The Quiet Ear, Deafness in Literature (1987) is an anthology compiled by Brian Grant, the then-Honorary Librarian of the British Deaf Association. Its entries about life without sound range from Herodotus’s account of Croesus’s deaf son (The Histories) to Caesar’s invitation to Antony to “come to my right hand, for this ear is deaf” (Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar), the carpenter’s complaint from “The Walrus and the Carpenter” in Lewis Carroll’s Through the looking-Glass, and Annie Sullivan’s interview by Helen Keller’s mother from William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker.
5. Blink!
1. “Richard Owen,” University of California Museum of Paleontology, http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/owen.html
2. Kaufman, M.H., “John Barclay (1758-1826) extra-mural teacher of anatomy in Edinburgh: Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh,” Surgeon. April 4, 2006 (2):93-100, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1479666X06800387
3. “Natural History Museum, London,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_History_Museum,_London
4. “Sir Anthony Panizzi,” NNDB,” http://www.nndb.com/people/550/000096262
5. “History and architecture,” Natural History Museum, http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/history-and-architecture.html#sthash.DJsXKOpI.dpuf
6. “Prof. Owen, in his Lecture at the Royal Institution, on Tuesday (19th of March), entered upon an exposition of the distinctive characters between the Negro (or lowest variety of Human Race) and the Gorilla, as exemplified by the skeleton and brain…. Now the parts the brain peculiar to man at the back parts of the hemisphere are situated behind the transverse line decussating the brains of the Gorilla and Negro in the cuts 3 and 4. Special anatomical details of these several parts, in comparison with the brains of the Chimpanzee and Orang, were then given, and Prof. Owen proceeded, in conclusion, as follows: The advocate for man’s origin from a transmuted ape contends, that there is a greater difference of structure between the brains of a Gorilla and of a Lemur than between those of a Gorilla and of a [396] Negro; and suiting his definitions to the statement, he affirms that the higher apes possess the ‘posterior lobe’ with the ‘posterior horn’ of the lateral ventricle, and the hippocampus minor, or at least the ‘rudiments’ of the parts which have been alleged to be peculiar to the human species.” “The Gorilla and the Negro,” The Huxley File, http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/comm/ScPr/owen.html
7. “Richard Owen (1804-1892),” University of California Museum of Paleontology, http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/owen.html & The Victorian Web, http://www.victorianweb.org/science/owen.html
8. “On the anatomy of vertebrates,” BiodiversityHeritageLibrary, http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/990#/summary
9. Darwin, Francis, editor, Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters, New York: Dover Publications, 1992, Pages 90-92, at AboutDarwin.com, Http://www.aboutdarwin.com/darwin/whowas.html
10. The platypus and its cousins, the echidnas, Australian mammals who lay eggs.
11. A primate with four “hands” rather than two “hands” and two “feet.”
12. Muller’s Elements of Physiology, Eng. translat. 1842, vol. ii. p. 1117, Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, vol. iii. p. 260; ibid. on the Walrus, Proceedings of the Zoological Society, November 8, 1854, http://accounts.smccd.edu/bruni/englishassets/rel_sci/thedescentofman.pdf
13. Your pet hamster is one of the few animals that may blink one eye at a time. When we humans do this, we call it a wink not a blink, a form of body language usually translated as “I really didn’t mean what I just said” or, more suggestively, “C’mon over here, handsome.” The hamster is probably just clearing her eye.
