the evolving mind

That castle is old. Well, depending on your perspective. From a cosmological perspective . . . it’s a fleeting thing. As our we.

[photo thanks to NASA]

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Warm, moist, and abundant in food (body oils and whatnot): why wouldn’t an armpit be a rich environment? A new study on the human skin’s microbiome has found that the biggest influence on the diversity of life found on your skin (bacteria and other unicellular microbes) is . . . drum roll please . . . location, location, location.

For example, the bacteria that live under your arms likely are more similar to those under another person’s arm than they are to the bacteria that live on your forearm.

Hopefully you find this tidbit of information to be more interesting than creepy. Yes, you are an organism that lives and feeds in an environment. And yes, you are also an environment for a host of organisms that live and feed off of you.

Hmm. If a person believes that all life is sacred, should that person never take a shower? Talk about attempting gene-o-cide. . . .

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We had a rainy week last week. So why wouldn’t the rain lilies sprout and bloom? Where these plants come from, I don’t know. Did a previous owner of the property plant a few, and now they have spread?

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What is this? Hint: title and x200. Answer and another pic below the fold.

Continue Reading »

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Why did our kind evolve such large, energy-expensive brains? Early theorizing targeted tool use. But there was very little change in hominid tool kits over thousands and millions of years. Over those same years the hominid brain kept changing. Hmm.

More recent reasoning has focused on social living. Maybe our kind experienced selective pressure to be able to live and work in complex groups. But that may not be the full reason, either. At least not according to the analysis of evolutionary biologists John Finarelli and John Flynn. After looking at living and fossil carnivore species they -

found that increased brain size is not routinely associated with sociality.

I imagine they focused on carnivores because while many herbivores live in large groups, like cattle and sheep, but, to use scientific lingo, “they aren’t too bright.” Perhaps hoofed vegetarians are social in a very rudimentary fashion, but not as rudimentary, no doubt, as, say, schooling fish.

Still, the conclusion does raise serious questions.

“The universality of the Social Brain Hypothesis does not apply,” says Finarelli. “When you look at relative brain size from the point of view of the entire evolutionary history of the clade, the story starts to fall apart—at least in carnivores. This study shows that, almost assuredly, brain size is increasing for different reasons in different groups of carnivores.”

What we have is a puzzle wrapped in a enigma being chased by a pack of hungry scientists. So to speak. I don’t know about you, but I love puzzles.

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As regular readers know, I am a “god-free” individual. Sometimes my writings about being god-free in a nation with a god-believing majority make their way into this blog. But now they will have a more fitting home.

Working alongside a few other members of the Orlando Atheists/Freethinkers group, I have launched into a new endeavor: a website and blog by and about Florida Freethinkers. If you are likewise god-free, and/or simply god-skeptical, you might want to check it out.

And here it is: Florida Freethinkers.

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Both my wife and I love flowers. And we both enjoy watching football. So we are not opposites in that regard. In fact, psychology research has shown that people tend to marry individuals that are similar to themselves. In education level, values, etc. Yet the biological sciences suggest that couples may be attracted to “different” for immunological reasons.

Like the findings from this study:

Professor Maria da Graça Bicalho, head of the Immunogenetics and Histocompatibility Laboratory at the University of Parana, Brazil, says that her research had shown that people with diverse major histocompatibility complexes (MHCs) were more likely to choose each other as mates than those whose MHCs were similar, and that this was likely to be an evolutionary strategy to ensure healthy reproduction.

Well, that’s not very sexy. But what a “brilliant” adaptation.

Within MHC-dissimilar couples the partners will be genetically different, and such a pattern of mate choice decreases the danger of endogamy (mating among relatives) and increases the genetic variability of offspring. Genetic variability is known to be an advantage for offspring, and the MHC effect could be an evolutionary strategy underlying incest avoidance in humans and also improving the efficiency of the immune system, the scientists say.

Other research [see my Love at First Sniff] has found that the cue to immunological difference is olfactory.

So perhaps I love my wife both because we enjoy the same activities and because, for some strange reason largely beyond my awareness, she smells good.

Love is a crazy thing.

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The bigger a claim, the better your evidence need be to adequately back it up. New research has been released “showing” that people and dog experts around the globe misunderstand dogs. They really aren’t interested in dominance and becoming leader of a pack.

What data was this finding based upon?

The researchers spent six months studying dogs freely interacting at a Dogs Trust rehoming centre, and reanalysing data from studies of feral dogs.

Okay, I guess that is something. But how were the dogs studied and the previous data analyzed? Unfortunately, I couldn’t gain access to the published article to find out. What the news release did contain was pack of accusations about what people are wrong about in their understanding of dogs.

In the first paragraph above I put quotes around the word show. Why? Because the article preached more than it taught. It didn’t show me solid evidence. In fact, most of what it did was argue against the alternative position. If current beliefs about dogs are wrong, I want to know how they know it is — “just trust us” doesn’t cut it. I also would like to know what instead is right.

The researchers probably have a point, but perhaps not the paradigm-shifting one they claim. It is my hunch that much of talk of dominance in the context of dog and dog training is shorthand. As with the vast majority of species that live in a sort of hierarchically organized group, there is no simple, static, linear array of individuals. Individual A can get its way over B and B over C, yet C may trump A. And this “ordering” can and will change from month to month and even from specific resource being tussled over. If tussled is the right word.

Dominance talk is usually shorthand for a very complex set of behaviors and dynamic social interactions. To understand better why that shorthand may be misleading, we need to better understand what is actually going on in these types of canine-canine and canine-human interactions. Researchers . . . . please inform us.

[source]

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Hey you spiral galaxy, get your hands off that . . . whatever the hell it is!

Photos of the deep sky can be like inkblots. We see a pattern and project qualities onto the external world that exist inside us.

Photo thanks to NASA.

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A recent technological advance has once again got me thinking about the term, dimension. What an advance it is.

‘Five Dimensional’ Discs With A Storage Capacity 2,000 Times That Of Current DVDs

Cool. Gold nanoparticles were incorporated into a disc surface, without adding to the physical size, yet increasing the storage capacity immensely.

How did they do it? Perhaps they used some String Theory, which “implies” that our universe has a number of dimensions beyond the standard three-plus-time available at Wal-Mart.

Discs currently have three spatial dimensions, but using nanoparticles the Swinburne researchers were able to introduce a spectral – or colour – dimension as well as a polarisation dimension.

Here’s my semantic-slash-metaphysical beef with talk of extra dimensions. Is the polarization dimension the same sort of dimension that is length, width, or height? Does it really belong in the same category and thus appropriately represented with the same word? I kinda doubt it.

Is that also the case with String Theory? I don’t know. When we talk about extra dimensions, what we are often referring to is additional scalar variables. And if variables provide us with additional information about something, a new type of information, is it wise to imbue this type of information and measurement with spatial connotations? In other words, with the information provided by a new variable and data, is there really a there there?

As for my brain, sure, you could put it on a stainless steel table and measure just it’s height and width and length. But there is so much more to my brain than that. Are there thus more dimensions?

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