Book Club: March 4, 2024, 2-4pm – Fellows and External Fellows
- This event has passed.
March 4 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
March 4, 2024, 2-4pm – Fellows and External Fellows
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (2022)
Discussion Leader: Sara Shettleworth
This book is filled with strange creatures and strange experiments; Yong is interested in what animals perceive, what they might communicate to us if they could. Humans see the world one way. Other species see it through very different eyes, and many don’t see it at all, but hear it, smell it, or sense it in ways inaccessible to us. Attempting to exchange one world view—or, to use the traditional ethological term, Umwelt—for another may be frustrating, but, he argues, that’s what makes the effort worthwhile. It reminds us that, “for all our vaunted intelligence,” our Umwelt is just one among millions. Some species of scallop, for instance, have dozens of eyes; others have hundreds. We can learn a lot from ways in which animals sense their surroundings. And doing so can be, for us, mind-expanding. Written by a Pulitzer-winning science journalist, this work is impressively thoughtful and thorough, not a mere “gee whiz” tour of animal behavior. (Available in all formats – paperback appears September 5, 2023; 360 pages plus notes.)
The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/BCxMjD8suV
The deadline to register is the Monday morning the day of the event at 8 am. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.
If you have any questions, please contact the organizer – Linda Hutcheon at l.hutcheon@utoronto.ca.
