Nature - autonomous learning

2 strange natureshis dad subsequent to his parent’s divorce when he was just three. But acourt-ordered test of Daniel’s biological patrimony revealed that a mix-upoccurred with his mother’s original IVF treatment. The man who wassupposed to be his biological father turned out to share no chromosomeswith Daniel. His mother’s eggs, it transpires, were accidentally fertilisedwith the sperm of another man. On this basis, a judge ruled that Daniel neednever again spend time with the person who, for thirteen years, acted as hisfather. What has this got to do with nature? In Daniel’s case, thelack of a biological link between a father and son was used to terminate athirteen-year social relationship between a boy and a man. As his motherexplained,‘The older he grew the less he looked like or behaved like hisso-called father . . . The damage done to that ...boy is unfathomable’(theGuardian, 23 August 2003).What’s interesting here is the suggestion that theabsence of a natural (that is, biological) connection has been fundamentallydamaging to Daniel’s well-being. In effect, his mother argued that this tiealone is more important than the years of time, love and emotional energythat her former husband invested in her son.Britain’s rainforest 2Nature can appear in the most unlikely places. Who would’ve thoughtthat a derelict oil terminal could be one of the most biodiverse sites inWestern Europe? In May 2003 an abandoned Occidental facility on CanveyIsland, in southern England, was found to contain numerous plant andinsect species – many of them endangered and some of them thoughtto be extinct.These included the shrill carder bee, the emerald damsel flyand the weevil hunting wasp, as well as familiar fauna like badgers andskylarks. Overall, the 100-hectare Occidental site is home to some 1,300species. But it is threatened with redevelopment as part of the UK government’sThames Gateway expansion plan for nearby London. Intriguingly,nature has returned to this former industrial site because of, not despite,human influence. Some years ago, Occidental dredged thousands of tonnesof silt from the Thames estuary and dumped it over former fields andmarshes. It did so to provide foundations for a proposed expansion of theoil terminal that did not, in the end, occur. Then, when the site wasabandoned in the early 1970s, it was frequented by children (who playedon the site and lit fires) and by bikers (who created trails).The result hasbeen constant disturbance of the plant life growing on the site’s fertile soils.