Ο Θεός-Αράχνη

Πριν ένα χρόνο κάποιος (μου) είχε γράψει

Πάντως είναι άλλο πράγμα η συνείδηση της υπάρξεως
από την συνείδηση της ατομικότητος. Γιατί το
λέω αυτό ; Γιατί μπορεί να υπάρχει
μία συλλογική συνείδηση - ας πούμε όλες οι αράχνες
να έχουν μία συνείδηση, κοινή σε όλες -
και μου αρέσει αυτή η σκέψη, να χει την συνείδησή σου
ο διπλανός σου, να ξέρεις επειδή σε ξέρει
αυτός - κάτι σαν ξενιστής συνείδησης . Ωραίο, έτσι ;
Αν χαθεί ο ξενιστής οι άλλοι θα πάψουν να γνωρίζουν την
ύπαρξή τους -
αχ να υπήρχε τέτοιος έρωτας στον κόσμο !
Είναι ο Θεός ;

Κάποιε, διάβασε και πες μου από που το γνώριζες (έχω ανατριχιάσει).

The Arachnid Threat (13/9)

I refer to the giant spider web at Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas. The web covers hundreds of square meters. Not only was it built by hundreds of spiders, who normally build isolated webs and eat each other if they get too close, but entomologist Allen Dean reports that they belong to twelve different families! We're talking massive inter-species communication here folks, and not particularly closely related species either. It is comparable to communication and collaboration between human beings (family Hominidae) and Lar Gibbons (family Hylobatidae).

Now I don't know what the size of their vocabulary is or whether they have recursion, but the fact is, they are communicating, and speaking for arachnophobes everywhere, I don't like it. If they keep this up, pretty soon it won't just be little spiders in North Texas building a big web, it will be armies of giant tarantulas coming to get us. Think of the bugs in Starship Troopers. We need a massive, international research effort into spider communication right now, so that we can put a stop to this menace. I don't know why the BBC and other journalists haven't raised the alarm. They're probably in league with the spiders.

Family Values in Biology and Linguistics (15/9)

In my post on The Arachnid Threat, I compared the cooperation of the twelve families of spiders involved to cooperation between human beings and Lar Gibbons. The basis for this comparison was the fact that human beings and Lar Gibbons, like the spiders, belong to different families within the same order. Without knowing exactly which species of spiders were involved (not reported in the news item), distance on the traditional family tree was the only measure available to me.

Over at Evolgen, RPM points out that this is not a good distance measure because mammalian taxa are much less diverse than arthropod taxa. Using estimates of the time depth of separation of the various taxa involved, he concludes that a more apt comparison would be cooperation between human beings and marsupials, such as kangaroos, koalas, opossums, and Tasmanian devils.