the evolving mind

This azalea sports tissue-thin petals. The stamen remind me of alfalfa sprouts. I wonder what they taste like.

That was a weird thought. Or was it?

Technorati Links: biology, flowers

Last month ScienceDaily posted an article bearing this last month: New Fossil Reveals Primates Lingered In Texas.

Couldn’t it have said, “primates have lingered in Texas”? You don’t need fossils to find that out; you can grab a microphone and go interview one of the roughly 24 million there today.

Oh, non-human primates.

During the early part of the Eocene epoch, primates were common in the tropical forests that covered most of North America. Over time, however, climatic cooling caused a dramatic decline in the abundance and diversity of North American primates. By the end of the Eocene, primates and most tropical species had almost disappeared from North America.

Cool.

I have long wondered whether it is not the use of language, but of clothing, that . . . allows . . . people to be so anthropocentric. There are animals, and there is our kind. But strip of our clothing and maybe we don’t look so different. Body hair, genitals, butt-cracks . . . yep, we’re animals all right.

Or maybe if we clothed all chimpanzees, in captivity and the wild — trousers and a nice, blue button-up shirt for the guys, a mini-skirt and pink blouse for the gals — maybe that would help people understand that we naked-ish bipeds aren’t the special creation of a supernatural agent. To really drive home the point, we could give those chimps some eyeglasses and Bibles to tote around.

Technorati Links: freethought, primates

Is it okay for teachers to perpetuate the Santa myth to innocent schoolchildren? (What parents do is more of their own business.) Considering that almost all children grow out of believing in Santa, no harm no foul, I suppose.

What about the myth of Thanksgiving? Wait, you didn’t know that the whole picnic-table pow-wow of Pilgrims and Indians was make-believe? I had an idea that it largely was, but learned more upon reading Thank Journalist, Rather Than Pilgrims, For Thanksgiving Feast.

Anne Blue Wills, assistant professor of religion at Davidson, explains that the current version of Thanksgiving was created by a journalistic crusader, and would have been unrecognizable to the Pilgrims it supposedly honors.

Hmm. Should schoolteachers continue to perpetuate the politically correct, multi-cultural, pro-tolerance (yet anti-fowl) message of Thanksgiving? My current thought is sure — providing they present it as cherished folklore and not historic fact.

Technorati Links: education, freethought

The Internet (a.k.a. the information superhighway) has given us all super-human powers. Alright, maybe not by today’s standards. And certainly not of the Marvel Comics sort. I mean more of the James Bond variety.

Want to know how to build a nuclear bomb? No need to seek out a double agent – Google it. Need to get a birds-eye view of the back streets behind a palace in Istanbul? Google Earth it. Want to make your way into the boudoir of a Russian hottie? (Make that a French hottie, seeing we’re talking “boudoir.”) No need to leave your chair. You can mouse-click your way in . . . providing she has a website.

And now my confession: I have been tracking you, dear readers. Thanks to a free service called “StatCounter,” I know not who you are, but where you are. Very roughly.

Here’s a map generated yesterday of where recent hits originated:

Interesting.

I have done very little to promote my blog, and yet my words have reached across the globe. (Insert diabolical laugh here ______.) Oh wait, I’m a force for good. I think.

What a time we live in. I can hardly imagine the powers technology will next provide us with.

Technorati Links: technology

Alas, since building a pond in our backyard 9 years ago, we have yet to spot a Loch-Ness-type monster in it. Not even one of the mini variety. No Loch Ness gator, No Loch Ness carp, No Loch Ness duck.

One spring, while dredging the pond, ankle-deep in muck, a monstrous bullfrog (too big to be held in my hand) leapt out and into a nearby bush. But I knew he or she might be there. For two years, when walking the yard at night, I’d caught sight of the massive amphibian — by backyard standards — sitting on flagstones lining the pond, contemplating its navel. Or maybe contemplating its lack of a navel. Or waiting for dinner.

Not to say there haven’t been any surprises. One summer we had so many toads mating in the pond you’d think it were the 60s all over again. And then came the few seasons of the leopard frog. Who may or may not have been swallowed by the bullfrog.

On the bright side, we’ve yet to have herons park their twiggy feet on the flagstones and help themselves to sushi on our tab.

I have a hunch, however, that we do have some hideous creatures lurking in our small pond. Unfortunately, I don’t have the necessary equipment to verify my hunch. In this case it would be a microscope.

Dear Santa, can you take a hint?

