p. 365 “The Great European Famine was a catastrophe of a remarkable magnitude. The crisis was initiated by a short-term weather anomaly, bringing about a very rare scenario of three back-to-back harvest failures in 1315, 1316 and 1317. Even though the adverse weather reduced the respective gross crop yields by 25, 25 and 14% respectively, and thus, created a relative shortage, non-negligible proportions of food were still available for human consumption. It was not Nature, however, that spurred the transformation of shortage into famine, it was a combination fo demographic and antropogenic (institutional) factors. … The disposal of gross harvests was managed in accordance with manorial customs, and a disproportional share of crops was invested as seed corn. The food crisis was aggravated further by the malfunctioning of local food markets, where segmentation, preferential trade, hoarding, and a very limited scale of foreign grain imports drove up prives to the point that very few could afford purchasing crops, even though very many desperately needed to do so to compensate for the calorific loss. .. While storage costs (and thus, spoilage rates) went up because of the adverse weather, transportation costs rose because of the combination of bad weather and voilence (especially in the sea). The ongoing warfare also had a devastating and long-lasting impact on food supply, through floral and faunal destrction within the ‘war zone’, which cut local communities off from their natural resources. Furthermore, warfare reduced the access of commoners to food supplies through purveyance sales, extortion and royal taxation, which could not have come at a worse time than 1315-16.”

p. 366 “Although our attempts to estimate the fall in population are far from secure, all available evidence hints that England may have lost at least 15% of her population (and most likely in the area of 15-20%)… teh Lordships of Ireland and south and east wales … may have suffered as badly on account of warfare. Southern and eastern Scotland … seems to have got away with much lighter losses – partially thanks to her demographic, institutional and dietary peculiarities.”

p. 368 The poulation.. resumed growing after the crisis … and seems to have reached its pre-famine levels by the time of the arrival of the plague in 1348″.

p36 In our dreams, we humans experience our most isolated and mysterious existence. “All men,” wrote Plutarch, “while they are awake are in one common world, but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own. How much more inaccessible, then, are the dreams of animals. .. in In1998 a new study showed that, in fact, the platypus experiences more REM sleep – some 14 hours a day – than any known mammal. .. Even enamtodes and fruit flies sleep. A 2012 study showed that if fruit flies’ sleep is interrupted repeatedly, they have trouble flying the next day – just as a person has trouble concentrating after a sleepless night.”

p. 45 The cephalopods have a comment of 30 to 50 different patterns per individual animal. They can change color, pattern and texture in seven 10ths of a second. On a Pacific coral reef, a researcher once counted an octopus changing 177 times in a single hour… have electric skin. For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cell near the surface – all controlled in different ways. The deepest layer, containing the white leucophores, passively reflects background light. The process appears to involve no muscles or nerves. The middl layer contains the tiny iridophores, each 100 microns across. These also reflect light, including polarized light (which humans can’t see but a number of octopus pradators, including birds, do). The iridophores create an array of glittering greens, clues, golds and pinks. … appear to be controlled by the nervous system. They are associated with the neurotransmitter acertylcholine… helps with contraction of muscles in humans, it is also important in memory, learning and REM sleep. In octopuses, more of it “turns on” the greens and blues, less creates pinks and golds. The topmost layer of skin contains chromatophores, tiny sacks of yellow, red, brown and black pigment, each in an elastic container that can be opened or closed to reveal more or less colour. Camouflaging the eye alone – with a variety of patterns including a bar, a bandit’s mask and a starburst pattern p can involve as many as 5 million chromatophores. .. No researcher today suggests that all of this is purely instinctive. An octopus must choose the displaty it needs for a particular occasion, then change accordingly, then monitor the results – and, if necessary, change again. Octavia’s camouflage abilities were superior to those of her predecessors because, living longer in the ocean amid wild predators and prey, she had learned them.”

