Mike Hansell
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780198507529
- eISBN:
- 9780191709838
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198507529.001.0001
- Subject:
- Biology, Animal Biology
Construction behaviour occurs across the entire spectrum of the animal kingdom and affects the survival of both builders and other organisms associated with them. This book provides a comprehensive ...
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Construction behaviour occurs across the entire spectrum of the animal kingdom and affects the survival of both builders and other organisms associated with them. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the biology of animal building. It recognizes three broad categories of built structure: homes, traps, and courtship displays. Even though some of these structures are complex and very large, the behaviour required to build them is generally simple and the anatomy for building unspecialized. Standardization of building materials helps to keep building repertoires simple, while self-organizing effects help create complexity. In a case-study approach to function, insects demonstrate how homes can remain operational while they grow, spiderwebs illustrate mechanical design, and the displays of bowerbirds raise the possibility of persuasion through design rather than just decoration. Studies of the costs to builders provide evidence of optimal designs and of trade-offs with other life history traits. As ecosystem engineers, the influence of builders is extensive and their effect is generally to enhance biodiversity through niche construction. Animal builders can therefore represent model species for the study of the emerging subject of environmental inheritance. Building, and in particular building with silk, has been demonstrated to have important evolutionary consequences.Less
Construction behaviour occurs across the entire spectrum of the animal kingdom and affects the survival of both builders and other organisms associated with them. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the biology of animal building. It recognizes three broad categories of built structure: homes, traps, and courtship displays. Even though some of these structures are complex and very large, the behaviour required to build them is generally simple and the anatomy for building unspecialized. Standardization of building materials helps to keep building repertoires simple, while self-organizing effects help create complexity. In a case-study approach to function, insects demonstrate how homes can remain operational while they grow, spiderwebs illustrate mechanical design, and the displays of bowerbirds raise the possibility of persuasion through design rather than just decoration. Studies of the costs to builders provide evidence of optimal designs and of trade-offs with other life history traits. As ecosystem engineers, the influence of builders is extensive and their effect is generally to enhance biodiversity through niche construction. Animal builders can therefore represent model species for the study of the emerging subject of environmental inheritance. Building, and in particular building with silk, has been demonstrated to have important evolutionary consequences.
Gregg Lambert
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816678020
- eISBN:
- 9781452948058
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816678020.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter defines the concept of a machine and a narrator in Proustian terms. Simply put, the Proustian narrator is a“Body without Organs”—unlike the Cartesian definition—and it is a being of pure ...
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This chapter defines the concept of a machine and a narrator in Proustian terms. Simply put, the Proustian narrator is a“Body without Organs”—unlike the Cartesian definition—and it is a being of pure sensation (no eyes, no ears, no memory, and above all, no thought), while the machine of Deleuze and Guattari is anything that interrupts a flow. Therefore the literary machine is a spiderweb—a vast and complicated partly animal and partly herbal web that interrupts the flows of signs and impressions that get caught up in it; and the narrator is the spider that drags its heavy body to the place of the interruption and spins a cocoon around the impression it finds there (i.e., to develop the impression into a sign) in order to finally drink its blood (extract its essence, its spiritual idea).Less
This chapter defines the concept of a machine and a narrator in Proustian terms. Simply put, the Proustian narrator is a“Body without Organs”—unlike the Cartesian definition—and it is a being of pure sensation (no eyes, no ears, no memory, and above all, no thought), while the machine of Deleuze and Guattari is anything that interrupts a flow. Therefore the literary machine is a spiderweb—a vast and complicated partly animal and partly herbal web that interrupts the flows of signs and impressions that get caught up in it; and the narrator is the spider that drags its heavy body to the place of the interruption and spins a cocoon around the impression it finds there (i.e., to develop the impression into a sign) in order to finally drink its blood (extract its essence, its spiritual idea).
