the evolving mind

Lately I’ve been into the travel show, Bizarre Foods. Man, that guy — Andrew Zimmern — will stick just about anything into his pie-hole. Sautéed goat balls, cattle spleen sandwiches, still-beating fish hearts, fermented plant foods of many types, insects galore. I admire him. He’s got the guts to eat all sorts of stuff. And digest it.

Zimmern’s motto is, If it looks good, eat it! The above basil plant looks good to me. I have often harvested a small sack of leaves and pureed them along with pungent, raw garlic, olive oil, pine nuts, and parmesan cheese, (gotta love what those microorganisms can do to milk!) then tossed the resulting green goop atop pasta. Mmm, pesto.

Of course, the ultimate reason behind stuffing your face is not to have a culinary experience, but to survive. And from watching Bizarre Foods it has impressed upon me that through the ages human beings have put all sorts of items — plant and animal and fungi — into their beloved organs of sustenance: their pie-holes.

We may have difficulty realizing it now, with our supermarkets abundantly stocked with quality foods, but the earliest food explorers experimented with their diet not so much in a spirit of adventure, but out of hunger.

Stuff your pie hole or die. That’s what eating ultimately comes down to.

Now where did I put my chipotle powder?

How’s this for a science-news-release title to make your brain go, “Huh?”:

Parasites keep things sexy in ‘hotspots’

Apparently, parasites can put organisms in the mood for orgasms. Well, if not for orgasms, at least for sexual reproduction. How so?

First things first. It has long puzzled biologists why some creatures bother with sexual reproduction. It is very inefficient next to the asexual variety. Why not just clone great numbers of yourself?

The answer may reside in the “Red Queen hypothesis” -

[W]hich says that coevolving parasites reduce the reproductive advantage of asexual reproduction by adapting to infect clonal individuals after they become locally common.

While sexual reproduction may be less efficient, it produces offspring with more diverse genes and gene-combinations. It is then less likely a parasite can wreck havoc on the whole population of one’s progeny.

Here’s the fascinating nitty-gritty of new research into the matter:

The team exposed snails taken from shallow and deep habitats in two lakes to parasites derived from those lakes or one other. In theory, King explained, if parasites and snails are coevolving, then they should be more infective to same-lake snails than different-lake snails. And that’s exactly what they found but on an even smaller scale: parasites from the same lake were significantly more infective to shallow-water snails than to deep-water snails, they show. Thus, it appears that snails living in deep water are completely removed from the coevolutionary interactions taking place in the shallows.

Cool! Precise data with profound implications. Oh baby, baby, Barry White may not have sung about parasites, but his singing may have likewise “inspired” copulatory behavior.

Technorati Links: biology, sexuality

I don’t believe everything I see. Does that make me distrustful of my very own senses? To some degree, in some circumstances, yes.

When I see a magician push a knife through a sexy assistant, do I believe he has truly impaled him? No, I don’t believe what I have seen.

If I see an unidentified flying object, do I believe I have seen something alien or supernatural? No, I don’t believe.

The above NASA photo is of the sunrise. Did two or three suns actually rise that day? Well, no, it’s an optical illusion caught by a camera. So I wouldn’t recommend believing what you might think you see.

The human brain and its sensory organs is a limited and perhaps even flawed reality-appraisal system. But that doesn’t mean we give up, or insist that there are other ways of knowing. We must instead look for tools and information outside ourselves.

Decades ago the bumper sticker “Question Authority” became popular. I would argue that the greatest authority in our own lives is . . . ourselves. And we should question that authority.

Technorati Links: cosmos, perception

A couple days ago I wrote a post, Climbing Vines, Climbing Aspirations. In it I wondered,

Climbing the ladder, stepping up, moving up in the world. Why up? Why doesn’t our kind so value downward movement?

I have just discovered that one year ago today I wrote a post in my An Almighty Alpha series that directly addressed the issue. In Why Godliness is Up I shared many Bible verses that manifest our tendency to value the up direction. Such as Luke 10:15:

And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted up to the skies? No, you will go down to the depths.

I also conjectured about why upward is revered by our kind. I also wondered if a very different species, such as a whale, if capable, would see upward as best. Maybe a whale would think down is where it’s at.

To read more from that post, click here.

As far as I can see, the supposed “new atheist” is no different than the old. What has changed? Greater visibility and a tone of discourse less bow-tie academic.

