| | Book: Humanimal |  |
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NoCoPilot
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Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Book: Humanimal Tue May 28, 2019 3:05 pm | |
| Neanderthals lived from about 400,000 years ago to 40,000 years ago -- a span of 360,000 years.
Anatomically modern humans first appeared about 200,000 years ago.
We've only lasted half as long as Neanderthals. |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20368
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Humanimal Wed May 29, 2019 9:27 pm | |
| - Adam Rutherford wrote:
- We have unusually large brains. They are also unusually folded and crenellated, meaning that the density of connections between cells is extremely high, and increases the surface area of our cerebral cortex. There are many metrics that can be applied to brains, and we come out near--but not at--the top of most.
We don't have the biggest brains as, in general, they increase in size as bodies do. Blue whales are probably the largest animal to have ever existed, but sperm whales have the heaviest brains, at around a monstrous eighteen pounds. On land, the heavy-weigh brain champion is the African elephant. In terms of the absolute number of neurons, African elephants come out on top with 250 billion, around three times more than ours, in second place with 86 billion.
Only about one pound in forty of our total body mass is brain. That ratio is about the same as mice, much higher than in elephants where it's more like 1:560. The record for the lowest brain-to-body mass ratio is held by an eel-like fish called Acanthonus armatus. If this ignominy wasn't enough, it's colloquial name is the bony-eared ass-fish. Treeshrews have the highest ratio of brain to body mass among mammals, at about 10%. Some species of small ants are 1:7. |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20368
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Humanimal Wed May 29, 2019 9:52 pm | |
| Ichthyosaurs are the largest aquatic dinosaurs known, at 85 feet.
Blue whales reach 100 feet.
The Argentinosaurus huinculensis reached 98-130 feet. As such, I believe they exceed blue whales as the longest animal ever to exist. At 100 tons they're still dwarfed by the 200 ton blue whale in mass though. |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20368
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Humanimal Wed May 29, 2019 10:18 pm | |
| The EASIEST way to create an artificial intelligence, or at least a superhuman intelligence, might be to isolate the genes in our DNA that cause the intense folding and crenellation and then splice those genes into, say, an elephant's or sperm whale's brain. All hail our overlord Cthulhu. |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20368
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Humanimal Thu May 30, 2019 9:53 am | |
| - Adam Rutherford wrote:
- Plenty of animals use artificial mechanical means to aid digestion. Birds don't have teeth to macerate, but they do have gizzards--muscular pouches in their digestive tracts that some fill with grit which grinds up food, making it easier to chemically digest. We call these "gastroliths"--stomach stones--and this is an ancient practice. The fossilized remains of many dinosaurs from the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods have been found with smoothed stones inside their body cavities, where once the soft tissue of gizzards would have been.
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20368
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Humanimal Thu May 30, 2019 7:44 pm | |
| - Adam Rutherford wrote:
- In fact, the longevity of dinosaurs was such that we humans are closer in time to the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, than the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex was to the iconic stegosaurus.
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20368
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Humanimal Fri May 31, 2019 10:03 am | |
| - Adam Rutherford wrote:
- Clownfish are sequential hermaphrodites. If the dominant female clownfish is removed, perhaps by being eaten, then as a result of an absence of her hormones among the group, a male--typically the largest--will move up the rung on the heavily stratified social ladder, and will spontaneously undergo a radical sex change. His testes will atrophy and he'll grow ovaries, and over the course of a couple of days, he becomes she. Removal of the dominant female clownfish is the opening to the excellent 2003 film "Finding Nemo." The biologically accurate version of this film would have the father, Marlin, physically transforming into a female, and then having sex with his own son Nemo, but I guess that would be a different, possibly less popular story.
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20368
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Humanimal Fri May 31, 2019 11:36 am | |
| - Adam Rutherford wrote:
- But masturbation is so wide-spread, and at least in mammals features such creativity, that generalized adaptive explanations fall short. Emergency room doctors will tell tales of patients presenting with unusual injuries caused by non-obvious and imaginative forms of self-stimulation. We must not judge however, and credit for resourcefulness must be given to the cetacean mammals. There is one reported case of a male dolphin masturbating by wrapping an electric eel around his penis.
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20368
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Humanimal Sat Jun 01, 2019 8:56 pm | |
| - Adam Rutherford wrote:
- Neanderthals were never in Africa as far as we know.
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20368
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Humanimal Sat Jun 01, 2019 9:23 pm | |
| - Adam Rutherford wrote:
- Pareidiola is the psychological phenomenon of seeing faces in inanimate objects--Jesus in a piece of toast, a face on the surface of Mars. Our brains know faces are important, so they recognize the pattern of a face even if there can be no mind behind it.
We are also so plugged into other consciousnesses that we detect agency when there is none. The result of a mind so highly attuned to others is that like with faces, we attribute a mind to mindless events. A creak in the floorboard as the house cools at night is creepy because our brains are trying to detect agency behind this noise, rather than rationally processing the thermodynamics of the situation. I am reluctant to delve too deeply into this, because it is only speculation and not particularly scientific, but it is attractive to think that this might be part of the explanation for religion. Our minds seek agency from another conscious mind rather than dumb nature. This is a force powerful enough for us to imagine ghosts; it could conceivably also be the genesis of gods. Mercifully, evolution has also equipped us with the biology to override this cognitive short circuit and seek the real reason why things happen. However we made gods, with careful thought we can also tuck them away again.
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20368
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Humanimal Sat Jun 01, 2019 11:01 pm | |
| - Adam Rutherford wrote:
- We've seen that there is little physical difference between a woman or man 100,000 years ago, and you or I today.
Point of grammar: shouldn't that be "You or me today"? You'd say "between a man and me" not "between a man and I" or would you? People say "the difference between you and I" all the time. Which is correct? Huh. Not sure. |
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