p. 48 For an invertebrate, the octopus brain is enormous. Octavia’s was about the size of a walnut, the same size as that of an African grey parrot. Alex, an African grey, trained by Dr Irene Pepperberg learned to us 100 spoken English words meaningfully, demonstrated an understanding of concepts of shape, size and material, could do math, and asked questions. He could also purposefully deceive his trainers – as well as apologise when he was found out… cephalopods are the only example outside of vertebrates of how to build a complex, clever brain”… the human brain is organised into four different lobes, each associated with different functions … an octopis brain .. has 50 to 75 different lobes. And most of an octopus’s neurons aren’t even in the brain but in the arms. These may be adaptations for the sort of extreme multitasking an octopis must undertake to coordinate all of those arms; to change color and shape’ to learn, think, decide and remember – while at the same time processing the flood of taste and touch information pouring in from every inch of skin, as well as making sense of the cacophany of visual images offered by the well-developed, almost humanlike eyes. … The common ancestor of humans and octopuses – a primitve, tube-shaped creature – lies so deeply enbedded in the prehistoric past that neither brains nor eyes had yet evolved. Still the octopus eye and ours are strikingly similar. Both have len-based focusing, with transparent cornea, irises that regulate light and retinas in the bacl of the eye to convery light to neural signals that can be processed in the brain. Yet there are also differences. The octopus eye, unlike our own, can detect polarized light. It has no blind spot… The optic nerve circles the outside of the retina. Our eyes are binocular, directed dorward for seeing what’s ahead of us, our usual direction of travel. The octopus’s wide-angle eyes are adopted to panoramic vision. And each eye can swivel independently, like a chameleon’s. Our visual acuity can extend beyond the horizon; an octopus can see only about eight feet away. There is another important difference. Human eyes have three visual pigments, allowing us to see colour. Octyopises have only one .. technically color-blind… New evidence suggests cephalopods might be able to see with their skin… the skin of the close relative, the cuttlefish, contains gene sequences usually only expressed in the retina of the eye.”

p 63 In Jennifer and Roland’s studies showing that octtopuses recogise individual humans, they found that after only a few trials, when the octopuses saw one of the staff members who always touched them with a bristly stick, they would make the eyebar as soon as they saw that person approach. When approached by people who always fed them, they did not.”

p. 72 The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda ehxibit with a 13-foot-long preatory reptile snuggled in her lap, the top of a tail coiled lovingly about one leg, provided dramatic evidence of what Scott and Wilson already knew: “Just about every animal” – not just mammals and birds — “can learn, recognize individuals and respond to empathy.” Once you find the right way to work with an animal, together you can accomplish what even Saint Francis might have considered a miracle.

p. 75 “Many of us respond without thinking to the angle of a horse’s ears, or the position of a dog’s tail, or the expression in a cat’s eyes. Aquarists learn the silent language of fishes.. the low-tide odor Scott detects, is that of heat-shock proteins. These are intracellular proteins that were first discovered to be released, in both plants and animals, in response to heat, and are now known to be associated with other stresses as well.”

p. 75 slime is a very specialised and essential substance, and there is no denying octopuses have slime in spades. Almost everyone who lives in the water does. Slime helps sea animals reduce drag while moving through the water, capture and eat food, keep their skins healthy, escape predators, protect their eggs… For some fishes – Scott’s Amazon discus and cichlids among them – slime is the piscine equaivalent of mothers’ milk. The babies actually feed off their parents’ nutiritious slime coat, an activity called “glancing”… A creature of the ocean bottom, a hagfish grows to about 17 inches long, and yet, in mere minutes, it can fill seven bucks with slime – so much slime it can slip from almost any predator’s grip. The hagfish would be in danger of suffocating on its own mucus, except it has learned, like a person with a cold, to blow out its nose. But sometimes it produces too much slime for even a hagfish to tolerate and the animal wraps its tail around its body like a knot and slides the knot forward, clearing the slime.”

