What Counts as Seeing

Alice Wong: I’ve been thinking a lot about the titles of your books, An Immense World and I Contain Multitudes, because I think most humans don’t really realize how interdependent we are to other organisms. Bacteria, fungi, viruses, bugs—there is still this binary thinking of these organisms as good or bad, as clean or dirty, which really obscures the reality. So I was wondering, how do you view your body’s relationship with the natural world, especially in the midst of this pandemic?

Ed Yong: I Contain Multitudes and An Immense World feel to me like connected books. Like part one and two of a series, with the main underlying theme being that the world is richer and weirder and wider than we understand. The first book explored that idea through the microbiome. It showed that our cells and our bodies are home to all these audiences we can’t see and that profoundly influence our lives, our minds, our health.

An Immense World argues that the world around us is deep and richer than we know because we are confined by the constraints of our own sensors. Other animals operate under different constraints and so perceive a very different world than what we are familiar with. And even everyday things, a street or a plant or a featureless body of water, are rich with information that other creatures can tap into, and that we can’t. 

You’re right that, beyond that, there is this theme of interdependence. I am deeply enamored with ecology as a field. Multitudes was very much about that. It was about microbial ecology, the collections between these organisms we disdain or ignore and ourselves. An Immense World contains those elements too. For example, there’s a part in the book where I talk about what kind of eye would be best at discriminating the fine differences between flowers. What you get is an eye that has receptors for blue, green, and ultraviolet: specifically, the wavelengths of an insect eye. You might think that eye evolved to see those colors, but actually it’s the other way around. The insects evolved first, and the flowers came later. The flowers developed colors that best tickle the eyes of insects. These creatures are highly interdependent, but in an unpredictable way. 

We think of the senses as passive intake valves: Light enters my eyes; my ears are vessels for absorbing sound. But actually the senses have this almost active role in shaping the world around us. In viewing nature’s palettes, eyes also act like paint brushes.

Original Article Link to read more

Article source: https://article-realm.com/article/Internet-Business/Email-Marketing/25587-What-Counts-as-Seeing.html