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The biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s term Umwelt refers to a concept about the subjective world of an organism. The world can be imagined as a soap bubble, which surrounds each individual and contains signifying markers relevant only to the world of that specific creature. This soap bubble, or Umwelt, is actively created…
[L]et us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. ... On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank…
There is one great difficulty with a good hypothesis. When it is completed and rounded, the corners smooth and the content cohesive and coherent, it is likely to become a thing in itself, a work of art. It is then like a finished sonnet or a painting completed. One hates to disturb it. Even if subsequent information…
Given that 143 million people visit accredited zoos and aquariums each year, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums is entitled to the claim that the association is building North America's largest wildlife conservation movement. Zoos and aquariums are mainstream environmental organizations. Their supporters, some 48…
The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenatrable for us really exists and manifests itself as…
But what good does it do me to think of the universe as an unthinking mechanism vast beyond comprehension? It gives me the consolation of believing I conceive it as it really is. It makes me thankful that I can conceive it at all. I could have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas. In…
In a curious way, the colors of marine animals tend to be related to the zone in which they live. Fishes of the surface waters, like the mackerel and herring often are blue or green; so are the floats of the Portuguese men-of-war and the azure-tinted wings of teh swimming snales. Down below the diatom meadows and…