Technorati Links: goldfish, skepticism

[T]wo studies have found that women going to a singles bar wear more jewelry and makeup when near ovulation. These adornments, it seems, have the advertising value of a chimpanzee’s pink genital swelling, attracting a number of men for the woman to choose from.
- Robin Wright (11)

Why is there so much talk of sex, sex, sex in the Bible? Thou shalt not “stick it” in another man (Deuteronomy 23:17); thou shalt not do it with livestock (Exodus 22:19); thou shalt not do it with your father’s concubine (Genesis 35:22) . . . etc, etc. The reason: human beings are one hyper-sexed bunch. Males have huge penises (relative to other species); females are sexually receptive pretty much all the time.

Among the other primates we see a transition to human hyper-sexuality. That females experience sexual pleasure, and even experience orgasm, was first documented and verified among female macaques. (12) Most like humans, “female bonobos [are] almost continually receptive; [with] pink swellings for most of their cycle.” (13) And, sacre bleu, “The French kiss is the bonobo’s most recognizable, humanlike erotic act.” (14)

Continue Reading »

Technorati Links: evolution, primates, sexuality

The latest Carnival of the Godless has been posted here.

Technorati Links: atheism, freethought

We interrupt this science blog to bring you a photograph of a juvenile blue tang. Which is not blue. The yellow feller turns blue upon reaching maturity.

Many colorful fish go through one or more “wardrobe” changes in their lifetime. Which certainly makes fish identification challenging.

Technorati Links: biology, nature

Scientists and science reporters should know that because two variables show correlation — change in one associated with change in another — does not mean that the one caused the other. The educated person who forgets this ought to write “correlation is not causation” 100 times on the nearest blackboard.

That goes for the researchers and writers of this article over at ScienceDaily: Media Violence Cited As ‘Critical Risk Factor’ For Aggression.

Okay, let me state outright that I believe media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior. But its a complicated issue and we’re still trying to sort it all out. I was very glad to read this nod to the fact with the statement that violence is a “multiply determined behavior.”

Here’s the article’s lead graph:

You are what you watch, when it comes to violence in the media and its influence on violent behavior in young people, and a new paper, lead-authored by Rutgers University, Newark, researcher Paul Boxer, provides new evidence that violent media does indeed impact adolescent behavior.

Hmm. Violent media does impact behavior? How do they know?

The research shows that even when other factors are considered, such as academic skills, encounters with community violence, or emotional problems, “childhood and adolescent violent media preferences contributed significantly to the prediction of violence and general aggression” in the study subjects.

Did you catch that? Media preferences contribute the the prediction of violence. Yes, and having a left arm is a good predictor that an animal will also have a right arm. Does having a left arm cause a person to grow a right arm?

The word preferences is also very telling. A preference for violent media may be the result of a third variable that influences both the watching of violence and engaging in violence.

How was the research conducted? I’m glad you asked, for it is a very important question.

It reports the results of the research team’s extensive interviews of 820 adolescents from the state of Michigan – 430 high school students from rural, suburban and urban communities, and 390 juvenile delinquents held in county and state facilities. The adolescents were about evenly split between male and female, minority and non-minority. Parents or guardians of 720 of the youths also were interviewed, as were teachers/staff of 717 of them. Each subject was asked about favorites TV shows, movies and video/computer games, both as a child and as a teen, and questioned to determine if they had engaged in specific antisocial behaviors, such as throwing rocks or using a weapon.

Extensive interviews!!! Poor quality data here, folks. Not much a person could reasonably conclude from it.

“You are what you watch.” Or maybe “You watch what you are.” Of course, both may be true. May be. We don’t know yet.

Technorati Links: critical thinking

Saint Einstein recently escaped being impaled by those gall-darn scientists. Test, test, test, doubt and question, that’s all they seem to do. And not even the work of the most high icon of science itself is exempt.

In Einstein’s Relativity Survives Neutrino Test I read,

The test of Lorentz invariance, conducted by MINOS Experiment scientists and reported in the Oct. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters, started with a stream of muon neutrinos produced at Fermilab particle accelerator, near Chicago, and ended with a neutrino detector 750 meters away and 103 meters below ground. As the Earth does its daily rotation, the neutrino beam rotates too.

“If there’s a field out there that can cause violations of Lorentz invariance, we should be able to see its effects as the beam rotates in space,” said Indiana University Bloomington astrophysicist Stuart Mufson, a project leader. “But we did not. Einsteinian relativity lives to see another day.”

In case you didn’t know, Einstein didn’t name his theories “special relativity” and “general relativity.” And really, the “relativity” was the tails side of the coin he focused on, at least initially. One could argue that his work was primarily about the invariance of the speed of light. And that work built upon Lorentz’s invariance equation. The mind-boggling implication that everyone now emphasizes is that the units we use to measure speed — spatial and temporal — are thus relative.

Technorati Links: education, philosophy