p. 81 Evolutionary biologists suggest that keeping track of our many social relationships over our long lives was one of the factors driving the evolution of the human brain. Intelligence itself is most often associated with similar social and long-lived creatures, like chimps, elephants, parrots and whales. But octopuses represent the opposite end of this spectrum. They are famously short-lived, and most do not appear to be social … Jennifer, the octopus psychologist… believes the event driving the octopus towards intelligence was the loss of the ancestral shell… freed the animal for mobility… the octopus can hunt like a tiger.. a single octopus may hunt many different prey species, each of which demands a different hunting strategy, a different skill set, a different set of decisions to make and modify… in 20009 researchers in Indonesia documented octopuses that were carrying around pairs of half coconut shells, which they used as portable Quonset huts… At the Middlebury octopus lab … a sea urchin was feeding too near the entrance of the den belonging to a female California two-spot. So the octopus ventured out of her lair to pick up a 3.5 inch by 3.5 inch piece of flat slate lying six minches away and draffed it back to the den, where she erected it like a shielf to protect herself from the urchin’s spines.”

p. 97 “More than 500 million years ago… the arms of Octavia’s ancestor, sensitive, suckered and supple, would have been recognizable as one of an octopus.

In the wild, most female octopuses lay eggs only once, and then guard them so assiduously they won’t leave even to hunt for food. The mother starves herself for the rest of her life. A deep-sea species holds the record for this feet, surviving four and a half years withou feeding while brooding her eggs near the bottom of Monterey Canyon, nearly a mile below the surface of the ocean.”

p. 115 Hormones and neurotransmitters, the chemicals associated with human desire, fear, love, joy and sadness, “are highly conserved across taxa”… whether you are a person or a monkey, a bird or a turtle, an octopus or a clam, the physiological changes that accompany our deepest-felt emotions appear to be the same. Even a brainless scallop’s little heart beats faster when the mollusk is approached by a predator, just like yours or mine would do were we to be accosted by a mugger.”

p. 192 “Like us, apparently, fruit flies make choices propelled by emotions like fear, elation and despair. Another study found that male fruit flies, dejected after their sexual advances had been rejected by females, were 20% more likely to turn to drink (liquid food suuplemented with alcohol in the laboratory) than males who had been sexually sated.”

p. 21 “This is the core claim of populism: only some of the people are really the people. Think of Nigel Farage celebrating the Brexit vote by claiming that it been a ‘victory for real people’ (thus making the 48% of the British electorate who had opposed taking the UK out of the European Union somehow less than real – or put more directly, questioning their status as proper members of the political community. Or consider a remark by Donald Trump … at a campaign rally in May, Trump announced that ‘the only important thing is the unification of the people – because the other people don’t mean anything’.”

p. 23 “some observers … associate populism with a distinct ideology of ‘producerism’. Populists pit the pure, innocent, always hardworking people against a corrupt elite who do not really work (other than to further their self-interest) and, in rightwing populism, also against the very bottom of society (those who also do not really work and live like parasites off the work of others.) .. claim to discern a symbiotic relationship between an elite that does not truly belong and marginal groups that are also distinct from the people. In the 20^th-century United States these groups were usually liberal elites on one hand and racial minorities on the other.”

p. 27 “a notion of ‘the people’ beyond all political forms and formation was influentially theorized by the rightwing legal theorist Carl Schmitt during the interwar period. His work, together with that of fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, served as a conceptual bridge from democracy to nondemocracy, when they claimed that fascism could more faithfully realize and instantiate democratic ideals than democracy itself.”

p. 44 “Populists tend to colonize or ‘occupy’ the state. Think of Hungary and Poland as recent examples. One of the first fundamental changes Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party sought was a transformation of the civil service so as to enable the party to place loyalists in what should have been non-partisan bureaucratic positions. .. such a strategy is not the exclusive preserve of populists … they can undertake such colonization openly and with the support of their core claim to moral representation of the people.”

p. 46 “state colonization, mass clientism and discriminatory legalism are phenomena that can be found in many historical situations. Yet in populist regimes, they are practised openly and, one might suspect, with a clean moral conscience. Hence also the curious phenomenon that revelations about what can only be called corruption simply do not seem to damage the reputation of populist leaders as much as one would expect.. for supporters of populists, .. corruption and cronyism are not genuine problems as long as they look like measures pursued for the sake of a moral, hardworking us, and not for the immoral or foreign “them”.

