95
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_10
Chapter 10
Ecological Contradiction, Antinomy,
and Counter-Intuition
10.1 To Fly or Not to Fly?
Amid so many preemptive deep syntactic and grammatical rules of speech and preemptive cognition that have amounted to no less than entire self-contradictory
Weltanschauungs, human consciousness, as possibly wired and varied from other
species, supplies an endless and inchoate set of mentally charged prescriptions for
its own exclusive use. Such utilities are, in aggregate, unself-conscious. This poses
the problem.
One classic case tantamount to this problem in other species concerns the cosmopolitan family of birds known as Rallidae, first organized in terms of their nomenclature (clustered) in 1815 by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque.
1
Found on every
continent but Antarctica, many rails, as they are generally called, can fly, though
their relatively short wings do not favor it, and their much preferred flightlessness
over time has become a biogeographical classic case study. “The paradox of the
distribution of the rail family around the world,” a former Secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution, the late American ornithologist Sydney Dillon Ripley,
muses, “has been its ability to disperse widely and, on the other hand, its having the
countervailing tendency to evolve rapidly towards flightlessness.”
2
The conundrum
is solved by any number of adaptive, genetic, and avian personality-related insights
that may, in fact, pertain to human evolution, as well (Fig. 10.1).
As clumsy flyers, rails are more readily blown off course, rendering migration no
simple given. Their long-distance vagrancies dot global maps. They can run fast, as
we have seen in the case of takahe (Porphyrio hochstetteri) on islands like Tiritiri
1 Bock, Walter J. (1994). History and Nomenclature of Avian Family-Group Names. Bulletin of the
American Museum of Natural History. Number 222. New York: American Museum of Natural
History. pp. 136, 252.
2 See Rails Of The World – A Monograph of the Family Rallidae by S. Dillon Ripley, With FortyOne Paintings by J. Fenwick Lansdowne, Daivd R. Godine, Boston, 1977, p. 26.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_10
Chapter 10
Ecological Contradiction, Antinomy,
and Counter-Intuition
10.1 To Fly or Not to Fly?
Amid so many preemptive deep syntactic and grammatical rules of speech and preemptive cognition that have amounted to no less than entire self-contradictory
Weltanschauungs, human consciousness, as possibly wired and varied from other
species, supplies an endless and inchoate set of mentally charged prescriptions for
its own exclusive use. Such utilities are, in aggregate, unself-conscious. This poses
the problem.
One classic case tantamount to this problem in other species concerns the cosmopolitan family of birds known as Rallidae, first organized in terms of their nomenclature (clustered) in 1815 by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque.
1
Found on every
continent but Antarctica, many rails, as they are generally called, can fly, though
their relatively short wings do not favor it, and their much preferred flightlessness
over time has become a biogeographical classic case study. “The paradox of the
distribution of the rail family around the world,” a former Secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution, the late American ornithologist Sydney Dillon Ripley,
muses, “has been its ability to disperse widely and, on the other hand, its having the
countervailing tendency to evolve rapidly towards flightlessness.”
2
The conundrum
is solved by any number of adaptive, genetic, and avian personality-related insights
that may, in fact, pertain to human evolution, as well (Fig. 10.1).
As clumsy flyers, rails are more readily blown off course, rendering migration no
simple given. Their long-distance vagrancies dot global maps. They can run fast, as
we have seen in the case of takahe (Porphyrio hochstetteri) on islands like Tiritiri
1 Bock, Walter J. (1994). History and Nomenclature of Avian Family-Group Names. Bulletin of the
American Museum of Natural History. Number 222. New York: American Museum of Natural
History. pp. 136, 252.
2 See Rails Of The World – A Monograph of the Family Rallidae by S. Dillon Ripley, With FortyOne Paintings by J. Fenwick Lansdowne, Daivd R. Godine, Boston, 1977, p. 26.