Visions of Spring

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard an analogy made comparing ordinary people to sheep from someone who purports to be interested in changing the world. Were it not for understanding why leftists, too, do inhumanistic things, it’d be a source of continual frustration.

Still worse, I’ve always found the statement pretty offensive to sheep. Sheep flock for a reason. For safety, for community, for reproduction, in short: for survival and prosperity. They flock both from the marvels provided to them in terms of instinct, as well as from their individual experiences: if dogs and a rancher has successfully protected the flock so far, why expect otherwise in the future?

Is it really that hard for progressives to see how ridiculous this comparison is? What is meant by the comparison of ordinary people to sheep is that sheep – and, correspondingly, people – are dumb for engaging in a collective struggle for survival. That this type of hogswallop permeates progressive movements so much shows the lack of faith that so many progressives have in ordinary people AND the distance that progressives still must travel to liberate themselves from the oppressive socialisation and mythology embedded in their soul. Why is community and solidarity funny?

Now I understand that if we were to arrive at a definition of what’s meant by the comparison it’d be that people should be critical thinkers. But why do you have to be an individualist to be a critical thinker? Shouldn’t we, as progressives be the ones promoting solidaristic, communalist, and dialogical education? “You can flock” and still think clearly! If the Left flocked more like sheep, the enemy would fear for its life.

The next time you hear someone compare people to a flock of sheep, raise before them the specter of community solidarity and the hegemonic reasons why people fall in line. For the Left to succeed, though, it has to start  by overcoming its own internal elitism (and the class, gender, sexual, and national privileges which they stem from).

If I were to ever become a marine biologist, studying octopuses would be at the top of my list! Here’s an article from the AP, with the first evidence of tool use by an invertebrate. It should interest folks interested in the continuum of animal intelligences and adaptation. Enjoy!

AP– SYDNEY — Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter – unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal.

The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot.

Julian Finn and Mark Norman of Museum Victoria in Melbourne observed the odd activity in four of the creatures during a series of dive trips to North Sulawesi and Bali in Indonesia between 1998 and 2008. Their findings were published Tuesday in the journal Current Biology.

“I was gobsmacked,” said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. “I mean, I’ve seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I’ve never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh.”

Octopuses often use foreign objects as shelter. But the scientists found the veined octopus going a step further by preparing the shells, carrying them long distances and reassembling them as shelter elsewhere.

That’s an example of tool use, which has never been recorded in invertebrates before, Finn said.

“What makes it different from a hermit crab is this octopus collects shells for later use, so when it’s transporting it, it’s not getting any protection from it,” Finn said. “It’s that collecting it to use it later that is unusual.”

The researchers think the creatures probably once used shells in the same way. But once humans began cutting coconuts in half and discarding the shells into the ocean, the octopuses discovered an even better kind of shelter, Finn said.

The findings are significant, in that they reveal just how capable the creatures are of complex behavior, said Simon Robson, associate professor of tropical biology at James Cook University in Townsville.

“Octopuses have always stood out as appearing to be particularly intelligent invertebrates,” Robson said. “They have a fairly well-developed sense of vision and they have a fairly intelligent brain. So I think it shows the behavioral capabilities that these organisms have.”

There is always debate in the scientific community about how to define tool use in the animal kingdom, Robson said. The Australian researchers defined a tool as an object carried or maintained for future use. But other scientists could define it differently, which means it’s difficult to say for certain whether this is the first evidence of such behavior in invertebrates, Robson said.

Still, the findings are interesting, he said.

“It’s another example where we can think about how similar humans are to the rest of the world,” Robson said. “We are just a continuum of the entire planet.”