The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world.
In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent...
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world.
In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.
Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.”
作者简介
· · · · · ·
Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer on the staff of The Atlantic, where he also won the George Polk Award for science reporting, among other honors. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, was a New York Times bestseller and won numerous awards. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times, Scientific American, and more. H...
Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer on the staff of The Atlantic, where he also won the George Polk Award for science reporting, among other honors. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, was a New York Times bestseller and won numerous awards. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times, Scientific American, and more. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Liz Neeley, and their corgi, Typo.
原文摘录
· · · · · ·
in 1995, environmental historian William Cronon wrote that “the time has come to rethink wilderness.” In a searing essay, he argued that the concept of wilderness, especially as perceived in the United States, had become unjustly synonymous with grandeur. Eighteenth-century thinkers believed that vast and magnificent landscapes reminded people of their own mortality and brought them closer to glimpsing the divine. “God was on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud, in the rainbow, in thesunset,” Cronon wrote. “One has only to think of the sites that Americans chose for their first national parks—Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Rainier, Zion—to realize that virtually all of them fit one or more of these categories. Less sublime landscapes simply did not ap... (查看原文)
We are used to senses like vision or hearing that offer nigh-instantaneous information. Magnetoreception probably doesn’t work like that, but we don’t know the timescales over which it does work. Without knowing that, or without even realizing that you need to find out, it’s hard to design good experiments. As I wrote in the introduction, a scientist’s data are influenced by the questions she asks, which are steered by her imagination, which is delimited by her senses. The boundaries of our own Umwelt corral our ability to understand the Umwelten of others. (查看原文)
Soundofwood
Random House2022版
colin
脸谱2023版
1 有用 Tennyson 2023-08-11 22:06:58 上海
感觉读了三个月的雅思科技类阅读。。。害。。。这题材自己似乎没什么兴趣。
0 有用 Wanderer12 2023-08-04 10:37:52 四川
读的这一版。因为只了解自己的感官，人类就从自己的感官去了解其他生物。而人类也受限于自己的感官，永远无法真正地感知其他生物的感知，也忘记了其他生物与我们是不同的。所幸，人类也是唯一一种有能力搞清楚其他生物所感所知，唯一一种可能在乎其他生物所感所知的生物。我们可以选择去了解，也必须去了解。因为这地球不只是我们的。p.s. 读完这本书，真心觉得每种生物都是可爱的，连这辈子最不喜欢的老鼠也变得没那么讨厌了... 读的这一版。因为只了解自己的感官，人类就从自己的感官去了解其他生物。而人类也受限于自己的感官，永远无法真正地感知其他生物的感知，也忘记了其他生物与我们是不同的。所幸，人类也是唯一一种有能力搞清楚其他生物所感所知，唯一一种可能在乎其他生物所感所知的生物。我们可以选择去了解，也必须去了解。因为这地球不只是我们的。p.s. 读完这本书，真心觉得每种生物都是可爱的，连这辈子最不喜欢的老鼠也变得没那么讨厌了。 (展开)