I visited Seward Park today and looked at the animals. The air quality in Seattle is bad so I walked and tried not to exert myself. There were few people out.

Animals

Half the animals I saw were dead: dead salmon, a dead turtle, a dead chicken (head only). The dead turtle was significant when you consider that they live 30 to 50 years. I saw one garter snake sunning itself.

The bird life was abundant:

• Steller’s jay

• Bald eagle

• Gulls

• Song Sparrow

• Canada geese

• Mallards

• Tiny chipping birds

• Chestnut sided chickadees

• Crows

• Dark eyed junco

• Anna’s hummingbird

• Grebe

Camera

I am still figuring this thing out. Bear with me as I learn to photograph things.

This crow pecked at a rotting salmon carcass.

These people paddled out into the haze.

This dude was doggedly probing for something with his metal detector.

Reading “Consilience”

I am reading Consilience by Edward O. Wilson. The book argues for the ultimate unity of knowledge, to be synthesized via empiricism and the original Enlightenment spirit of inquiry, rationality and knowability. He argues that powerful, generalizable laws and principles of complexity will emerge that will apply across disciplines and synthesize upward from the reductive approach that science usually follows (to great success thus far).

The writing is excellent and I’m continually absorbed in (and impressed by the evidence for) ideas about a universal of human nature shaped by evolution, principles of Darwinian selection, epigenetic rules (or the inherited regularities of mental development that compose human nature, which is deep and highly structured), the rooting of fictional archetypes in the human brain and body, gene-culture coevolution, and how ethics is driven by hereditary rules of mental development.

The last EO Wilson book I read was “The Future of Life” and the next one will probably be The Diversity of Life or “Biophilia.”