the evolving mind

Many years ago I had a roommate who kept parakeets in a cage on the dresser in her bedroom.  There was a mirror in one corner of the cage, and it seemed the birds would attack it when bored and needing a cathartic release (so to speak.)  “Silly birds,” I thought.

Yesterday I encountered further evidence that all birds are not equally bird-brained.  Move over higher primates, move over dolphins and elephants, the magpie has been found to have the ability of self-recognition.  Paint a blemish on its face, place a mirror before it, and its behavior says, “Hey, how did that get there!”

In Mirror Self-recognition In Magpie Birds we learn:

Psychologist Helmut Prior and colleagues have shown evidence of self-recognition in magpies-a species with a brain structure very different from mammals. . . .

These findings not only indicate that non-mammalian species can engage in self-recognition behaviour, but they also show that self-recognition can occur in species without a neocortex. This area is thought to be crucial to self-recognition in mammals, and its absence in this case suggests that higher cognitive skills can develop independently along separate evolutionary lines.

Fascinating.  Thinking aloud here, self-awareness may be tied to the existence/development/activity of mirror neurons and restricted to species capable of learning by imitation.  The existence and activity of mirror neurons may be a necessary but not sufficient condition.  But that is only a guess.  I anxiously await further research.

Forgive me for getting my undies in a bunch over a matter of “mere” semantics, but I believe that if you slant the reporting of a scientific finding, like Water Is No Passive Spectator Of Biological Processes: It Is An Active Participant, believers in soft-brained woo-woo such as homeopathy are likely to take your verbal polish and peddle it as support for their non-science.

Whew.  Take a deep breath, Andrew.

What is active water, you may wonder?  Does it have feelings, motives, memory?  Here’s a snippet of what the article was really about:

The research team recently demonstrated that THz-range absorption spectroscopy is a sensitive method for the investigation of the water shell that surrounds proteins. In the layers immediately surrounding the protein, the water molecules are networked to each other differently than in pure water. Their absorption of THz radiation at certain frequencies is thus changed.

Hey, that seems to me to be strongly scientific.  However, the use “networked to each other” sounds a tad too easy to anthropomorphize.  Did the molecules send each other emails, or what?

And then there is the meat of the matter:

The movements of the protein backbone influence the solvent, and the dynamics of the solvent can in turn influence the dynamics of the protein-thus playing an important role in the folding process.

So water plays a dynamic role in a chemical process.  Is this truly an active role?  Would we similarly say that in the gymnastics floor routines of the 2008 Summer Olympics the mat played an active role?

The whole world is alive.  Even water is active!  Although not all parts of the Universe score well on the Stanford-Binet, science is proving that nature is more intelligent than we ever dreamed!

You’re so veined, you probably need the vessels to survive.
You’re so veined, you definitely need the vessels to stay alive.
Don’t you? don’t you?

Here’s the mystery: Is my bastardized version of a Carly Simon song lyric about the leaf in the above photo, or about James Taylor, or about YOU?!

(Hint — all three are correct.)

I can’t imagine how excited a pollinator of these plants would get upon spying them in blossom. As the name, “rain lily” suggests, they flower only after several days of heavy rain. Now you don’t see them, now you do.

Here in Florida we get heavy rains a lot, and of the flotsam left in the wake, the short lily blossoms, little taller than lawn grass, are one of the few beautiful things. Otherwise we mostly find downed branches and fungi growing anywhere it can gain a toe-hold (a filament-hold?).

Speaking of rain, it looks like we’ve got some headed our way. Here comes hurricane/tropical storm Fay. I hope the rains and high winds leave nothing serious in their wake.

Holy Jesús!  It seems that God did not cook up one of the main ingredients for Mexican food on the fifth noche.  Instead, the sacred chili pepper, with it’s transcendent heat, gulp . . . evolved.

In Bugs Put the Heat in Chili Peppers over at ScienceDaily we learn,

If you’re a fan of habañero salsa or like to order Thai food spiced to five stars, you owe a lot to bugs, both the crawling kind and ones you can see only with a microscope. New research shows they are the ones responsible for the heat in chili peppers.

No, cayenne pepper is not bug poop.  You can pick that taco back up and continue shoving it in your mouth.

For these wild chilies the biggest danger to the seed comes before dispersal, when a large number are killed by this fungus,” said Joshua Tewksbury, a University of Washington assistant professor of biology. “Both the fungus and the birds eat chilies, but the fungus never disperses seeds - it just kills them.

The pungency comes from capsaicinoids, the same chemicals that protect them from fungal attack by dramatically slowing microbial growth.

Dios mio!  The heat I so love in Mexican and other spicy foods is actually fungicide!

Capsaicin doesn’t stop the dispersal of seeds because birds don’t sense the pain and so they continue to eat peppers, but the fungus that kills pepper seeds is quite sensitive to this chemical,” said Tewksbury, lead author of a paper documenting the research.

That certainly makes sense of the home remedy to repel squirrels: cayenne pepper mixed in the bird seed.  Birds don’t seem to mind it.  If they did, the seeds bearing the heat would never have been dispersed to grow and reproduce.

I’ve got a recommendation for that handful of believers in Intelligent Design who keep up-to-date on scientific findings: Mylanta, cherry flavor.