14. Darwin, a dog lover all his life, found himself mystified by feline behavior. He accepted a dog’s licks as a sign of affection but obviously did not know that cats have scent glands on the sides of the cheeks, head, tail, and paws that they use to mark their “property,” including their humans. This lack of information explains the puzzlement he expressed in writing, “[w]hy cats should show affection by rubbing so much more than do dogs, though the latter delight in contact with their masters, and why cats only occasionally lick the hands of their friends, whilst dogs always do so, I cannot say.” “Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Biblioklept, http://biblioklept.org/2015/02/12/on-the-special-expressions-of-cats-charles-darwin/
15. “Nature’s squeegee—the nictitating membrane,” Scatterfeed, https://scatterfeed.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/natures-squeegee-the-nictitating-membran
16. Merriam-Webster dates the first known use of the word “squeegee,” originally squilgee, to 1844 (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/squeegee). Among the first, if not the first, to use it in relation to the nictitating membrane was University of Liverpool (UK) professor E. Philip Stibbe in his 1928 paper, “A comparative study of the nictitating membrane of birds and mammals,” Journal of Anatomy, January 1928, 62 (Pt 2):159-76, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1250027/pdf/janat00621-0037.pdf
17. DeRemer, Susan, “21 Facts About Animal Eyes,” Discovery, https://discoveryeye.org/blog/32-facts-about-animal-eyes/
18. Miller, Paul, “Why do cats have inner eyelids as well as outer ones?”, ScientificAmerican, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-cats-have-an-inner/[email protected]
19. “Healthy Pregnancy Week by Week,” MayoClinic,com, http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/pregnancy-week-by-week/in-depth/prenatal-care/art-20045302?pg=2
20. Patel, Bhupendra, Meyers, Arlen D., “Eyelid Anatomy,” Medscape.com, http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/834932-overview
21. “Cranial features and race,” John Hawks weblog, http://johnhawks.net/explainer/laboratory/race-cranium/
22. Blake, C.R., Lai, W.W., Edward, D.P., “Racial and ethnic differences in ocular anatomy,” International Ophthalmology Clinics, 2003 Fall;43(4):9-25, https://majorityright.com/images/uploads/eye_anatomy.pdf
23. “Posts in What’s so great about double eyelids anyway?” jpopasia.com, http://www.jpopasia.com/forums/posts-in/whats-so-great-about-double-eyelids-anyway::14::4266::1
24. Rakuten Global Market.com, http://www.rakuten.com.my/shop/nattacosme/product/4972915007305/
25. “When light enters water, its intensity quickly decreases and its color changes. These changes are called attenuation. Attenuation is the result of two processes: scattering and absorption. The scattering of light is caused by particles or other small objects suspended in the water—the more the particles, the more the scattering. The scattering of light in water is somewhat similar to the effect of smoke or fog in the atmosphere.” Ross, David, “Fish Eyesight: Does Color Matter?” Midcurrent http://midcurrent.com/science/fish-eyesight-does-color-matter/
26. “How do animals protect their eyes?” ebiomedia, https://www.ebiomedia.com/how-do-animals-protect-their-eyes.html
27. “Sleeping With Your Eyes Open—Is It Possible?” Essilor USA, http://news.essilorusa.com/stories/detail/sleeping-with-our-eyes-open-is-it-possible
28. Nakano, Tamami, Kato, Makoto, Morito, Yusuke, Ito, Seishi, Kitazawa, Shigeru, “Blink-related momentary activation of the default mode network while viewing videos,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, http://www.pnas.org/content/110/2/702.full
29. Stromberg, Joseph, “Why Do We Blink So Frequently?” Smithsonian.com, December 24, 2012, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-do-we-blink-so-frequently-172334883/#22m7WCZIV4Kk5OT3.99
30. “Blink quotes,” Brainy Quotes, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/blink_2.html#MzwLxLuWeMuZoyhI.99 & http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/blink.html#FIOwVdcK8QiTV8Xb.99
31. Volokh, Eugene, “Houston ban on annoying ‘goo-goo eyes,’” the Washington Post, March 30, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/03/30/houston-ban-on-annoying-goo-goo-eyes/
32. Van den Bosch, W.A., Leenders, I., Mulder, P., “Top
ographic anatomy of the eyelids, and the effects of age,” British Journal of Opthalmology, March 1999, 83(3),:347-352, http://bjo.bmj.com/content/83/3/347.full
33. Pappas, Stephanie, “Bedroom Eyes Make Guys Look Sketchy,” LiveScience, May 10, 2012, http://www.livescience.com/20222-bedroom-eyes-guys-sketchy.html,
34. Arends, G, Schramm, U., “The structure of the human semilunar plica at different stages of its development—a morphological and morphometric study,” Annals of Anatomy, June 2004, 186(3):195-207, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15255295
35. “Calabar Angwantibo—Arctocebus calabarensis,” Carnivora.com, http://carnivoraforum.com/topic/10064654/1/
36. “Nictitating membrane,” Medlibrary.com, http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/Nictitating_membrane
