david spooner

the follow-up to THE INSECT-POPULATED MIND: HOW INSECTS HAVE INFLUENCED THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
is coming in 2013:
WRITERS WHO STARED AT THE SUN: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON EVOLUTIONARY THEORY

Soon after I had worked as Consultant to the US Fish & Wildlife Service in successfully saving the El Segundo Blue Butterfly in the environs of San Francisco Airport, I was awarded the Medal of Honor for Natural History (2004). I was subsequently inducted into the American Hall of Fame, the first Scottish natural historian to receive such an honor since the great John Muir in the nineteenth century. I served on the Scottish Biodiversity Committee (Scottish Natural Heritage) from 1999-2003. I had founded Butterfly Conservation, East Scotland in 1996, and have since been fortunate to record the first Small Skipper Butterfly to be seen in Scotland for over 170 years

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I was founder and Director of Borderline Press 1977-1984, and published many of the major poets in Scotland, such as Tom Scott, J.F. Hendry (an associate of Dylan Thomas) and re-published John Cornford. I am on the Board of the London Diplomatic Academy based in London and Madrid, as well as having honorary membership of the Fiat Lux Society at UC Santa Cruz where the University Library holds the correspondence over a number of years between Norman O. Brown and myself

An indication of the context in which I look on myself as working is an extract from my Frontispiece to a book

"The project of the Thinker today is to reveal the essential spirit, or `genius`
of matters, that are obscured in the vast mass of unleavened information
and discoveries in such arenas as molecular biology, astronomy and the natural
sciences

We have reached an apparent plateau of knowledge, without scaling the Everest
of Wisdom

We have pitched our tents too short in mutual adulations

The early natural historians were ordinary Whitmanesque folk with plain and simple
jobs. We of the twenty-first century reasonably expect more precise knowledge
than the serendipities of the `amateur`

The aim and object of the writer needs be to reach out to the educated and self-
educated reader."

My books have striven to awaken such connections:

The Insect-populated Mind: how insects have influenced the evolution of consciousness (2005)

Thoreau`s Vision of Insects and the Origins of American Entomology (2002)

The Poem and the Insect: Aspects of twentieth century Hispanic Culture (1998: 2002)

Creatures of Air:Poems 1976-2001 (2001)

The Metaphysics of Insect Life (1995)

Forthcoming 2013: They Stared at the Sun: writers and new perspectives on evolutionary theory

“anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must once in his life withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.”
(Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations).

What if from the standpoint of defining human nature A.R. Wallace`s reservations about Darwin`s theory are the crucial ones? (see Chapter 10 of my new book).

And what if all the incredible physiological data regarding the human ascent that has been accumulated over the past two centuries remains little more than subsidiary?

Have the mere accumulators of facts (as Husserl called them) blinded both the academic world and, through the academies, the general public to an intelligent assessment of human nature?

“Human nature” has of course been abolished as too footling in many Faculties, and become another deposit in the dustbin of incorrectnesses. Chapter 7 will reveal where that has led many of the so-called intelligentsia via Heidegger.

I was born during the Second War across the water from Wales at West Kirby Cheshire, and went to the University at Leeds. There I was awarded one of the original post-War Firsts in literature, following on from the previous couple gained by Jon Silkin and Richard Hoggart. I then studied theatre and direction under Hugh Hunt from the Abbey Theatre and Stephen Joseph, founder of the modern theatre-in-the-round. My doctorate was gained at Bristol University in 1968 on the subject of World Writers and the Spanish Civil War and lectured at Kent University for 6 years, until a spell at Penn State in the mid-1970s.

from CHAPTER 2 of THEY STARED AT THE SUN

THE INVENTION OF LANGUAGE AND THE EMBRYONIC DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE

This is the story of how the world of insects has penetrated the innermost reaches of human experience. It involves music, language and genetics. What we observe in the commonsensical world is only a fraction of reality. Quantum data is an even larger part of what is going on out there. The formulation of a theory that unifies the Einstein model and the infinitesimal quantum atomic activity remains to be discovered for a full account of the world in which we function. Such a theory will enhance out appreciation and understanding of life. This book will show how there is also a quantum world of natural organic history; that of the insects; needing to be integrated into evolutionary theory as foreseen by Malraux.

