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Dinesh club

Posted: 10 Aug 2023

Taken: 09 Aug 2023

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Keywords

264 •
Mammal •
Egg Laying mammal •
Image •
On the Origin of Species •
150th anniversary •
Special Edition •
Second excerpt •
FROM THE TREE TO THE LABYRINTH •
Author •
Umberto Eco •

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Duck-billed platypus

Duck-billed platypus
In Australia, near the end of his voyage, Darwin glimpsed several cavorting in a pond


The Duckbill Platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) or duck-billed platypus is often just referred to as the platypus since it is the only living platypus species today. It is one of only 5 species of egg laying mammals known as monotremes

Nature and Evolution is a miracle, this is extra-miraculous specimen of evolution

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus

Nouchetdu38, Edna Edenkoben, Fred Fouarge have particularly liked this photo

Comments
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
On the ORIGIN 0f SPECIES
13 months ago. Edited 2 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
In Eco 1997 we discussed at length the history of the platypus, which was discovered in Australia at the end of the eighteenth century. When a stuffed platypus was brought to England, the naturalists believed that it was a taxidermist’s joke. Not surprisingly, the debate became even more heated when this animal with a bill and webbed feet, but at the same time covered in fur and with a beaver's tail, was found to nurse its young and lay eggs. The platypus appears in the Western world when Kant had already written his works – and indeed had already fallen into a period of mental obnubilation (1. the process or fact of making dimmer, darker, or obscure. 2. medicine. the obscuring or dimming of awareness or mental faculties.) – and when it was finally decided that the platypus is a mammal that lays eggs, Kant had already been dead for some eighty years. To ask ourselves that a mental experiment, but the experiment is useful precisely because it provides an occasion for reflection on how the theory of schematism might explain the experience of an unknown object. ~ Pag 478

. . . . If Kant had been able to observe the platypus (morphology, customs, and behavior), as has been done in the two centuries since Kant, he would have probably have come to the same conclusion as Gould (1991) that this animal is not just a clumsy experiment of nature but a masterpiece of design, a perfect example of environmental adaptation. Indeed, its fur protects it from cold water, it can regulate its own body temperature, its morphology makes it adapted for diving into water and finding food with its eyes and ears closed, its anterior limbs allow it to swim, its posterior limbs and tail act as a rudder, its ankle spurs enable it to compete with other males in mating season. But Gould would probably not have been able to give this “teleological” reading of the platypus if Kant hadn’t suggested to us that “an organized product of nature is that in which everything is an end and reciprocally means as well”, as well as suggesting the products of nature appear (unlike machines, which are moved by mere driving force, a ‘bewegende Kraft) as organisms moved from within by a ‘bildende Kraft, a capacity, a formative foce. ` Page 482

FROM THE TREE TO THE LABYRINTH
2 months ago. Edited 2 months ago.

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