Jun 25 2008
Have you ever said something along these lines: “You are so cute, I could just eat you up!”?
Devouring beauty. This topic fascinates me, and also reminds me how much we have yet to learn about the attraction people feel towards sights, sounds, and events we neither plan on eating nor attempting to mate with.
Beauty, I would guess, is species-specific. What a dung beetle perceives as “Woo-hoo!” a panther probably wouldn’t. Continue Reading »
Jun 25 2008
My own field of psychology has been making progress toward becoming more strongly scientific. I am seeing a greater emphasis on testing and measurement, less ungrounded theorizing and speculation presented as knowledge. Certainly there are a large number of psychologists/psychotherapists who appear to be practicing something closer to religion than applied science. But in the least, over the past couple decades the emphasis and content of psychology textbooks has noticeable changed.
Jun 24 2008
Is the pattern on the above azalea petal akin to flagmen at an airport, signaling insects down the runway and into the center parking spot?
I can appreciate the delicate coloring of the flower without deluding myself that Gawd created it for me and my kind. The flower exists for itself, the coloring, pattern, and pollen/nectar booty having evolved to entice pollinators into doing their thing.
Although the flower may exist in the “garden” of Earthly flora (a vastly larger garden than the Lunar and Martian dirt patches), it isn’t my garden. I’m just one of a mind-boggling number of species that bumble around in it.
Jun 24 2008
Over at ScienceDaily yesterday I encountered this headline and article: New Discovery Proves ‘Selfish Gene’ Exists
As you might guess by now, the word nerd in me went critical all over some of its sorry letters. As I have mentioned before, the desire for precision is part of doing science. As is expressing, explaining, and arguing over data, concepts and theories.
My beef about the title is twofold. We’ll tackle the lesser matter first.
Jun 23 2008
I enjoy immersing myself in the wild. Why? For the untamed beauty, the experiences with other species – more on their terms rather than mine — etc. I used to say that the wilderness was my cathedral. It’s where I go to feel something different: to clear my head of the human and personal concerns that buzz buzz buzz around my brain at 60 miles per hour, 17 hours per day and then some.
Jun 23 2008
Over the weekend I printed out three science news releases from ScienceDaily. (For serious reading I prefer paper. For one, you can’t scribble notes on a computer screen.) Two articles got the word-nerd parts of my brain going, the third was just great science coupled with ramifications on how I may henceforth view things such as the seemingly perfectly positioned petals of the small, paisley-blue plumbago blossoms.
Jun 22 2008
Why do those yellow lines at the base of purple petals strike me as gorgeous? Could science unweave the beauty of this iris blossom? Or can science actually weave into our experiences an added depth – a marveling at the intricate, complex mechanisms beyond a superficial, snapshot view?
Perhaps an experiential appreciation and an intellectual understanding are two separate types of experiences. Even if the case, it may be possible to fuse the two, with each enriching the other. In the least, they need not be mutually exclusive.
Jun 22 2008
Why Paley’s Watch Makes a Better Case for Evolution
The Paley’s watch analogy persists as an argument for a great creator. But the analogy is critically flawed. Never in history has a human artifact been the product of one mind working in isolation.
Jun 21 2008
A nameless backyard plant (nameless to me). It produces small, yellow flowers. If I knew the name, would I understand the plant better? Names may allow us to better make connections, to build neural networks, so to speak. So yes, a name might increase understanding, provided that the name was linked to other information.
As for appreciating its beauty, however, I don’t need a name.
Jun 20 2008
Cars aren’t stupid (you stupid car!); hurricanes aren’t vengeful (you bad, bad, storm!“), and black holes certainly don’t get so hungry they could eat a galaxy.
It seems that the human propensity to engage in animism and anthropomorphism runs deep. Certainly, as an extremely social species that spent much of its early years evading predator and chasing prey, we can understand why we might over-extend the tendency to infer agency behind phenomena of all sorts. This over-extension of inferring agency probably plays a huge role in the perception of “supernatural” events.
[For more on inferring agency, see the chapter, "Bumpkins in the Night," at my "An Almighty Alpha" website.]
As a word nerd, however, the sloppy use of language concerns me. So when I found this headline on ScienceDaily, “Black Holes Have Simple Feeding Habits,” I couldn’t help but grunt in disapproval.
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