December 2019 presentation to Melbourne Emergence Meetup in the scope of ongoing Supervenience project series and as corollary to November's presentation re human infrastructure projects the group has taken an interest in. Includes pictures from recent visits to Stony Creek toxic fire site and Mud Island.

1. Life’s Infrastructure
soils, swamps, streams, sands, sea shores, shallows, seasons, sticks & stones
signs, signals, smells, sights, sounds & a return to Mud Island
Tony Smith
Melbourne Emergence Meetup
12 December 2019

2. Stones to me are the objects that parallel all life, more so than trees or mortal
things because stones are almost immortal. They know things learned over deep
time. Stone represents earth, tools and spirit; it conveys meaning through its use
and through its resilience to the elements. At the same time it ages, cracking and
eroding as time wears it down, but it is still there, filled with energy and spirit.
Tasmanian Max (Dyers?) quoted by Tyson Yunkaporta

3. Complexity 101: Gradient Dissipation
Thriving at interfaces: air, water, rock
Growing your own: trees, corals, shells
Burrowing, nest construction, Beavers
Navigation guides, collective knowledge
Adaptive use of human infrastructure
Going up Stony Creek to toxic fire site
Opportunistic return to Mud Island
Ibis at Pelican lake
Cairnlea 25 May 2019
Life’s Infrastructure

4. Too Funny for Words
Abstractions, Category Errors,
Epistemic Cuts
Life on an Active Planet The Two-edged Sword
Multiple Paths to Emergence
Constraints and
Degrees of Freedom
Birds and Others Interweb to Facebook
Better than Out of Control
Information,
Maps and Territories
Urban Hydrology out of Sight
Going Down with
the Egg Basket
Self-organising, Adaptive
Codification and
Communication
Exploiting a
Dissipating Gradient:
creaming, trickle down
Dystopian Utopias and
Science Fiction
Towards Healthy
General Knowledge
The Inside View:
knowing when you're dreaming
Verbal Blindness
Accepting Cosmological
Responsibility

5. Life has emerged from chemistry and physics
across billions of years and organisational
structures have emerged subsequently, so it
is useful to ground attempts to appreciate
these extraordinary arenas of diversity on
the sound foundations of complex systems
theory, of which the most fundamental is
the emergence of novel order/organisation
requiring and accelerating the dissipation of
some energising gradient.
Yarrawonga Weir
25 May 2016
Complexity 101: Gradient Dissipation

6. Ilya Prigogine’s 1977 Chemistry Nobel on emergence of new
structures through internal self-reorganisation of dissipating
systems was foundational to the study of complex systems.
Such dissipation is a consequence of far from equilibrium
thresholds moving towards equilibrium against impedance of
their components, an understanding which brings order to
the seeming chaos of biology.
Radiation from the visible surface (but don’t look) of our
local thermonuclear reactor with a frequency distribution
following the standard black body curve for 5700°C from
infrared through visible to human wavelengths to ultraviolet.
A small portion of that radiation powers photosynthesis in
plants and algae providing reusable energy storage in the
form of oxygen gas and sugars which can be released later
by combustion to reform the water and carbon dioxide
originally consumed.
Much of that majority of the solar radiation which isn’t
directly reflected evaporates water, driving planet shaping
hydrological and atmospheric cycles including erosion,
deposition, ice formation and flow.
April’s Supervenience presentation was on Dissipating
Gradients & Sinks, including much more that doesn’t need
to be duplicated here, at least not beyond reiterating that
“the Supervenience book/project is centrally about
extending the understanding of dissipation into the domains
of minds and money.”

7. It is highly likely that
abiogenesis of Life's earliest
prokaryotic cells occurred at
the undersea interface between
active volcanic rock and tidal
waters, two fluidic systems
with very different operational
timings that create far from
equilibrium adjacencies.
Once free oxygen persisted for
long enough for highly
differentiated multicellular
eukaryotes to adapt to
breathing air and living on land,
these new interfaces became
productive.
Intertidal zone
10 January 2014
Thriving at interfaces: air, water, rock

8. Specific individual histories
of geological deposition,
deformation and interaction
with tidal, wave and weather
cycles create each unique
habitat around southern
Australia’s rocky shores
where encrusting animals
and algae provide a home
for crustaceans and fish.
Petroleum geologist
Waltham’s 2014 book goes
deep into peculiarities of
cosmological and planetary
history, including a very
thorough account of natural
climate variability, which
make the odds of being here
so small as to require the
weak anthropic principle.Gutter Life: intertidal intensity

9. While the larger scale processes that shape our physical
universe are more energetic, either through accumulation
or intrinsically, the chemistry of life is based on localised
molecular interactions towards the low end of the energy
spectrum where reactants need to be kept within a narrow
range of environmental variables to retain efficacy and to
be transported to reaction sites through liquid water.
Representation of the most basic of these processes in human
language, even assisted by diagrams and models, is encyclopaedic,
e.g: Adenosine_triphosphate, Nicotinamide_adenine_dinucleotide.
While the actual pathway of abiogenesis may be beyond current
research capabilities, not helped by the lack of comparators to our
one example, general inferences are credible enough to assume
opportunistic steps working with mostly common components.

