That's Life

 

Townsend's Warbler on the Hunt

I'm about three-quarters of the way through How Life Works by Philip Ball, and all I can say is Wow. And I'm not alone either. 

Ball writes, "By 'interesting and wonderful,' I admit that I often also mean [how life works is] 'complicated,' even dizzyingly so. There are good reasons why most popular accounts avert their eyes from the baroque digressions of molecular biology. But the main reason this has happened is that researchers themselves have been baffled by it. Even to them, the complexity of cell processes often seems too much: we can watch the conjuring trick being done, and know there is a rational, nonmagical explanation for it, but we cannot for the life of us see what this explanation is." (p. 53)

I've always been awed by the fact that we start out life as a single-celled zygote that somehow knows how to build a human being. I mean, that vast knowledge  is somehow in that single cell! Ball also argues that it's the cells, not the genome, that runs the show. That is, the genome is a resource used by cells, not the other way around.

A big surprise for me was the author's allowance that cognition pertains even to cells: "[I]t is meaningful to regard lower-level adaptive processes in biology as cognitive too -- even in the way single-celled organisms operate. Life is, as biologist Michael Levin and philosopher Daniel Dennett have argued, 'cognition all the way down.'" (p. 137)

Later on he elaborates a bit more, writing that, "Cognitive systems exist to integrate information from many sources to produce a goal-oriented response. To that extent, all living systems have to be cognitive agents almost by definition. And the fact that evolution grants this capacity should really be seen as unremarkable, for cognition is clearly a good way to deal with the unforeseen: to develop versatile and instantly adaptive responses to circumstances an organism has never encountered in its evolutionary past.... 

"I don't anticipate a consensus any time soon on the question of how to define life, but it seems to me that cognition provides a much better, more apt way to talk about it than invoking more passive capabilities such as metabolism and replication." (pp. 265-66)

And, "The idea that cells are 'building blocks' of our bodies makes them sound rather passive, like bricks that can be stacked into the edifices of tissues. In fact they are much smarter than that. Each cell is, as we've seen, a living entity in its own right, able to reproduce, make decisions, and respond and adapt to its environment." (p. 268)

Ball also writes that there are 80,000 to 400,000 varieties of protein molecules in human cells, and no, that is not a typo. I keep thinking I must have read it wrong. Figuring out what they all do is going to keep a lot of people busy for a very long time. And how to do you come up with names for them all? Luckily, most of the names follow a convention, but not all. Where would we be without proteins like Sonic Hedgehog and Shrooms? (Answer: It wouldn't be pretty.)

I found this interesting tower of fungus on Mt. Tam yesterday.

Nearby was another tower that was further along in its construction.

And finally there was this cheerful colony. I uploaded pictures of this polypore to iNaturalist which identified it as Onnia subtriquetra, but it doesn't really fit this description, since it was growing under Doug fir.

A pileated woodpecker was re-working a snag not too far above eye-level along the Cataract Trail.

As it moved around the snag I was able to get a mellower background.

Short Clips of Pileated Woodpecker At Work

I was placing a couple of trail cams out there for the first time in a while, and it was still early enough in the morning that I caught this fence lizard napping. I wondered if it had spent the night there -- very much out in the open -- in a state of torpor.

Apparently, a male house finch who's yellow instead of red is simply not getting the carotenoids in his diet that would redden his feathers.

The finch was among a small mixed flock of birds, including Western bluebirds, along the Sunset Parkway this morning.

Also in attendance was my first yellow-rumped warbler of the season.

This bluebird clung to a lichen-crusted branch on an otherwise dead plant.

A few pigeons were also feeding nearby, and I especially liked this one's striking feather pattern.

Chilean Rhubarb Leaf

Bushtit, Elk Glen Lake

At first I thought this was another bushtit. I keep forgetting how very small these Townsend's warblers are in person. This one was kind enough to forage within range of my camera for a few minutes.

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Get Enraptured

 

Rapture On 14th Avenue

I guess some people were disappointed that they missed the rapture last month, but they are in luck since the guy who's calling the shots (no, not God; some guy in South Africa) says the new date is either today or tomorrow. Hooray! According to the news I've heard, people are preparing themselves to float up into the sky. I would just offer a word of caution: be sure to wear your blaze orange vests so duck hunters will know to hold their fire.

Another interesting thing I learned today is that the word "rapture" does not appear in the Bible. Nevertheless, what the rapturists are talking about can be read in Matthew 24:1-51. Two things to note: 1) Jesus says that no one but God knows when it will happen; and 2) there will be many false prophets beforehand. 

Do people listen? No, they do not. And now they are about to be disappointed yet again. Luckily, they can still find rapture right here on planet Earth while keeping their feet firmly planted on the ground.

I like the Merriam-Webster definitions of rapture: 1) an expression or manifestation of ecstasy or passion; 2a) a state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion; and 2b) a mystical experience in which the spirit is exalted to a knowledge of divine things.