The cartoon below from atheistcartoons.com says it, I think.

Is there a war on Christmas? Is the new atheist a different animal than the old. I doubt both.

Technorati Links: atheism, belief, cartoon

Gawd is apparently not totally pissed with his minions on Earth. For it was the planet Jupiter that recently got hit with an interstellar bolt of wrath. Maybe it was a comet he tossed. Had the object hit our own planet, Gawd’s alleged favorite, an entire continent would have been immediately obliterated.

So Gawd was just sending us a message for us to behave, maybe. A warning shot. But only folks with telescopes have seen the actual message. And why isn’t the impact scar shaped like a cross or something? That would have made quite the religious impact. Is Gawd not religious?

My point: Drawing a bulls-eye after-the-fact is frequently a cheater’s way of finding evidence for his or her preexisting belief. Jupiter was in no bulls-eye; the Earth isn’t in one either. Or, put another way, all planets are in it. The Earth could one day be partly or fully destroyed by a wayward hunk of space junk. But Gawd won’t be responsible for sending it. Nor could Gawd prevent it. Gawd works only after-the-fact.

[Jupiter impact source]

Technorati Links: belief, cosmos, critical thinking

Climbing the ladder, stepping up, moving up in the world. Why up? Why doesn’t our kind so value downward movement?

Yah, Joe is really going somewhere in the world, he’s moving up.

Did gravity play a crucial role in the history of our contemporary conventions of speech? I think so. Words, after all, come from somewhere.

Technorati Links: meaning, semantics

Does living at home breed violence?

Say what?!

“Home” belongs in the same category as Mom, apple pie and baseball, doesn’t it?

New research suggests the benevolence of living at home with parents . . . depends. It depends upon the sex and age of the individual.

The news release to the study bore this title: Young men living at home with parents are more violent. Okay, they’ve discovered a correlation, but is the link between variables causal or inertly predictive or something else?

Here’s the data the correlation consists of -

Professor Jeremy Coid and Dr Ming Yang surveyed over 8000 men and women. Participants answered questions about violent behaviour over the past 5 years and mental health problems.

Their results showed for the first time that staying in the parental home is a stronger risk factor for young men’s violence than any other factor.

A “risk factor.” What’s a risk factor? Good question.

Is living at home the equivalent of a young, adult male’s non-religious madrasah? Here is how Coid interprets/explains his finding:

“And these [violent/antisocial behaviors] are more common among young men who do not have responsibilities of providing their own accommodation, supporting dependent children, or experiencing beneficial effects on their behaviour from living with a female partner.

“Young men who live at home are also more likely to receive financial support from their parents than in the past when the pattern was reversed. However, in this study their earnings or benefits were the same as those who had left home and taken on greater social responsibility. They therefore had more disposable income which may have partly explained why they had more problems with alcohol.”

So living at home may not be a malevolent social influence as much as it provides a haven for individuals needing a more constructive social environment and role within it.

But we cannot be as confident of the explanatory layer to this finding as we can the data it is based upon. And frankly, the data itself is not all that solid.

An interesting finding; a thought provoking conjecture. I await further research.

Technorati Links: relationships, sociology

The above looks a bit like bacon. But it’s not. Some species might consider it as tasty. We don’t. Last hint: x200 magnification.

Answer and another pic below the fold.

Continue Reading »

Technorati Links: biology, fauna

A couple days ago I posted an essay about placebo-treatments that included this:

For a few moments I considered developing and marketing a raisin-based sleep aid. I figured I could make it available in regular and ultra placebo strengths. The ultra would be organically-grown.

Echoing both the grape element (but crushed, not dried) and the semantics-for-better-sales theme, I came across this bit of writing yesterday in a Costco circular:

Kirkland signature wines are positioned in three distinct tiers; Premium, Super-Premium and Ultra-Premium.

Wow! If premium isn’t good enough, try the super-premium! But wait, doesn’t premium mean “the best,” or at least “very high quality”? Man, the copy writers for Costco are really scraping the ceiling with those words.

In my opinion, however, Premium, Super-Premium and Ultra-Premium sound like descriptions not for something you pour in long-stem glassware, but into a fuel tank.

What is in a word? Sometimes there is absolutely nothing “behind” the word. But who knows what sparkling connotations peoples’ minds will add to it. Advertisers are well aware of this.

Technorati Links: culture, semantics