Not a human move

[AlphaGo] doesn’t perceive the world or move within it, and the totality of its behaviour is manifest through the moves it makes on the Go board. Nevertheless, the intentional stance is sometimes useful to describe its behaviour.

...Commentating on the match, the European Go champion Fan Hui remarked: ‘It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move. So beautiful.’ According to AlphaGo’s own estimate, there was a one-in-10,000 chance that a human would have used the same tactic, and it went against centuries of received wisdom. Yet this move was pivotal in giving it victory.

from What other kinds of minds might be out there? by Murray Shanahan

Hidden

Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.

Donald Hoffman

Moonbow photo courtesy Calvin Bradshaw via wikimedia

Deep song

Whale song has artistic elements beyond simple communication of information. For example, since each whale theme ends with consistent final sounds, the phrases can be said to “rhyme” in a way akin to human poetry. Is such ornamental courtship behavior just an illustration of the “male quality” valued by hard-line evolutionists? Or does it show that evolution, over thousands of years, is able to produce art if there are no serious predators around?

Edward Sapir quoted by David Rothenberg in Whales synchorize their songs across oceans...

Image by Mike Deal

Abundance

The pecan groves give, again and again, Such generosity might seem incompatible with the process of evolution, which involves the imperative of individual survival. But we make a grave error if we try to separate individual wellbeing from the health of the whole. The gift of abundance from pecans is a gift to themselves. By sating squirrels and people, the trees are ensuring their own survival.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low & horridly cruel

What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature! 

Letter from Charles Darwin to Joseph Hooker , 13 July 1856

Image: Alexander Wild

Wonders Wornowiidical

Eyes are meant to be animal inventions. They’re supposed to comprise many cells. They are icons of biological complexity. And yet, here’s a non-animal that packs similar components into its single cell. Is the ocelloid actually an eye? Can it sense light? What does a warnowiid use it for? These questions are still mysteries, but in trying to answer them, Gregory Gavelis...has discovered something about the ocelloid that’s even weirder. At least two of its components—the “retina” and the “cornea”—seem to be made from domesticated bacteria.

Phenomena Ed Yong

936 genders

Cyathus stercoreus, the "dung-loving bird's nest", has 39 different possible MAT-A's, and 24 MAT-B's. This means that there are a total of 936 (39×24) different genders, and an arbitrary fungus will be able to mate with 874 (38×23) of them. 

John Kellden

Image: University of Guelph

h/t: FJ

Omnicloakia Echolalia

The Patagonian vine Boquila trifoliolata.. is a thin-stalked woody climber which can spiral from ground level to high canopy, and is endemic to the temperate forests of South America. Its basic foliage pattern is composed of groups of three roughly spear-shaped leaves. What is not supposed to be possible is that these leaves are able to mimic the colour, shape, size and orientation of those of its host trees... Boquila’s leaves stay within the green-blue spectrum and keep their formation, but as the vine winds through the tree community over weeks and months, the leaves morph to resemble those of each new supporting species, even ones it may never have encountered before. In the space of few metres the leaves of a single vine can be as smooth as an ivy’s, more rounded like box, then bluish and deeply veined, then yellow-green, serrated, oval-ended...  

The Chilean researchers who discovered this mysterious legerdemain made a series of photographs of entwined trees, and had to insert arrows to point out which leaves belong to the vine and which to the host trees, so difficult are they to tell apart. ...They have no idea how the vine does its trick, except that, in being able to cope with unfamiliar situations, it is demonstrating the first principle of intelligence... 

from The Cabaret of Plants by Richard Mabey (2015).

See also Jerry Coyne 

An unceasing flux

You share some of your genes with the tree through the window, but you and that tree parted company very early in eukaryotic evolution, 1.5 billion years ago, each following a different course permitted by different genes, the product of mutations, recombination and natural selection. You run around, and I hope still climb trees occasionally; they bend gently in the breeze and convert the air into more trees, the magic trick to end them all. All those differences are written in the genes, genes that derive from your common ancestor but have now mostly diverged beyond recognition... 

But that tree has mitochondria too, which work in much the same way as its chloroplasts, endlessly transferring electrons down its trillions upon trillions of respiratory chains, pumping protons across membranes as they always did. As you always did. These same shuttling electrons and protons have sustained you from the womb: you pump 10²¹  protons per second, every second, without pause.

from The Vital Question by Nick Lane (2015)

Image: Magus6 via wikicommons