The buffet tables of evidence for evolution keep multiplying.  Oh sure, a person can get narrow-minded and select an anomaly à la carte.  Or he/she can turn to the kiddies menu and settle on the “Happy Argument from Ignorance” (because I can’t wrap my brain around it, it must be wrong). 

My attitude toward both cuisine and ideas is identical: bring it on!  For man does not live well by stale bread alone.

I enjoy the television show, Mythbusters, although sometimes it is annoyingly obvious to me when the hosts/producers have ventured beyond their area of expertise (or even familiarity).

A recent show on the influence of stress on driving and gasoline economy had the second string Mythbusters perform what they called an experiment that was unblinded, uncontrolled, and had an n of 2! Two of the program personalities got very relaxed, and drove a course. Then the same guys, knowing the subject of the test, were stressed, and they drove the same course. Oy vey. Because the . . . em . . . experiment (it pains me to type that) was not single-blinded (both drivers knew what was being tested), nor double-blinded (the person doing the measurements knew which cars were driven by whom under what condition), and with a total of subjects of 2, this stunt couldn’t bust a hunch, never mind a myth.

In another episode, the show took on the “myth” that explosives can generate a wave so big you could surf it. To test the myth they set off explosives in an abandoned quarry and watched to see if their robotic paddler on a surfboard would get swept along. Nope.

I could have told them that. As a surfer I have gained a scientific understanding of waves. I first learned from experience that you can’t catch a wave, however huge, until it starts to break. I spent many hours of futile paddling out beyond the break zone before I comprehended why. While a surfer can catch a breaking 2 foot wave, the best surfer in the world can’t catch a 20 foot wave that isn’t breaking. Why?

Continue Reading »

In both chimps and people, fathers, brothers, and sons form the core domestic group; it is ordinarily females that change groups.
Paul Ehrlich (45)

When a female primate migrates into a group of related males, she is generally welcome. To but it bluntly, she provides the resource of another womb. She will join the group and bear related offspring. Male infants grow up unmolested, providing the paternity is unquestioned. If an outsider male happens to take over an established troop, frequently he will kill newborns.(46) The females will come into estrus more quickly and he can father his own. In his book on chimpanzee culture, William McCrew notes, “[W]hen within-group infanticide occurs, it is male-biased, towards sons. Why? Perhaps because in a species where males never leave their natal community and grow up to join the co-operating male club, it is important that these sons be genetic kin. Daughters grow up to emigrate, to have their offspring elsewhere, and so are not a threat to the long-term integrity of the group, so they are spared.”(47)

In the above we can see that there are at least two reasons why infanticide occurs. The first is to insure paternity, the second to protect and expand blood alliances. We might describe the first as child selection, the second as a form of kin selection. Via infanticide one set of genes directly determines what other sets of genes will survive to propagate and assist in survival of related genes. No doubt, to many minds this type of thinking is embarrassingly animalistic. The ultimately selfish nature of human drives is candidly exposed. It is a blow to the notion that we are special, our motives grand. In one sense religion serves to provide noble disguises for quite mundane motives. Infanticide is as bluntly revealing an example as there may be. Is there evidence of infanticide in the Bible? Well, yes. Even more so, there is a mountain of material manifesting the two motives of child selection and kin selection.

In two of the most important Bible stories, the god of the people determines that a son shall be sacrificed. Under command of his superordinate, Abraham comes within moments of killing his first and only son, Isaac. But the child is spared. In the New Testament, the Bible god sends his own, only son to be sacrificed. Although human agents do the deed, the plan comes from above. In Abraham’s case, the near act of infanticide is used to test the strength of a relationship or alliance. Abraham’s god was no alien god, but his great father. In the case of Jesus, the purpose of the indirect killing of an adult child, Jesus, is to redeem a relationship. Significantly, in the stories Jesus has no wife, so there is no loss of potential offspring. The relationship redeemed is that between a god — the great father — and the many children who have strayed from him. A strong bond between a father and his children helps assure that his legacy lives on. This is true for both genes and units of culture, sometimes called memes.

Here are three other clear examples of the Bible god engaging in infanticide directly or instructing his people to perform the act: Continue Reading »

Birdwatchers rejoice — it is Christmas morning.  A new discovery has unwrapped a small package of a new bird, never before identified and new to millions of birdwatchers across the globe.  And what a cutie it is:

(photo by Brian Schmidt, posted at Science Daily)  Continue Reading »

Can a rainbow be intellectually “unwoven” so that it is not longer strikingly beautiful?

The above photo is of a great blue heron in flight. The wingspan is nearly six feet. Although I understand the mechanics of flight, part of my brain still can’t believe that a creature so large can climb the relative airy nothing of the earth’s gaseous atmosphere to move about. That same part of my brain watches a hummingbird hang before a blossom, its ultra-rapid wingbeats nearly invisible, and wonders why gravity has failed to do what it normally does.

But there are other parts of my brain. And those more educated parts are the parts I tend to trust when confronted with questions of what is real and how things work.

Flight . . . wow! And here is how it works . . . still wow!

If you haven’t seen it, here’s a very interesting post over at Pharyngula about a new fossil find.  There is still so much to discover about human history (and pre-history).

The following analogy comes to mind on the subject of knowledge: While those of a fundamentalist bent put all their eggs in a knowledge-basket woven 2000+ years ago, there are new baskets woven every day (and/or relatively new baskets re-woven).  Besides custom, security, and laziness, why would a person want to commit to an old and increasingly obsolete intellectual product?