Response Week 1

1. Aristotle based most of his work on in depth observations. Although his predecessors did the same, Aristotle attempted to go back and find the similarities between animals. He also studied animals as living organisms rather than just for hunting and food. Pliny, like Aristotle, based a lot of their writing on stories, folk lore, and word of mouth. Aristotle rarely presented these as fact, only as written observations and notes. Pliny however tended to present these as truth. Neither of them traveled much farther than their region of Greece; Pliny wrote about several hundred species, and the all were from around Greece and its islands, especially sea life. They also based their information off of travelers and traders, who sometimes exaggerated stories to see how much people would actually believe. 2. There was a greater urgency for life classification due to European countries not discovering, but claiming land in new places. Ships were going all over the world, thus finding and discovering new animals. This made the use of the Linnaeus’ classification method all the better. Meeting of different cultures was also happening, but Linnaeus’ method was universally understandable. One of the main differences between Pliny/Aristotle time and Linnaeus’ time is that stories and folk lore about animals were less likely to be accepted as truth, since more and more people were moving to different places, and the world was becoming figured out. 3. The “Packrats” one was very interesting to me. I like to collect things and understand them and consider the story behind them, so it is a good analogy for natural history. You collect facts and theories, and save that information until you can connect them with something down the line. Everything is a puzzle. That connects with “The Chase”. She says that natural history, when referring to animals specifically, is about the relationship between you and the animal. The excitement in catching the animal and learning about it and categorizing it and piecing it in to the web of life. That is why zoos are all in all good and important for the furthering of education and awareness of the environment. People need to be able to understand what happens in the world on a larger scale, and not just the human race and that we are not the only living things on the planet 4. I thought Dillard’s segment on blindness was very interesting. “For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning.” (pg. 28). This is such an abstract and bizarre idea. To live your life only through touch, smell, taste and hearing creates a completely different world. Anyone can close their eyes and try and understand what this could be like, but for those with the ability to see, there is still a mental visualization of their surroundings. If they feel something, they create a picture of it in their minds. But for a blind person, nothing is based on creating an image in their minds. They learn things through feeling. They can memorize the feel of everything. But when given surgery to see for the first time, everything changes for them and they simply don’t understand a visual world. They see color and take in different amounts of light, but no image means anything. Even objects they know very well are unidentifiable if not held and touched. Being able to see the world without recognizing anything at all, and just experiencing color and light would be amazing.