10. While metabolism is
confined to fluid cells, the
diversity of multicellular life
rests on its ability to produce
hard skeletal materials that
support growth and provide
protection.
Beyond those producer
species, this hard stuff is
readily coopted by others for
their own purposes, from
climbing creepers to access
barriers proving safer living
spaces to Hermit Crabs.
Such accumulated hard stuff
is also vital to sedimentation
processes that build
continents.
Shell accretion
23 November 2019
Growing your own: trees, corals, shells

11. Boron atoms are only produced by
cosmic ray fission and are strongly
oxidised so seem unlikely candidates
for a major biological role.
However boron is essential to the
healthy vegetative growth of buds
and root tips as well as to the
strength of plant cell walls.
Without its catalytic role there
would not be trees substantial
enough to encourage the evolution
of primates, nor such a kick starter
houseboat construction material.

12. View Point reef
Way back when
Beneath the waves, holding fast while water flows past can
be a productive strategy for diverse phyla of sessile animals

13. Traces of burrows are
amongst the oldest indicators
of animal life, some dating to
the Ediacaran period which
preceded the Cambrian.
While some substrates allow
digging animals to effectively
swim through sand or mud, it
is more stable yet still
malleable soils which enable
many animals, including
eusocial insects, to excavate
more permanent dwellings.
Wood is a key component of
many birds' nests and, at
another scale, Beaver dams.
Mud Island
23 November 2019
Burrowing, nest construction, Beavers

14. Yarrawonga
25 May 2016
Horehound & its bugs
Sydenham Park
2 April 2017

15. 6 May 2010: They’re the Donald Trumps of Beaver world;
as in real estate development–they don’t yet have their
own celebrity apprentice shows. Several beaver families
have built one of the largest beaver dams ever, in
northern Canada, large enough to be visible from space.
19 September 2014: Rob Mark walks in to get his own pic.
16 August 2017: The Guardian provides long form general
commentary on these rodent protagonists.

16. Almost invisible web
St Leonards 20 October 2017

17. With 50,000+ nests now in a breeding colony
established 1991, Straw-necked Ibis do “not feed
on (Mud Island,) flocks commute to the Bellarine
and Mornington Peninsulas, and the Geelong-
Werribee region to forage in pastoral land.”
Other critters make more spectacular journeys
on other timeframes, all depending on
environmental signals including polarising
reflections from water surfaces, and mostly in
company so knowledge is shared implicitly.
Ruddy Turnstones
breed in the Arctic
St Leonards 17 October 2017
Navigation guides, collective knowledge

18. Mates Park, Albury
3 September 2014
https://vimeo.com/105479288

19. While the recent planetary takeover by
humans, domesticates, stowaways and detritus
is disastrous for most species who make their
living in older ecosystems, the spread of
agriculture, pasture, cities, harvesting and
connecting infrastructure is facilitating range
expansion and densification by species able to
exploit such new opportunities.
Social media is also facilitating wider
awareness of friendly interactions.
Starlings, radio mast
Cobram 23 May 2016
Adaptive use of human infrastructure

20. With its ability to respond to stimuli, its “intelligence”, distributed to
bud formation and growing tips, it’s a challenge to a mobile animal to
even imagine what it would be like to be a tree, despite Enid Blyton’s
best efforts informing many childhoods.
Yes, we can see a reflection of our own notions of personhood in the
octopus, especially when their most interesting behaviours are recorded
and shared, but struggle to extend that to a bee hive or other eusocial
insect nest, finding it easier to focus on the behaviour of individuals
even while we recognise some collective behaviour of humans as being
of another order to our own day to day personal affairs.
Plague locusts and murmurations of starlings are something else again,
closer to football crowds and mass protests than we might want to
admit.
Whether Straw-necked Ibis at Mud Island, Grey-headed Flying-foxes at
Yarra Bend, or Little Corellas at Yarrawonga Weir, colony-forming flying
creatures share a strategy for aggregating and disaggregating between
colony and feeding grounds which can include regathering places at
street corner electricity poles and must include information sharing,
including by olfaction, on what they found on their separate travels.
Familiar sound of trees full of roosting birds in the evening or morning
suggest further information sharing, including reunions and planning.
Social media saturated with minimal marginal cost image and video clip
sharing has transformed public awareness of the wonders of the natural
world away from the spectacular extremism so beloved of traditional
nature documentary makers to ordinary day to day encounters showing
love of life and caring to be far more widespread than Genesis,
Descartes or Skinner would allow.
Yarrawonga Weir
25 May 2016
Horsham
21 April 2016

21. A Saturday afternoon without enough time to
justify going home and out again between
Footscray and Sunshine events instead presented
an opportunity to explore Stony Creek upstream
from Paramount Road.
Fifteen months of clean up since the fire water
flood has cleared tracks along this once inaccessible
green ribbon through the ageing industrial estate
with plenty of signs of life returning and no real
obstacles to reaching the burnt shell.
Going up Stony Creek to toxic fire site

26. At the centre of Nepean Bay Bar and
covered by both RAMSAR and National Park
protections, it became imperative to take a
first hand look just when Mud Island's
regular transport provider moved on.
In 2019 a hiking Meetup organiser and a tour boat
operator combined to offer a first visit in early March
which stayed mostly on the southwest beach facing
Port Phillip Heads, then a very different return in
late November to the eastern and northern shores.
Opportunistic return to Mud Island

33. Suggestions!
Questions?
Menkhorst,Peter.(2010).
Asurveyofcolonially-breedingbirdsonMudIslands,PortPhillip,
Victoria;withanannotatedlistofallterrestrialvertebrates.
ArthurRylahInstituteforEnvironmentalResearch.