants diversified and softwood trees with cones made room for the broadleaved hardwoods that thrived in the heat and closed the forest canopy. The woods became windbreaks. As the warming continued the temperature gradients between the poles and the equator weakened and the whole planet became less windy. Some estimates suggest that average windspeeds dropped by 30%. Confronted by the stillness of the Cretaceous forests, fungi began working with animals by painting toadstool caps and making some of them glow green, erecting stinkhorns with heads smeared with cadaverous slime, and perfuming truffles. Species that were unable to adapt to the obstacles to wind dispersal were eliminated, which may be part of the explanation for the mass extinction of Cretaceous fungi indicated in phylogenetic studies. It seems likely that insects and other invertebrates performed an accessory role in dispersing mushroom spores in the Jurassic. But when the wind dropped in the Cretaceous, the value of insects as couriers rose, and coloration may have become a marketing tool for mushrooms in the same way that colorful flowers lure pollinators. (This, at least, is my hypothesis.) Experiments suggest that bioluminescence achieves the same goal. Insects attracted to mushrooms may have been rewarded with sugars secreted by the fungus, although fruit bodies provide more obvious benefits for insects by acting as incubators for eggs and refuges for larval maturation. Some colors attracted birds and mammals and we may be underestimating the continuing importance of these relationships today. Interactions between mushrooms and animals are observed in species that suppress the expansion of the fruit body and do not expose their gills to the air. These are called secotioid mushrooms and they are viewed as intermediary forms in the evolution of the hypogeous fungi or truffles that perfected the animal-fungus symbiosis. (Truffles that evolved from gilled mushrooms and boletes are called false truffles to distinguish them from true truffles that belong to a different group of fungi.) Secotioid mushrooms are very colorful in some habitats, which is consistent with the significance of animal dispersal in their life cycles. Coloration is obviously immaterial for subterranean truffles whose volatile attractants were engineered to attract particular animal species rather than generalized scavengers on forest floor. Phallic mushrooms and their relatives arose at this time too, dispensing with wind dispersal in favor of transportation by carrion flies. All of these modifications were part of a great radiation of mushroom forms in the Cretaceous. To summarize: Climatic changes in the Cretaceous may be part of the reason that mushrooms with a perfect mechanism for wind dispersal invested in mutualisms with animal vectors. These relationships involved fundamental modifications to the development of fruit bodies and are the foundation of much of the modern diversity of mushroom morphology. When we flip through the pages of a mushroom guide, paper or virtual, and marvel at the strange shapes and bright colors, we are looking at solutions to the problem of spreading spores when the wind stopped blowing. *** Illustration: Leratiomyces erythrocephalus is a secotioid mushroom whose bright red caps attract birds that consume the fruit bodies and disperse their spores. Photo credit: fishHook Photography / Alamy Stock Photo
By Nik Money 24 Jan, 2022
From the depths of this Ohio winter, I am pondering whether we are on the cusp of Civil War II in my beloved adopted country and The Eschaton in Ukraine. In a failed attempt to take my mind elsewhere I am reading poems by British poet and painter, David Jones (1895-1974). Jones served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers in the First World War. His best-known poem is an epic, Anathemata, published in 1952, which defies synopsis. Returning to my current concerns, I adapt the following lines from his shorter verse, Protothalamion . Song for America, 2022 I have heard bird-song seen flowers lean towards each other, under the sun that shined to delineate the hate
hare
By Nik Money 07 Dec, 2021
It is so rare to take pause and breathe slowly enough to contemplate the experience of being alive. This is a terrible shame, given the sheer improbability of existence when measured against the infinite length of one’s dark bloodless future. Most moments of any lifetime are added to our libraries of blurred remembrances as soon as they are done, but there are a few that persist as if they never stopped happening. There was an evening from my childhood, for example, when I stood alone, confused but excited by the sight of boxing hares in a Chiltern meadow. They ran wildly, stopping every so often and raising themselves on their back legs to thump one another a few times, then tearing off again. The pointed ears of spectators stuck above the waving grass culms and the sun set to the cheerless accompaniment of a fox crying in the beech hanger above the meadow. I was mesmerized, breathless. Fifty years on, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe . . . Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion . . . I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.” And the mad March hares have boxed on in my skull throughout, and will continue to do so, I think, until time turns my brain into nothing more sensible than a boiled potato.
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