51 pages • 1 hour read
Ed YongAn Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Ed Yong
Ed Yong is a British American science journalist. He received both his BA and his MA in zoology from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 2002. He did postgraduate study at University College London, where he received an MPhil in biochemistry. In 2014, he joined The Atlantic, where he currently works as a science reporter. He has also written for an array of magazines and newspapers, including Nature, The New Yorker, Wired, The New York Times, Scientific American, and National Geographic.
Yong focuses on making science accessible to the public, both in his reporting and in his two monographs, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life and An Immense World. He received a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2021 for a series on COVID-19. He is an award-winning science blogger who has been recognized for his consistent engagement with readers and other science writers through social media. He has also been a finalist twice for a National Magazine Award for public service. His 2014 Ted Talk “Zombie Roaches and Other Parasite Tales” had almost two million views in spring 2023. An Immense World won numerous awards and nominations, including the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and appeared on the best books lists of The New Yorker, Time, The Guardian, The Economist, Kirkus, and Esquire in 2022.
Jakob von Uexkull
Jakob von Uexkull was an Estonian biologist who focused on physiology and animal behavior. He is most well-known for his theory of the umwelt, in which he criticized his fellow scientists for their denial of the fullness of animal lives.
The umwelt has influenced many philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, and Uexkull’s work formed the foundation for the field of biosemiotics, which studies how living beings communicate. In addition, the umwelt is foundational in posthumanist theory, which has influenced various fields in the humanities that are concerned with other-than-human lives. Yong uses Uexkull’s ideas as the starting point for exploring animals’ sensory systems in An Immense World. He discusses humans and various animal species as inhabiting various “sensory bubbles” that inform their navigation of the world. Humans’ efforts to expand their own sensory capacities, such as by creating artificial lighting, disrupt the umwelten of other animals due to differences in visual sensory organs. Yong also shows that humans’ understanding of other umwelten is necessarily limited by differences in sensing mechanisms across species.
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher. He is most well-known for his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” This essay asserts that humans can never know what it is like to be a bat because they do not perceive the world the way bats do. Humans and bats do not have the same sensory systems. For humans to attempt to even imagine the way bats live, then, is impossible.
Yong uses this famous essay to further explain and support Uexkull’s theory of the umwelt and its emphasis on umwelten as species-specific perceptual bubbles. Although the worlds of various species often intersect with one another, humans’ understanding of the world of other animals is limited. It is also impossible to assess the impact of changes wrought by forces such as extinction and climate change on the umwelten of other animals, as humans cannot fully understand how these other sensory systems function.
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was a naturalist and biologist who theorized evolution. He is often cited by Yong. Darwin’s theory of evolution, in which each species adapts in its own unique ways to changing environments, relates to Uexkull’s theory of the umwelt. Darwin similarly asserts that evolution is not about reaching a predetermined goal or about an organism becoming more complex, despite the ideas that popular memes of cavemen becoming more evolved humans suggest.
Rather, the theory of evolution suggests that species evolve to meet their specific needs, and evolution is ongoing, with species becoming simpler or more complex as needed. Species are never static in relation to the outside world. This process occurs through natural selection, in which those offspring that are most suited to their environment survive and pass on these traits to the next generation.
Like Uexkull’s theory of the umwelt, the theory of evolution does not privilege humans over other organisms.
