Natural Wonder

[Obviously, this displays the global distribution of…
something. But what? See the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural.

(Joseph Conrad)

…and:

The Kingdom

At times
the heart
stands back
and looks at the body,
looks at the mind,
as a lion
quietly looks
at the not-quite-itself,
not-quite-another,
moving of shadows and grass.

Wary, but with interest,
considers its kingdom.

Then seeing
all that will be,
heart once again enters —
enters hunger, enters sorrow,
enters finally losing it all.
To know, if nothing else,
what it once owned.

(Jane Hirshfield)

Not from whiskey river:

Flight

Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic—
back from bone the echoes stroke, back
from the halved heart, the lungs
three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills.
From a leather chaise, the astronaut’s withered legs
dangle, as back they come, sounds
a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape.
The physician cocks his head and taps — exactly
as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock
chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved

and halved, until a roof appears, black as space.
I’m gaining ground, he says, the astronaut,
who knows, from space, earth is just a blue-green glow,
a pilot light he circled once, lifted, swiftly flown
above the rafters and atmospheres, half himself
and half again some metamorphic click,
extinct as memory. I’m gaining ground,
he says, and back it comes, his glint
of cloud-crossed world: a pilot light
or swaddled leaf, green in the season’s infancy.

(Linda Bierds [source])

…and:

Lively writing about science and nature depends less on the offering of good answers, I think, than on the offering of good questions.

My own taste runs toward such as What are the redeeming merits, if any, of the mosquito? Or Why is the act of sex invariably fatal for some species of salmon? Or Are crows too intelligent for their station in life? Why do certain bamboo species wait 120 years before bursting into bloom? How do seals stay cool in the Arctic? Does a termite colony constitute many little animals or one big one? Or, perhaps best of all, Why are thre so many different species of beetle?

[…]

Within that basic pattern [among 300,000 beetle species] there is an unimaginable variety of shapes and colors and life strategies — vicious pinchers and rhinoceros horns on the head, anteater snouts, antennae like the most elaborate TV aerial, snapping hinges between thorax and abdomen that allow certain species to turn somersaults, light fixtures for signaling mates after dark, beetles as small as a sesame seed, beetles as large as a mouse, long scrawny beetles and husky broad-shouldered ones, leaf-eaters and fungus-eaters and meat-eaters, some that live underwater in rivers, some that burrow subway tunnels along the cambium layer of trees, some that gather and roll huge Sisyphean balls of dung… Why, then, are there so cotton-pickin’ many species of Coleoptera? Why 300,000 variations?

I don’t know. I don’t know of anyone who knows.

(David Quammen [source])

…and:

Mystery Squid

They say it lives miles down
in that wet obsidian
we crawled from, below
Martini’s Law, down where
things, if they can, create
their own light.
All we know
of its country is an accurate
reading of our own ignorance,
but in photographs that thing
looks like a blown-back
umbrella, handle and spokes,
fabric gone, until we
recall it’s twenty feet long,

the size of a tree uprooted and
drifting sidewise where
pressure of depth
has exacted stringency,
and its arms like ten sticky
branches trap prizes

yet to be named, blinks
and inklings, articulated wisps,
eclectic pulsings, a magpie
hoard where no magpie
can live, rhythms fleshed out,
tidbits on which this living
Giacometti thrives.

Where it moves with random
tail-lights toward memory’s
submarine canyons, our loneliness
is as much without meaning
as silence, our disbelief is only
the self-saving doubt of a fieldhand
witnessing a space shot: “That thing
ain’t going to no moon.”

(Brendan Galvin [source])

…and:

New Cop

He is waxed and polished, as streamlined
from crewcut to steel toes
as this new cruiser my taxes bought him.

If he’s Before, then I’m After,
creased and spindled in all the wrong places,
what he could become,
though I doubt he can imagine
letting his shirttail hang out like this
to indicate it’s one of his better days,

or growing a white beard until
it turns flyaway and his wife-cut hair
freaks whitely from an Orioles cap
as if at the first
tingle from Old Sparky.

Should I excuse myself by telling him
how I have to exercise this left hip joint,
or say I’ve been jogging
and walking this road right here for
a third of a century, so have a claim on it?

Who is this kid, anyway? Nobody
I’ve ever seen in this town of 1,500.
It’s suddenly damp and foggy,
and I’m feeling muskrat shaggy
and a little bagged off, like I just crawled
out of that marsh down there.

Are you a Baltimore fan? he asks.
No, I’m an oriole fan, I say,
the wrong answer because I can see
it’s scrambling his gestalt.

Not a good day for a walk, he says,
watching the eyes behind my bifocals
for the Vacancy sign, waiting
for me to ask when the Pope’s
going to get here with my tuna sandwich.

(Brendan Galvin [source])

The story of Into the Wild, published in 1996, pretty much covers all the bases on the subject of natural wonder. Here’s Eddie Vedder, with the official video for “Hard Sun” (from the soundtrack to the Sean Penn-directed 2007 film version):

[Lyrics]

__________________________________

About the image: Alleles are genetic markers for particular traits in an individual organism, expressed as one or more genes. Predisposition to a particular hereditary disease, for instance, might be one allele; hair color, another; whether an insect has two wings or four, still another; and so on. Mapping the genetic code for humans was one big challenge, of course. But in some ways a much harder one will be figuring out what the code means, at the allele level. Nonetheless, we’ve made some surprising finds already…

…like the one depicted in the map. It shows (hold your breath) the global distribution of the allele for wet ear wax. Populations with wetter ear wax are depicted with mostly blackened circles; with less wet ear wax, via circles only partially blackened.

At the Discover Magazine column where I found this online, the author also discusses a correlated statistic: the prevalence of sweat glands, and hence body odor. As it happens, populations with wetter ear wax apparently tend as well to have wetter armpits.

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