Rapture is part of our birthright as human beings. It just needs to be claimed.

The crepuscular rays (or "god-beams") wowed me as soon as I saw them, but they kept getting even better as I continued walking. From crepuscular rays to brocken specters, you gotta love that sun-fog interface.

My favorite princess flower tree. It's my favorite because of the way the profusion of petals decorates the ground and sidewalk beneath the tree.

I was riding past the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival on Sunday when a coyote got caught out in the open and quickly darted into cover. The many festival attendees and copious fencing around the stages likely impacted their usual travel routes and routines.

Pelicans Resting at Seal Rocks

As I was sitting in our back yard garden area I noticed a mouse dart toward a corner of the next-door neighbor's place. Moments later I heard a strange sound like crinkling plastic coming from a different next-door neighbor's place. When I got up to investigate the sound, a red-shouldered hawk flew up with the corner-mouse in its talons and fluttered up into the second neighbor's oak tree. While I watched the hawk (which somehow descended on the mouse without my seeing it happen), I heard the plastic crinkle sound again: a crow was bouncing on a thin oak branch, and the leaves scraping the leaves on another branch made the strange sound.

There wasn't much light left out back when I returned to our garden bench and watched this hummingbird feeding on some of our flowers, so I was surprised to get a decent shot with a 1/125th sec. exposure @ ISO 3200.

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Simply Complex

 

A red-shouldered hawk sounds off on Whiskey Hill.

I finished Nick Lane's book on the chemistry of life and started another book last night called How Life Works by Philip Ball. Naturally, I woke up this morning thinking about the Citric Acid Cycle (a.k.a. Krebs Cycle). 

Thinking, Here I am, lying in bed doing nothing, while all the food and water I've consumed (along with the air I breathe) is being turned into fuel to power the 35 trillion or so cells in my body. And within each of those cells is a fuel-production assembly line running 24/7 that uses an ingenious proton pump to crank out as many as 10 million ATP molecules every second in an active muscle cell.

It's amazing what we take for granted. And indeed it has all been granted to us by the laws of nature (wherever the laws of nature came from). Consciousness itself is just the cherry on top of a universe whose vastness we can't really comprehend, and where on at least one little ball of space junk within that vastness, simple elements created by exploding stars have joined into complex molecules that somehow sparked into life, and it's been off to the races ever since.

Tree ferns existed before dinosaurs evolved from reptilian archosaurs, and now tree ferns in Golden Gate Park provide foraging habitat for birds which evolved from dinosaurs. 

Townsend's Warbler foraging in an oak on Whiskey Hill.

Red-shouldered Rear-view

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A Tern for the Better

 

Elegant Terns at Ocean Beach
(I wonder if that chocolate-brown gull is some kind of dark-morph Western gull.)

There were lots of brown pelicans lounging on the edge of Sutro Baths this morning, something I don't see very often. I was tempted to go down there, but it didn't really seem worth it without Sutro Sam. 

From the overwatch behind the Cliff House I was surprised to see yet another young pelican drifting south across the surf zone. It didn't appear to be injured, but evidently it could not fly. I kept my eye on it, and sure enough it was sucked over the falls by a wave and was eventually pushed in to the beach, almost as if it were body-surfing. Once it was ashore, it proceeded to trundle all the way up to the sea wall before finally turning back toward the ocean. Another onlooker had called the city's Animal Care & Control folks, but I left before they arrived.

The wind wasn't blowing too hard, so I took another ride out through Sunset Dunes and stopped when I heard the calls of a small flock of elegant terns near Pacheco Street. Instead of flying away when someone passed near them, they lifted off and circled back to their original spot, so I figured I'd take a chance and go down there, leaving my ebike up on the sea wall. The terns weren't bothered by my presence, and I was surprised toward the end when they circled through the air and landed even closer to me.

This is either a female or immature western bluebird at Golden Gate Heights Park. I was going to try to photograph a much more blue male nearby, but both birds were frightened away by an offleash dog.

Lounging in the Bison Paddock

Meditative Bison

Brown Pelicans at Sutro Baths

A Pelican's Adventure

I saw rain falling in the distance a few times this morning but didn't actually get rained on until I started to head home at about noon. I pulled a rain jacket out of my saddlebag, but it wasn't particularly cold out, so I left the rain pants in the bag.

The pelican seemed like it couldn't get far enough away from the ocean, but it was stymied by the sea wall. I wondered if it would climb the stairs to the esplanade, but it wasn't feeling sociable toward us humans.

After walking along the sea wall a ways, the pelican began walking back toward the beach.

Elegant Terns & Sanderlings

Terns in Flight

Beach Wrack Denizens

We don't often get a lot of bull kelp washed up on Ocean Beach. I was glad to know there's actually a kelp bed or two offshore (given their plight), although I do wonder if this bunch drifted down from up north somewhere.

Elegant Terns Facing the Wind

Young Elegant Terns

A Birdy Day at the Beach

Flock o' Terns

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