## Metadata - Author: [[Peter Cashwell]] - Full Title: Along Those Lines - Category: #books ## Highlights - The line is a tool of arbitration, and it’s fitting that the decision about what a line actually is should be arbitrary. ([Location 280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=280)) - a line is most important to human beings when it serves the purpose of separating reality into two sides—left and right, Central and Mountain, here and there. And if it performs this task, we call it a borderline. ([Location 283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=283)) - though crossing the water may be more of a challenge, neither the river nor the nameless line would serve as a boundary if the people on both sides did not consider it one. ([Location 295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=295)) - BORDERS GO WHERE people go. ([Location 297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=297)) - “Demarcating a lengthy boundary by any means at all is expensive, and it is hardly worth it in inhospitable mountains, vast deserts, frigid polar lands, or other places where there is virtually no human presence.” The process of demarcation, therefore, is limited to those sections of border where the people on one side or both feel a need to announce the line’s presence in a highly visible or even physical manner—a fence line, a wall, a series of lookout towers. If there’s no one to see it, the show does not go on. ([Location 317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=317)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. —E. L. Doctorow ([Location 694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=694)) - Between traveling for the University of North Carolina admissions office and the United States Marine Corps Reserve, Dad probably did more driving from 1965 to 1995 than anyone not actually paid to plant his butt in a car seat. Knowing this, whenever mine is in Dad’s passenger seat, I am utterly comfortable, even in heavy traffic or bad weather. I know that his ability to anticipate and avoid trouble will keep me safe and happy, and that my occasional needs for pit stops, road food, and good music will be attended to almost immediately. We can talk about any subject under the sun, but we can also go mile after mile without needing to say a word. It’s like being back in the womb, only with a better view, and with more diesel fumes. ([Location 872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=872)) - They’re not impartial arbiters of what is right and true, but tools used by human beings to persuade other human beings about what is right and true. The foul line doesn’t tell us what is foul and what is fair; only an umpire—a human being—can do that. ([Location 1262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=1262)) - THAT THERE ARE borderlines for moral judgment within the human brain should not, I suppose, be all that surprising, considering how our lives involve a never-ending series of decisions about which lines to cross and which to leave inviolate. The rules handed down by the various divine powers may involve a bewildering variety of moral lines, some more clear and specific than others, but at least a believer can take comfort in one fact: unlike a true line, these rules are not infinite. It’s a practical matter; if they were infinite, no human being could obey them all. Thus, most faiths rely on a short list of fundamental principles or behaviors—the Five Pillars of Islam, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, etc.—which is supplemented by additional more specific rules. If you like, these latter rules can be considered as closer views of the border between right and wrong, just as more detailed maps of small sections of a border can reveal more specific curves and whorls than a small-scale map of a large region can easily depict. ([Location 1680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=1680)) - The reason all those ones and zeroes can successfully reproduce the face of a swimsuit model, or the motion of a skateboader, or the voice of a humpback whale, is scale. Human beings can see and hear things with only a certain degree of precision, and if we use tools small enough to fall below the threshold of ordinary perception, we detect only the larger system and not the tools working within it. ([Location 2262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=2262)) - A single fMRI cannot be used to tell the sex of a brain, but a series of three images—taken over six years of development—almost always shows a distinctive trajectory. “Girls develop the left side of the brain earlier, boys develop the right earlier,” says James. “The tricky bit is that the verbal center starts on the left side. Most adult males use only the left side for language and use both sides for spatial skills; adult females use both sides for language, but only the right side for spatial skills.” ([Location 2671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=2671)) - The first thing McGowan wants to make sure I understand is the difference between taxonomy and systematics. These fields are closely interrelated, even interdependent, but they are not identical. Taxonomy is, in his words, “the sorting out of life into parts.” In order to make sense of the world, we need to have labels for those parts, and taxonomy supplies those labels; it’s not that the parts don’t exist without the labels, but rather that we can’t really think about them until their labels are affixed. This is a phenomenon I’ve observed in my students, both indoors and out. Teach them what a symbol is and they start spotting symbolism all over the place; teach them what poison ivy looks like and they’ll soon be shocked to discover that even familiar pathways are surrounded by it. Many birders know this from experience as well; once you’ve seen a bird and learned its name, you suddenly notice it everywhere—and not because it wasn’t there before. As McGowan says, “If we don’t know the name of it, it’s invisible.” Systematics, on the other hand, is the study of how all these parts relate. If there’s a question about what to call something, you should ask a taxonomist, but if you need to figure out whether the Black-billed Magpie is more closely related to the other North American magpie (the Yellow-billed) or to the magpies of Eurasia, a systematist should be engaged. Of course, to figure out the relationships, each piece must first be given a name, but sometimes a clearer understanding of the relationships will result in the need to change a name. ([Location 2975](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=2975)) - As McGowan notes, the problem of Linnaeus’s starting point was that it was just that: a point, a unique location, a single place on a vast globe. “Most places, if you sit down and show them stuff, most people will come up with the same species—the same kind of divisions that others do,” he points out. But in science, we no longer look in a single place—the perspective is global. “You look out,” he says, indicating the Cayuga Lake Basin outside the Cornell Lab, “and you see robin, cardinal, chickadee … They’re clearly not the same things. But in Seattle, their Song Sparrow doesn’t look the same [as ours], and sounds a little different. The Pribilofs [four small islands off the southwest coast of Alaska] have a big honking subspecies of Song Sparrow, bigger than a Hermit Thrush, but it still sings like a Song Sparrow. Is that the same thing?” ([Location 3019](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=3019)) - It is a controversial idea first proposed by British marine biologist Donald I. Williamson: that a larva and an adult insect may actually be two different organisms. To some degree, the idea stems from the theory of endosymbiosis, which suggests that some of the subunits contained in living cells—the mitochondria in animal cells, for example, or the chloroplasts in the cells of green plants—were originally free-living bacterial or algal cells. (This theory would explain, for example, why mitochondria have their own DNA, distinct from that contained in the cell nucleus.) Williamson’s own theory is that long ago, when the ancestors of metamorphosing insects were aquatic and fertilization was something that happened in the water around them, they absorbed genetic information from another species. This information, however, can’t be activated except in the right conditions, and those conditions don’t exist while the original animal is alive. But after the original animal is dead, the new species’ genes finally have their opportunity for growth. ([Location 3236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=3236)) - As Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan once elegantly put it, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” ([Location 3392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=3392)) - In fact, it is common enough for a population to be rediscovered after it has been declared extinct that such a population has a name: it’s called a Lazarus species. ([Location 3493](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=3493)) - Declaring that a species is extinct before all of the data are in, a phenomenon known as the Romeo error, has profound negative consequences. When a species is moved from the “critically endangered” list to the “presumed extinct” list, it loses protection from direct harm, and more importantly, habitat loss. It is important that we not give up on species based on an incomplete understanding. Decisions about extinction should be guided by science, not perception. ([Location 3650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=3650)) - Though the next mass extinction may leave only creatures we might consider weeds, those weeds will flourish on the Earth’s tangled bank, finding new ways to exploit the possibilities of the air, the water, and the sunlight, giving birth to offspring with genes and forms not quite like their own. And one day, millions of years from now, standing or soaring or slithering over the resting place of the last lion or the final rhino, there will be a fantastic creature whose form we cannot even guess at, born from the surviving remnants of our own age. ([Location 3717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JKUMLVW&location=3717))