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Confidently Irreverent | Jessie Rack
The Principal Uncertainty
Jessie Rack is an ecologist, naturalist, and environmental educator passionate about communicating how the world works. Jessie has a PhD in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut (for which she studied salamanders!) and diverse experiences in both formal and informal education. She taught writing at Princeton University, wrote for the NPR ScienceDesk, and is a AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador, one of 125 women in STEM fields chosen to be a science role model to middle school girls. Currently, she is a professor in the biology department at Northern Arizona University.
In this episode:
- The Iceland job interview at 9pm in midsummer daylight, in field gear, for a video call she thought was a phone call
- Why the offer of a tenure track position might be the thing she'd need to escape — the container of permanent employment as the scarier prospect
- Prions, AI, plant intelligence, jumping spiders, scorpions — how each functions as a probe for what the categories are doing when they start to break down
- "Everything is conscious or nothing is"
- The sentence in a scientific paper about scorpion eyes that made her write a poem
- A Princeton classroom assignment connecting pheromones to free will — and what happens when your students come out of it realizing nothing they do is free
- The difference between deference and respect, and why "I'm not scared of you" is the part that matters
- The psychic who looked into her eyes and saw only swirling chaos
- What "confidently irreverent" means from the inside
The Scorpion and the Stars — the poem she wrote after reading about scorpion eyes — is reproduced here with Jessie's permission.
The Scorpion and the Stars
“[Scorpions’] median eyes appear capable of image formation, and their lateral eyes can identify subtle changes in light magnitude. Both sets of eyes are highly sensitive to light and can putatively detect starlight against the background of the night sky.”
-from “Scorpion fluorescence and reaction to light,” Gaffin et al., 2012
The scorpion pauses on top of a flat rock
Midway through a nocturnal scuttle,
A foray to find delicious bugs to crunch.
Its legs still all at once. Its pedipalps—the great pinchers—lower, the coiled tail relaxes
In surprise.
Both sets of its eyes would widen if they could,
Except they’re held fast
In the chitinous rigidity of its exoskeleton.
It has, for the first time, noticed the stars.
It has no sense of distance, of space,
So the tiny sparkling points could be
Glowing insects for all it knows, could be
Some odd phosphorescent rock formation,
Could be a human-thing, inscrutable and meaningless.
But it senses something more,
Some feeling stirring in its tiny chest, its tube heart contracting powerfully,
Its copper-laced blood pumping with a new intensity.
The scorpion’s would-be prey skitters away across the sand
As the creature freezes, awestruck,
Feeling its size.
Not understanding, but understanding enough.
Fully present for the first time, somewhere in the desert night,
The distant stars reflected in its flat, pupilless,
Wondering
Arachnid eyes.
**Also mentioned:**
- Franny Choi's "Turing Test"
- Zoë Schlanger, *The Light Eaters*
- "The Comforts of Horror" — Jessie's unpublished essay on science communication and horror films; watch this space...
The Principal Uncertainty is a podcast by George Laufenberg. It's not about finding solid ground — it's about staying oriented in open water.
