Nurturing Animals Shaped Human Evolution | Animal Connection Drove Development of Language and Domestication | LiveScience

[The] earliest known domesticated animal was not a delicious porker, but man's best friend. Shipman considers humans' strong connection with animals, rather than a desire for food, as the more likely explanation for why people ( Read more... )

The Onion - America's Finest News Source

http://www.theonion.com/articles/rhino-tickbird-stuck-in-deadend-symbiotic-relation,2287/

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I have a theory that in many cases, crimes of violence, such as rape, assault & battery, and murder, or forced consent, such as molestation, seduction, and rape committed by adults against children, are caused, among other factors, by one or more viruses1 present in the limbic brains of the perpetrators.2The main priority of any microbe is to get ( Read more... )

1) Were carnivorous lady dinosaurs social creatures, babysitting one another's eggs and young, thereby vastly increasing all their chances of genetic survival? How could one go about getting an answer to this question?

2) How did the average carnosaur avoid massive dental disease? Munching on cycads, the way we and some other carnivorous mammals ( Read more... )

Lately I've been reading Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997; ISBN 0-520-21064-6). On pp. 171-172, they say: "The Canadian biologists K. Pirozynski and D. Malloch belive plants emerged from symbioses between algae and fungi. According to ( Read more... )

Rich --

As you know, for many years I've had a theory about the possibility that ecosystems and even our living world might have intelligence in their own right.( Read more... )

". . . Over the past fifty years or so, scientists have observed that prokaryotes routinely and rapidly transfer different bits of genetic material to other individuals. Each bacterium at any given time has the use of accessory genes, visiting from sometimes very different strains, which perform functions that its own DNA may not cover.( Read more... )