37. Arends, G, op. cit.
38. “The word sty (first recorded in the 17th century) is probably a back-formation from styany (first recorded in the 15th century), which in turn comes from styan plus eye,[21] the former of which in turn comes from the old English stígend, meaning riser, from the verb stígan, rise (in Old English G is often a Y sound). The homonym sty found in the combination pigsty has a slightly different origin, namely, it comes from the Old English stí-fearh—fearh (farrow) is the Old English word for pig—where stig meant hall (cf. steward), possibly an early Old Norse loanword, which could be cognate with the word stigan, above. “Stye,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stye
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The eye is a camera in the sense that it captures images and sends them to the brain, which decodes them. Early on, however, the idea of eye-as-camera was misinterpreted to suggest that it might be a crime-fighter, the notion, as British author A.S.E. [Alfred Seabold Eli] Ackermann wrote in Popular Fallacies—a book of common errors explained and corrected with copious references to authorities (1908)—that the “Victim of a Murder Retains In the Retina of His or Her Eye the Portrait of the Assassin.” This led to the introduction of optography, photographing the back of the eye of a murdered person to produce an optogram, a picture that might show the face of the murderer. After the sacrifice of untold numbers of laboratory animals to excise and photograph their eyes in an attempt to see what they saw before dying, and Scotland Yard’s conclusion that it had been a total failure in their effort to identify Jack the Ripper, this long-lived myth was conclusively debunked by the Bobbies as well as the scientists. “It is unfortunate that this is not true,” Seabold said, “as if it were it would greatly assist to bring the criminal to justice.”
6. Pearly Whites
1. Choi, Charles Q., “How Did Multicellular Life Evolve?” Astrobio.net, http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/multicellular-life-evolve/#sthash.no9KhT7q.dpufusive/multicellular-life-evolve/#sthash.HVIHPTvE.dpuf).
2. “The Proterozoic, Eukaryotes and the First Multicellular Life Forms,” Smithsonian National Museum of Natural history, http://paleobiology.si.edu/geotime/main/htmlVersion/proterozoic3.html
3. Retallack, Gregory J., “ Ediacaran life on land,” Nature, January 2013, 3, 493,89–92 (03 January 2013)
4. Harris, Richard, “Land Creatures Might Not Have Come From the Sea,” NPR, http://www.npr.org/2012/12/12/167052782/land-creatures-might-not-have-come-from-the-sea
5. The fossilized remains of these teeth, having fallen to the ocean floor, are treasures for modern scientists who study the ancient shift of ocean currents such as the flow of waters between the Atlantic and the Pacific through the Drake Passage. The chemical mix of water from one ocean is not the same as that from the other. The fossilized teeth offer a record of which water was where when, and thus a historical “snapshot” of how and when the ocean currents met. Chang, Kenneth, “Clues to Oceans’ History In Fish Teeth Fossils,” the New York Times, January 22, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/22/science/clues-to-oceans-history-in-fish-te
6. How a creature moves has real meaning, both physical and evolutionary. The ability to stand up and walk requires specific skeletal features such as a pelvis, a set of bones most fish don’t have. As always, there seems to be an exception. In this case, it’s the waterfall-climbing cave fish, Cryptotora thamicola. In 2016, researchers from Maejo University (Thailand) and the New Jersey Institute of Technology found that unlike ordinary fish, who will flop around if dropped on the ground, these fish who live in caves in northern Thailand, behave like “early land vertebrates, known as tetrapods [creatures who walk on or at least have four legs and] evolved adaptations that enabled them to move efficiently over solid ground. A pelvis joined their hind limbs to their spines, for example. Their vertebrae grew flanges so that they interlocked, helping the spine hold itself stiff and straight even when being pulled down by gravity. These adaptations led tetrapods to walk in a distinctive fashion, moving their forelegs and hind legs together in a cycle. Early tetrapods probably walked much the way salamanders do today, bending their trunk from side to side as they traveled. All tetrapods descend from a single ancestor—a single lineage of fish that managed to spread on land. Some other fishes evolved vaguely similar ways of moving around.” Zimmer, Carl, “Researchers Find Fish That Walks the Way Land Vertebrates Do,” The New York Times, March 24, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/science/researchers-find-fish-that-walks-
7. The connection is furthered by the subsequent discovery of even older fossils showing a similar link. “Archaeopteryx,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx
8. “Darwin’s finches,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_finches
9. Scoville, Heather, “Charles Darwin Webquest,” About Education.com, http://evolution.about.com/od/Darwin/fl/Charles-Darwin-Webquest.htm
10. Pomerantz, Aaron, “Achoo! Why Galápagos Marine Iguanas Sneeze,” The Next Gen Scientist, June 9, 2016, http://www.thenextgenscientist.com/
11. “Chadwick’s Radio Expedition to Palmyra for Morning Edition,” NPR, July 24 & 25, 2000. http://www.npr.org/programs/re/archivesdate/2000/jul/000724.palmyra.html
12. This is an abbreviated table. An accessible chart showing the complete time scale, with every division of the various periods, is available at “The Geologic Time Scale,” University of California Museum of Paleontology, http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/help/timeform.php
13. Geologic Times Scale, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Geggel, Laura, “Why Birds Don’t Have Teeth,” LiveScience.com, http://www.livescience.com/49109-bird-teeth-common-ancestor.html
18. Udesky, Laura, “Wisdom Teeth,” HealthDay, http://consumer.healthday.com/encyclopedia/dental-health-11/misc-dental-problem-news-174/wisdom-teeth-645686.html
19. Pain, Clare, “Lifestyle Changes Your Jaw,” ABC Science Online, November 22, 2011, http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/jaw-size-human-diet-evolution-111122.htm
