Year: 2005

Over at the Mind Hacks Blog, Tom Stafford refers to the intriguing theory by the evolutionary pscychologist David Buss that homicide is an evolutionary adaptation that we all share.

As Bill Hill has pointed out, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, our operating system is Homo Sapiens 1.0, it’s been in place, without any upgrade, for at least 100,000 years, and the design parameters that were used in its creation apply to very few of today’s humans.

Here at chez nous, Martin is the gardener – I just mow the lawn, or occasionally share some of the heavier garden work. Because of this secondary position, I don’t have very much influence over what goes into the garden.

I know this because I can’t have a Monkey Puzzle tree in the garden.

My better half has stamped his foot, and, being the head gardener, pulled rank on me. It is useless for me to say (quite truthfully) that ever since I was a small child, I have loved the look of the Monkey Puzzle tree, and always wanted to have one. In fact, I think it was probably a formative experience as a very small child that imprinted this desire on me. I must have only been about seven or so…

My parents had a hotel. To my seven year old eyes, in the winter, the out-of-season time, it was rather like having the run of the Overlook from Kubrick’s The Shining. The attic seemed to me to be huge, filled with mysterious things that either belonged to us, or were fixtures and fittings of the hotel that had passed their in-fashion date.  One day I was poking about in the attic and found: an artificial monkey puzzle tree. I had never seen anything like this before – and when I learned the name from my mother I was even more intrigued. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to have one in a garden that I can call my own. 

Flash forward to present time and "No, you can’t have a tree like that in the garden".

So – time to get sneaky, and this is where the Wollemi Pine enters our story. The Wollemi Pine is one of the world’s oldest and rarest plants dating back to the time of the dinosaurs.  Until 1994, when it was discovered at a secret location in Australia, it was known only in 200 million-year-old fossil records. With less than 100 adult trees known to exist in the wild, the Wollemi Pine is now the focus of extensive research to safeguard its survival. Its very dark green leaves and bubbly bark help mark it out as a close relative of the Monkey Puzzle tree (beginning to get the picture?).

So here’s the schtick – how can my gardening husband possibly refuse the chance to help propagate an exceedingly rare species of tree?

We can register online at www.wollemipine.com and get involved in what is a worldwide conservation project. So I get something that is closely related to the mysterious tree of my childhood and he gets the feelgood factor of helping to preserve something extremely rare. A win-win situation, I feel. I’ll let you know how it goes when I drop this on him.

One of the threads that Peter Watts wove into his picture of Vampire Domestication was the connection with the human brain’s facility of pattern matching and the apparent ability of savants to "calculate" difficult mathematical problems instantly. I put quotes around the word calculate, because a savant isn’t really "calculating" at all – the answer is just apparent to them.

By coincidence, I was reading today in the Guardian about the documentary that has been made about Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant. That triggered a memory, and sure enough, I had read an article on Tammet in the Guardian a few months back. Tammet is unusual in that he can describe how he does these feats of mathematical wizardry to ordinary mortals like us. The article is well worth reading and gives a brief glimpse into another way of experiencing the world.