By now a century and half after Darwin`s publication of The origin of species, every schoolchild knows we evolved from apes. But because of the limited state of genetics, embryology and morphology, Darwin could not be expected to distinguish the equal, and perhaps even more significant, relation with insects. This relationship can answer some of the intellectual issues raised by his co-founder of the theory in his name, A.R. Wallace. When evolutionary biology met embryology and genetics, it opened up a new perspective on the profile of species.

Richard Dawkins has splendidly spelt out the remarkable change over the past 25 years of research:

"It was a similar triumph to show that the insect head contains – again all jumbled up – the first six segments of what, in their remote ancestors, would have been a train of modules just like the rest of the body. It was a triumph of late twentieth century embryology and genetics to show that insect segmentation, far from being independent of each other as I was taught, are actually mediated by parallel sets of genes, the so-called hox genes, which are recognizably similar in insects and vertebrates and many other animals, and that genes are even laid out in the correct serial order in the chromosomes! That is something none of my teachers would have dreamed of when I was an undergraduate learning, entirely separately, about insect and vertebrate segmentation. Animals of different phyla (for example, insects and vertebrates) are much more united than we ever used to think. And that, too, is because of shared ancestry. The hox plan was already sketched out in the grand ancestor of all bilaterally symmetrical animals. All animals are much closer cousins to each other than we used to think.
The situation began to change some quarter century ago with the discovery of the homeobox of genes, and after this, the main features of animal development were found through the fruit-fly Drosophila merganogaster. Further research has shown how between 120,000 and 30,000 years ago, “the effusive mass of tangled neurons took a significant new step that formed the essential patterns of thought and greatly increased human consciousness…”

And the recent discovery of the spindle cells has thrown more light on the evolution of the brain and consciousness. These cells appeared some 10-15 million years ago in the common ancestor of humans yet to be unearthed, and rapidly increased 100,000 years ago. The spindle cells deal with high-level emotions and are situated in the fronto-insular cortex.

At the same time remarkable advances have been made in understanding the brain stem inherited as it is from amphibians and reptiles.The stem lies at the boundary of the brain and spinal cord and largely controls our breathing, heart-beat, digestion and sexual drive, everything involuntary in our lives. As Neil Shubin writes: “the brain stem originally controlled breathing in fish; it has been jerry-rigged to work in mammals.” It is Shubin who has identified hiccups as the clue to our debt not only to amphibians in general, but to tadpoles in particular. The sudden closure of the tadpole`s glottis to prevent water entering the lungs is the ancestral experience that explains the advent of hiccups. Shubin`s Arctic researches into fossils produced the clues for our relationship to aspects of amphibian physiology. He discovered the transitional water-to-land creature, the Tiktaalik, which is just as much a part of our history as the African hominids, such as Australopithecus aforensis, the famous `Lucy.` Seeing Lucy we can understand our history as advanced primates. Seeing Tiktaalik is seeing our history as fish.

Indeed in 2012, a prehistoric eel-like creature has been identified in a Canadian shale bed and named as the earliest ancestor of the human species.

So our heritage is far more variegated than used to be imagined. I hope to show by the end of this book how when insect aspects are taken into account, the natural reflexes of the working of the human brain, and its evolution into the mind via cultural achievements, throw further new light on evolution.

André Malraux`s hope that the awareness of metamorphosis would dominate evolution and create its own history has been met by Norman O. Brown who lit upon a key set of language elements via the insights of Descartes: Larva means mask; or ghost. Larvatus, masked, a personality — larvatus prodeo it also means mad, a case of demoniacal possession. Larva is also `the immature form of animals characterized by metamorphosis`; in the grub state; before their transformation into a pupa, or pupil; i.e. before their initiation. So the butterfly masks its final form at all stages; ovum (egg) > larva (caterpillar)> pupa (in its chrysalis: from crusos {gold}) > imago (perfect final creature)

This is a fourfold process and why this is so important will become clear as we progress. In the course of the book, we shall be seeing how this structure in nature has been appropriated by some of the greatest poets from Blake to Coleridge and T.S. Eliot. Quite beyond merely descriptive or passionate expression, the writer threads into the natural world at his and her heart. The integration between the writers and that structure meets its point of fusion in their representation of insects. The dialectic of microcosm (the poems) and macrocosm (the dimensions of the universe) is in play throughout.