![]() This means there are often things to be learnt from them. In this Trees-Over-Time (TOT) article, I’ve put together some anomalies that didn’t readily fit within any of the other themes of my previous TOT articles: it’s a bunch of ‘leftovers’, is what I’m hinting at. We’ll look at a few physical anomalies, some theoretical anomalies and some tree management anomalies – and I’ll let the pictures and captions do most of the talking.Īnother reason to look at anomalies is that they are away from what is standard, normal, and expected. The common question asked is “What has caused the tree to do this?” – and frequently the correct answer is “We just don’t know.” These complications increase further due to the many unseen interactions between trees, microbes, and aspects of a tree’s growing environment which we ourselves cannot see nor sense. ![]() Like most complex life forms, trees do sophisticated things that we do not yet fully understand – and odd things that seem to be self-defeating or just plain weird. To overcome this paradox, neurologists turn to technology but when AI starts understanding how our brains work, I think we need to watch out! This observable limitation to our minds ties in with what is known as the ‘brain paradox’ – if our brains were simple enough for us to understand how they worked, then we would end up being too simple to understand our brains. Take, for example, the sea cucumber that breathes through its bottom and, when attacked by a predator, fires parts of it innards at its enemy, growing them back later when it has done an inventory as to what is missing. I’m afraid the average human’s imagination is just not capable of coming up with such implausible creatures even our depictions of alien species tend to be derivative of animals we are already familiar with, such that we give our imagined aliens tentacles, horns, large eyes – and, of course, most of them speak English (especially in early editions of the Star Trek series).
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