Arachnophilia

I've always had an admiration for spiders. There are countless extraordinary, almost miraculous things to be seen in the natural world and, for me, the spider's web is amongst the most extraordinary of them all. I was reminded of this last week. A spider had suspended an immaculate web between my dustbin and the wall, which I had no choice but to disturb in order to put the rubbish out. I found it really hard to destroy something so beautiful and painstakingly constructed. The very next day, I found that it had been fully restored in exactly the same place.

I can only marvel at the complexity of the 'software' running inside the spider's tiny brain that enables it to achieve its goal so unerringly. It has to utilise the most ingenious algorithm, the fact being that there is no spider school to which baby spiders go to learn how to spin a web. All those amazing problem solving skills must be hard-coded into their DNA, a linear digital code of just four 'numbers'. I find it literally mind-boggling.

Not surprisingly, their brains are very big for their size, indeed so big that I discovered that they actually spill out into their legs! I have on occasion wondered if we're not missing something in respect to the morphogenesis of the 'software' of the natural world. A long time ago I was rather seduced by Rupert Sheldrake's concept of morphic resonance. I still admire him for his original thinking even if I can no longer takes his ideas seriously. These days I'm more inclined to wonder if there may be a huge team of software developers somewhere, in a whole other plane of existence, the ones running the simulation we're living in, all chuckling at how we can possibly believe that it can be explained so simply!