p. 60 “As David Ost has put it starkly in an analysis of the 2015 PiS victory, “The problem… is not that people are not committed to democracy. Yes, plenty of people today aren’t committed to democracy, but they’re not committed to it because they feel that democracy, packed in neoliberal wrapping, is not committed to them.”

p. 73 “What about the shouts heard in Tahrir Square – or going back roughly a quarter century, the emphatic chanting of ‘We are the People” on the streets of East Germany in the fall on 1989? This slogan is entirely legitimate in the face of a regime that claims exclusively to represent the people but in fact shuts large parts of the people out politically.. in nondemocracies, ‘We Are the People’ s a justified revolutionary claim: it is precisely not a populist one.”

p. 79 “Parties … offered two or more competing conceptions of peoplehood, dramatized the differences between them, but also recognised the other side as legitimate. This approach was particularly attractive in countries that had undergone a civil war … parties represented diversity; party systems symbolised unity. .. neither parties nor party system fulfil their respective functions any longer. .. slow disintregation of parties and party systems .. affects the viability of democracy … including whatever remains of an ideal of democracy as providing political communities with a sense of unity and collective agency.”

p. 94 “The whole direction of political development in postwar Europe has been towards fragmenting political power (in the sense of checks and balances, or even a mixed constitution) as well as empowering unelected institutions or institutions beyond electoral accountability, such as constitutional courts, all in the name of strengthening democracy itself …

p. 96 “…always particularly vulnerable to political actors speaking in the name of the people as a whole against a system that appears designed to minimize popular participation. .. technocracy is crucial for understanding the present-day rise of populism. The two mirror each other. Technocracy holds theire is only one correct policy solution; populism claims there is only one authentic will of the people.”

p/ 99 “What is the alternative? An approach that seeks to bring in those currently excluded – what some sociologists sometimes call ‘the superfluous’ – while keeping the very wealthy and powerful from opting out of the system. This is really just another way of saying that some sort of new social contract is needed… a grand coalition actually empowered at election time. Alternatively, societies could officially renegotiate their very constitutional settlements.”

p. 141 “Captive great apes … are present at the crossroads of several entangled histories, with their personal stories mingling with that of their ape or human partners, inscribing them with a social history as well as a specific cultural history. Nevertheless, we still continue to confine them to a single history: their natural histort, reducing them to representatives of their species and products of their phylogenetic history. Yet the behaviors of great apes, eminently social and flexible, cannot be generalised at a species level. … It is difficult for us to admitthat creatures other than human beings might have a biography. Yet great apes are born, grow up,meet others, form friendships, travel from place to place, developing different character traits, preferences, varied interests, and particular skills.

p. 97 “Knot after knot, assembly after assembly, weaving after weaving, Wattana repeats the chain of movements involved in knotting. Little by little, she refines her gestures, and increases their complexity, developing true technical mastery… simultaneously a rhythmic and a hand-to-hand struggle with the world and its materials, colors, consistencies, achieved with the aid of fiber and cords. … Sometimes she is absorbed in this activity for a whole afternoon, and thus expresses a real taste for the execution of knots. Her sustained attention, the depth of her involvement, and her craving to do it right all testify to this.”

p. 98 Orangutans “their fascination for sophisticated manipulations (their predilection for shoelaces being one example) is far more pronounced than in other primates. This also applies to their greater aptitude for using one tool to create another … p. 100 “plaiting, interlcaing, intertwining,: these are all terms used by primatologists to describe construction techgniques that greay apes use in building their nests. .. Great apes are not satisfied in building a basic bed. They decorate their nests with a plant mattress that some researchers consider artistic. They select their materials according to the available plant life and the shades of green. They then line their nests with Campnosperma branches to protect themselves from mosquitos. .. Some apes systematically bite the tips of the branches used for the fringes of their nest, the edge being composed of twigs of similar appearance and the same length. Some of them fashion a small cushion from plants that they grip tightly against themselves as they sleep. Apes also seem to attach importance to the panorama that can be seen from the bed; they chose the site carefully according to the view. These shelters may also be equipped with ‘roofs; to protect them from sun and rain.”

