Evolutionary biology
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On Gerry Alanguilan’s “ELMER,” his author bio, and animal cognition.
In ELMER by Gary Alanguilan, chickens suddenly gain intelligence and have to fight against murder, oppression, and prejudice.
abortion rights, Andy Hartzell, animal cognition, chicken, David Duchovny, ELMER, empathy, ethics, evolution, Fox Bunny Funny, Frans de Waal, Gerry Alanguilan, graphic novel, Holy Cow, Homo naledi, live your ethics, Peter Singer, speciest, suffering, teleological misconception, teleology, vegan, vegetarian
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On attempts to see the world through other eyes.
Recoloring an image is cool … but is it enough to imagine how other animals view a certain scene?
A Different Form of Color Vision in Mantis Shrimp, animal cognition, animal vision, animal vision tool, attention, brain plasticity, color vision, colorblind glasses, cone cells, crotalomorphism, dichromat, distinguishing between similar colors, eyes, facial recognition, frequency shifting, fusiform gyrus, gene therapy, glasses to let colorblind people see color, human facial recognition, image processing, mantis shrimp, mantis shrimp research, mantis shrimp vision, neurological processing, New York Times, peacock vision, perception, photoreceptors, retrovirus, species, starling vision, summer of science, tetrachromat, Thoen study, trichromat, vision, visual spectrum, what do bees see, what do dogs see, what does the world look like to other animals, what does the world look like to other creatures
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On mental architecture and octopus literature.
I might spend too much time thinking about how brains work. Less than some people, sure — everybody working on digital replication of human thought must devote more energy than I do to the topic, and they’re doing it in a more rigorous way — but for a dude with no professional connection to cognitive…
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On playing outdoors, and allergies.
K has been on a big kick reading books about sending students outside. Obviously, I approve. Being outdoors seems to make most humans happier, and people who spend time outside seem more likely to care about preserving our environment. Plus, K even has scholastic reasons to ask students to sit contemplatively outside — it’s reasonable…
allergies, allergy, allergy epidemic, AP biology, asthma, autoimmune disorders, cute kid photos, David Strachan, eating peanuts to cure a peanut allergy, expecting to fight makes us more aggressive, farm animals, farmed-animal sanctuary, fatherhood, fieldwork, Hay Fever Hygiene and Household Size, hygiene, hygiene hypothesis, immune system, immunology, let your kid eat dirt!, oral immunotherapy, outdoor learning, outdoors, outside, parasites, parasites as medicine, parenting, pathogens, peanut, play, spending time on a farm to prevent allergies, The Watchmen, Uplands PEAK, vegan animal sanctuary -
On how human different humans happen to be (hint: equivalently human).
I finally read some of the initial papers (circa 1981) describing an outbreak of opportunistic infections among previously-healthy homosexual men in the United States. The case studies are harrowing — a dispassionate litany of suffering, ending with death. And, yes, these are papers from before I was born. I should’ve read them already, or at least…
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On racism and the empathy gap (while sneakily building toward the idea that teaching kids to root for your favorite sports team might be kinda evil).
There is an unfortunately compelling evolutionary model to explain why humans are so predisposed to racism. The rotten treatment of presumed outsiders may well be a corollary of our genetic inducements toward altruism. Which is grimly ironic, the idea that the same evolutionary narrative could explain both the best & worst sides of human nature. In…
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On fire myths and the origin of knowledge
EDIT 5/4/2018: a finished essay based on this research was published here. If you’re writing about conflicts between religious and scientific worldviews, there is absolutely no reason why you’d be forced to write about fire. But, c’mon… fire is cool. Eventually you probably would. While researching myths about the origin of fire, I realized that…
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On evolution (and why there aren’t more black plants).
As I was reading Freeman Dyson‘s recent collection Dreams of Earth and Sky, specifically his essay on democratizing genetic manipulation, I came across the following passage: “For a plant growing in a hot climate, it is advantageous to reflect as much as possible of the sunlight that is not used for growth. There is plenty…
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On GM foods.
I thought Mark Lynas‘s New York Times editorial about genetically-modified foods was quite good. Well worth a read, if you have a minute. And it inspired me to jot down something that I’ve been meaning to write for a while: I wish the concepts “grown without pesticides” and “not genetically modified” weren’t so intertwined in this…
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On violence against women (part three): rape, evolution, and the dangers of partial truths.
This is third in a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2. Were you sired by a jerk? Don’t worry! You can still be good! I’m mostly familiar with two theories addressing the question, “Why do men rape?” One comes from feminism, like the thesis put forward in Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: violence against women…
Frank Brown Cloud 