20. Ibid.
21. Maheswari, N. Uma, Kumar, B.P., Karunakaran, S,C., Kumaran, S. Thanga, “Early baby teeth: Facts and Folklore,” Journal of Pharmacy and Bioallied Sciences, August 2012, 4 (Suppl 2): S329–S333, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3467875/
22. Like right- or left-handed humans, elephants seem to apply “handedness” to their tusks, using either the left or the right more frequently. “Elephant,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant#Tusks
23. “Dentistry,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dentistry#History
24. Ibid.
25. The Natural History of Human Teeth -John Hunter,” UT Health Science Center, http://library.uthscsa.edu/2015/03/the-natural-history-of-human-teeth-john-hunter/
26. “Transplantation,” Live on NY, http://liveonny.org/all-about-transplantation/organ-transplant-history/
27. “The Whole Tooth and Nothing But the Tooth,” Bostonia, Winter-Spring 2011, http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/winter-spring11/tooth/
28. McCrae, Fiona, “Humans could develop BEAKS like pufferfish because our teeth are ‘no longer f
it for purpose’, claims scientist,” The Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2354496/Scientist-believe-humans-grow-beaks-instead-teeth-like-pufferfish.html#ixzz44U7BQD2P
29. Silvestri, Anthony R. Jr., and Singh, Iqbal, “The unresolved problem of the third molar: Would people be better off without it?” Journal of the American Dental Asociai0otn, 2003, http://jada.ada.org/cgi/reprint/134/4/450 & Levin, David, “Nipping Wisdom Teeth in the Bud,” Tufts Dental Medicine, http://now.tufts.edu/articles/nipping-wisdom-teeth-bud
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No matter what mouth they sit in, teeth are made for eating. What we eat, however, varies from time to time and, more important from place to place because geography has much to do with dinner. In the perfectly delightful Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture (Simon & Schuster, 1985), Marvin Harris (1927–2001), an anthropologist with a special interest in the history of food, answers the question of why some people eat insects instead of, say, chickens, this way: Suppose you live in a forest where someone has pinned $20 and $1 bills to the upper branches of the trees. Which will you reach for? The $20s, of course. But now suppose that there are only a very few $20s but millions and millions of $1 bills. Substitute chickens for the $20s and large insects for the $1 bills, and you can see that people who live in places where insects far outnumber chickens are better off picking the plentiful high-protein, low fat, and highly nutritious bugs than chasing after the occasional chicken. It’s a perfectly rational decision, illustrative of the evolution of the rational human brain. And as the culinarily adventurous will testify, tasty, as well.
7. Dispensables
1. James, William, The Energies of Men (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1908).
2. Neither side, however, governs heartbeat, blood pressure, and respiration. The control for these vital functions resides in the brain stem, the part of the brain at the base of your skull that connects to the spinal cord and controls the flow of messages from the brain to the rest of your body. A person who has lost the function of the cerebrum (the two hemispheres at the front of the brain) but has a functioning brain stem will still have a heartbeat and can breathe on his own. If the brain stem dies, the heart and lung function ceases and only mechanical life-support will keep the body alive. Thus, the modern standard of brain death defines it as not simply a lack of function in the two hemispheres but also in the brainstem.
Spare Parts Page 21
