Traffic Life : Passionate Tales and Exit Strategies
Edited by Stephan Wehner
An Anthology
 
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180 Traffic Zoology ...These are but the fringes of the zoo, the tip of the ice- berg. We have not even touched on the sensitive antennae of the Stipitate Phototaxites fringed with Virtual Coxswains, pseudo-lead cars ready to be sacrificed to trip any trap; the chaotic wrath of the Biflagellate Ableptic Figmo and the fate of the cystidial flotsam locked within them; the weird rhythms of the Cacospysic Super-Barbicanoids and their elaborate dance of shifting coxswains; the majesty of the motorcycle-based Raging Fallaxoid; the menagerie of end- less cancers that can grow from unexpectorated papillic gran- ulomae, from cataracts of geriatric nektons, or from service- stations with badly planned driveways. Further Study. The study of a new order of life is not with- out its risks, both professional (in terms of reputation) and practical (in terms of being maimed by mis-navigated ve- hicles). The amateur automotive ethologist must not only have keen skills of observation, but also the fortitude to per- severe despite the slings and arrows of dubious dissenters. Like Leeuwenhoek's controversial animalcules and Pasteur's superstition-defying microbes, there will always exist a cer- tain testudinal resistance to new ideas among older quar- ters. There will be those who doubt the very existence of aggregate vehicular life, or who insist that the zoo of the road dwells in metaphor alone. The opinions of such sceptics could be changed by a sin- gle night spent on a grassy hill overlooking a well-travelled country highway, watching the streams of red and silver lights merge and split, compress and attenuate, roil and interact, fatten and reproduce... Watch the roads, and see the zoo for yourself. There is no denying its patterns of insectile purpose, its myriad vari- ations in anatomy and configuration, or the orchestrated madness of the low-cost petroleum feeding frenzy. Your own mind, honed by thousands of generations of natural selection to recognise life from non-life, will tell you it is true; the disciplines of careful observation and meticulous classification will tell you how, and why. Open your eyes, and witness an untapped world.
  
Matthew Frederick Davis Hemming 181 Bibliography Dawkins, Richard. The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: W.H. Freeman and Company Limited PTRIGHT Oxford University Press, 1982. H¨olldobler, Bert and Edward O. Wilson. Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994. Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. Boulder: Perseus Books, 1994. Ronfeldt, David. Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's Biggest Superspeedways. First Monday, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2002. http://www.firstmonday.dk Tien, H.T. and Angelica Ottova-Leitmannova. Membrane Biophysics: As Viewed From Experimental Bilayer Lipid Mem- branes (Planar Lipid Bilayers and Spherical Liposomes). Am- sterdam: Elsevier, 2000. William Morton Wheeler. The Ant Colony as an Organism, Journal of Morphology, Vol. 22, 1911, p. 307-325. Necker, Louis Albert. Observations on some remarkable phenomena seen in Switzerland; and an optical phenomenon which occurs on viewing of a crystal or geometrical solid, The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Jour- nal of Science, Vol. 1, 1832, p. 329-337.

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