---
title: "Weird Organism"
description: "A lost perceptual-block handout from Winfree's session on Adams's Chapter 2, reconstructed as an exercise in describing a familiar living thing so plainly that a stereotype hides it."
type: Activity
tags: [course, student-facing, problem, section-2, perceptual-blocks, stereotyping, observation]
status: stable
problem:
  section: 2
  session: 7
  identification: unknown
  kind: puzzle
generated:
  by: "claude/fable-5-1"
  at: "2026-09-16T00:00:00Z"
sources:
  - id: winfree-handout-2003
    resource: "https://web.archive.org/web/20030111064604/http://eebweb.arizona.edu/Faculty/Winfree/handout_479.htm"
    title: "The Art of Scientific Discovery (EEB 479/479H/579): course handout and retrospective syllabus (Internet Archive capture)"
    author: "Arthur T. Winfree"
  - id: adams-blockbusting-current
    resource: "https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/james-l-adams/conceptual-blockbusting/9781541674042/"
    title: "Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas (publisher page, Fifth Edition)"
    author: "James L. Adams"
  - id: adams-blockbusting-archive
    resource: "https://archive.org/details/conceptualblockb00jame"
    title: "Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas, 3rd edition (Internet Archive lending copy)"
    author: "James L. Adams"
  - id: platt-excitement-of-science
    resource: "https://archive.org/details/excitementofscie0000john"
    title: "The Excitement of Science (Internet Archive lending copy), containing the essay The Art of Creative Thinking"
    author: "John Rader Platt"
  - id: miner-nacirema-1956
    resource: "https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1956.58.3.02a00080"
    title: "Body Ritual among the Nacirema"
    author: "Horace Miner"
  - id: dallenbach-puzzle-picture-1951
    resource: "https://doi.org/10.2307/1419008"
    title: "A Puzzle-Picture with a New Principle of Concealment"
    author: "Karl M. Dallenbach"
  - id: wikipedia-ambiguous-image
    resource: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguous_image"
    title: "Ambiguous image (overview)"
    author: "Wikipedia contributors"
  - id: wikipedia-platypus
    resource: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus"
    title: "Platypus (overview)"
    author: "Wikipedia contributors"
  - id: aosd-syllabus
    resource: "https://github.com/tyson-swetnam/aosd/blob/main/docs/assets/aosd_syllabus.pdf"
    title: "The Art of Scientific Discovery: original course syllabus (PDF)"
    author: "Arthur T. Winfree"
---

# Weird Organism

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a>.

*[Section 2](../section2.md), session 7. Discussed together with [Rearranged Triangle](rearranged-triangle.md); the same session starts the group lab on [Dominoes](dominoes-lab.md).*

!!! abstract "The problem"

    Reconstructed from the syllabus: only the title survives, so the
    exercise below is the editors' own, in the form the evidence makes most
    likely — a familiar organism described so plainly that a stereotype
    hides it.

    A naturalist from somewhere very far away sends these notes on an
    organism they have never met, and asks you what it is.

    > It is among the largest organisms in its habitat, yet by mass almost
    > entirely dead: a living film a few cells thick lies beneath a coat of
    > dead armour, and nearly everything within is dead tissue the organism
    > keeps and builds upon. It grows only at its tips and in girth, never
    > lengthening in the middle. It eats air, using light to do so, and
    > drinks through the parts of itself buried in the ground. It never
    > moves from where it began life, and may live for centuries. Some
    > kinds recruit mobile animals to carry their offspring away.

    In your GamesWorth notebook, before class:

    1. What is it? Name the class of things, not one species.
    2. Mark every sentence that made you picture something exotic, and
       beside each write the assumption it violated.
    3. Describe some living thing you see daily — yourself is allowed — so
       that a friend cannot identify it in under a minute.

## Why it is in the course

Section 2 is six sessions on creative blocks, and session 7 is the perceptual-blocks session, read against Adams's Chapter 2. Winfree paired three exercises whose names all point at the gap between what is in front of you and what you perceive. What the other two were is an inference from those names: the Rearranged Triangle is probably a dissection figure in which the eye supplies a straight edge that is not there, and the Dominoes lab possibly the mutilated chessboard, where a hidden property of the board decides which tilings can exist. The Weird Organism puts a stereotype between you and a plain description: Adams's first perceptual block is seeing what you expect to see, and "organism" summons something animal-sized and mobile.

The point was never the identification. Winfree wrote that the puzzles, "many of them silly", exist "to slow you down for a few minutes so you can examine the working of your own mind", and that "actually solving the practice problems is way less important than learning how to try". What you bring to class is the inventory of assumptions you caught yourself making.

## Where it comes from

The problem is known from one document only: Winfree's course handout for EEB 479/479H/579, transcribed here as [the syllabus](../syllabus.md), where "discuss Weird Organism" opens session 7. Solo problems went out a week ahead, so it was handed over at session 6. The sheet he handed out for the problem has never been found, on his archived pages or anywhere else, so the title is all that survives. Like most of the course's puzzles it was most likely his own, "contrived much as the organizers of an Easter Egg Hunt do".