p.102 “The majority of behaviors devices and tools (associated with body care, sex, games,comfort) belong to what French philosopher Dominique Lestel would describe as an ethology of comfort… The concern for self by self and the simple fact of existing constitute tasks that our societies tend to forget… Great apes experience a power and a pure pleasure of being, which carries them beyond basic needs; to advance towards what for them represent possible sources of comfort, satisfaction, or pleasure.”

p.103 “Tool ideology.. the direction taken by the discipline is built on underlying sweeping dichotomous categories of males versus female, of hard versus soft, of the public versus the private (intimate) domains. Fibres are considered to be soft materials, in contrast to stone, representing the hard. As proposed by Nold Egenter, it would surely be very fruitful to ponder the question of homoisation using construction as a starting point.”

p. 33 “this case of adoption is not uncommon among the great apes. While some females very clearly turn their backs on motherhood, others are strongly attracted to babies.Some go as far as to take care of three infants simultaneously. .. Even if they have no experience at all, cats instinctively know what needs to be done after the birth of their first litter. In fact, great apes are envisaged as the natural counterpart to humankind, as authentic creatures of nature, entirely governed by instinct and subject to biology. .. Yet repeated cases of ape mothers in zoos that show no interest in their babies, or do not know how to look after them, clearly show the process leading to ‘becoming a mother’ is complex. Moreover, this suggests that the notion of ‘matrenal instinct’ as something both universal and automatic, and as the only foundation for this kind of capacity, needs reevaluation for great apes….even when they do have the opportunity to learn from an effective model, young female apes are still deprived of all that is transmitted through the close proximity of bodies: a particular maternal style will influence the baby more surely if it is incorporated, experienced in the flesh and picked up by all the senses.”

p.121 Siri, a 12-year-old Asian elephant … “the female would often trace lines with a stoneon the ground in her enclosure… he provided her with paper, paints,paintbrushes, or pencils. Without being encouraged or rewarded, she freely drew dozens of compositions on sheets of paper.. She produced these in 20 to 30 seconds,sometimes pausing to examine the paintings. … her pictorial techniques evolved considerably over the course of the sessions. .. elephants know what they are doing and clearly enjoy doing it. .. the French philosopher Etienne Sourian, a specialist in aesthetics, showshow much the aesthetic act seems to be linked to ‘impulses stemming from the depths of life’.”

p. 124 Bottlenose dolphins in Hawaii indulged in making bubble rings. “To achieve this, they produced whirlpools with their flippers and then breathed out air through these eddies with their blowholes. In this way they fashioned circles, spirals, tori, vortices and helices. .. Once the bubble rings had been shaped, the dolphins played with them”.

I was going to point someone to the recipe on which this was based, but in fact I’ve varied it so much they’re really different cookies, so here it is:

1 cup of gluten-free oats
1/2 cup gluten-free white flour
1/2 cup of tapioca flour (not essential to have this type of flour, but makes them chewy)
1/2 cup of buckwheat flour
1/2 cup sugar
125 grams of margarine (or you could use butter)
4 dessertspoons of golden syrup
Teaspoon baking powder
Two tablespoons boiling water (or thereabouts)

Mix all the dry ingredients, melt margarine/butter in microwave with golden syrup, dissolve baking powder in water and mix into this, then mix into dry ingredients.

Bake in oven around 180C for about 20 minutes.

They’ll be soft out of the oven but will harden up as they cool.

1/4 cup cornflour
1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup rice flour
1/2 cup margarine
3/4 cup unsweetened coconut
Teaspoon of lemon juice

Mix dry ingredients, melt margarine in microwave, mix, make into balls and flatten wiith a fork

Bake for about 20 minutes in 180 degree oven.

Based on this recipe.