The title points at an old trick: describing the familiar as a stranger would see it, as in the Sphinx's riddle or Horace Miner's "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" (1956). Its visual cousin is the hidden figure, whose type specimen is a puzzle-picture published in the *American Journal of Psychology* in 1951 and commonly reproduced as the "Dallenbach cow": an animal most viewers cannot find, and then cannot un-see.

??? tip "Hints"

    - Separate observation from interpretation: underline every word that is already a conclusion — "eats", "armour", "dead" — and rewrite it as the bare thing an observer would see.
    - Notice what "organism" made you picture, then deliberately try the other kingdoms of life, and other scales of size and time.
    - Test the notes against the nearest living things: yourself, a pet, a houseplant, whatever grows on the wall outside.
    - Check any candidate against every sentence, especially the ones that fit badly; one that explains most of the notes is a hypothesis, not an answer.

??? success "Resolution"

    **For the reconstructed example only.** Winfree's own answer is not known.

    The notes describe a tree, and more broadly any woody perennial plant.
    The dead armour is bark, the living film is cambium and phloem, the wood
    within is mostly dead xylem the tree keeps and builds on; growth is at
    shoot and root tips and, in girth, at the cambium; eating air by light
    is photosynthesis; the recruited animals are pollinators and seed
    dispersers. Every clause is meant to be literally true of some ordinary
    tree, and the exotic creature came from the reader's stereotype of an
    organism as an animal. What belongs in the notebook is not the word
    "tree" but the assumptions that delayed it.

## Sources

- **Arthur T. Winfree**, *The Art of Scientific Discovery (EEB 479/479H/579): course handout and retrospective syllabus* (2001) — [Internet Archive capture](https://web.archive.org/web/20030111064604/http://eebweb.arizona.edu/Faculty/Winfree/handout_479.htm){target=_blank} 🔓
- **James L. Adams**, *Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas*, Chapter 2 "Perceptual Blocks" (Fifth Edition, 2019) — [publisher page](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/james-l-adams/conceptual-blockbusting/9781541674042/){target=_blank} 🔒
- **James L. Adams**, *Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas*, 3rd edition (1986) — [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/conceptualblockb00jame){target=_blank} 🔓 *(borrow)*
- **John Rader Platt**, *The Excitement of Science* (1962), containing "The Art of Creative Thinking" — [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/excitementofscie0000john){target=_blank} 🔓 *(borrow)*
- **Horace Miner**, "Body Ritual among the Nacirema", *American Anthropologist* 58(3), 503–507 (1956) — [DOI](https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1956.58.3.02a00080){target=_blank} 🔒
- **Karl M. Dallenbach**, "A Puzzle-Picture with a New Principle of Concealment", *American Journal of Psychology* 64(3), 431–433 (1951) — [DOI](https://doi.org/10.2307/1419008){target=_blank} 🔒
- **Wikipedia contributors**, "Ambiguous image" (overview) — [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguous_image){target=_blank} 🔓
- **Wikipedia contributors**, "Platypus" (overview, for the 1799 specimens) — [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus){target=_blank} 🔓
- **Arthur T. Winfree**, *The Art of Scientific Discovery: original course syllabus* (2001) — [PDF](https://github.com/tyson-swetnam/aosd/blob/main/docs/assets/aosd_syllabus.pdf){target=_blank} 🔓

!!! note "How sure are we that this is Winfree's problem?"

    Not at all: the identification is **unknown**. The syllabus gives the
    name, the session and its two neighbours, and nothing else; searches on
    the exact phrase, on Adams's chapter, on puzzle collections and across
    Winfree's archived site found no text. Both session-mates are "what you
    see is not what is there" puzzles, which makes a perceptual-block
    exercise about an organism likely, but its form is open. The 2002 and
    2007 captures of the handout are word for word the same, so nothing
    fuller is online.

    - **A written "identify this organism" puzzle**, the form reconstructed
      above. It fits Adams's stereotyping block and the course rule that
      exercises "depend as little as possible on knowledge of any particular
      subject area", but no text has been found.
    - **A hidden or ambiguous picture of an animal**, in the family of
      Dallenbach's cow. It would sit beside the Rearranged Triangle
      naturally, but a picture is hard to work on for a week.
    - **A "could such an organism exist?" thought experiment**, asking which
      assumptions about living things are necessary and which are habit.
      Nothing beyond the title supports it.
    - **A real organism that looks impossible**, the stock case being the
      platypus, whose first specimens in Britain were judged in 1799 to be a
      fake sewn together from several animals. Against it: the schedule
      lists readings and anecdotes bare — Golden Tooth, N-Rays, the
      Barometer Story — but puts "discuss" in front of the problems students
      worked on for a week, and this one carries it.

    If the handout ever surfaces, this page should be rewritten around it.

---

*Back to [Section 2](../section2.md) · [All problems](index.md) · [The schedule](../syllabus.md#section-2-creative-blocks)*