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Random News Stuff
First: Four year old uses her bike to murder an 87 year old woman.Um... lolwut? I completely disagree that four years and nine months old is old enough to use critical thinking and reasoning skills. Children at this age BARELY use their frontal lobe for decision making (the frontal lobe is used for higher order thinking, like empathy and resisting ( Read more... ) -
Bat echolocation
Man, I am so good at this blogging thing. =P ( Read more... ) -
Appetative and Consumatory Behaviours
There's a line of thinking in ethology (and more rarely in psychology in general) that states that all behaviours can be broken down into appetative or consumatory behaviours. Consumatory behaviours are pretty much any behaviour that is an endpoint of an action, like eating or sex. Appetative behaviours are any actions that lead to an endpoint, ( Read more... ) -
Language Evolution
Humans are the only organisms considered to have true language. The only other animals that come closest to having a true language are song birds. This is not to say that many animals do not communicate verbally or otherwise, and some animals may even have more complex language characteristics such as deep syntax. What separates human language ( Read more... ) -
Fun Fact: Octopi
Fun Fact!: Octopi have photo receptor cells on their tentacles which allow them to "see" their environment with their bodies and mimic it almost instantly. This means that even blind octopi can camouflage themselves almost flawlessly ( Read more... ) -
Human Attraction - Symmetry
Humans find symmetry among other humans attractive. This has an evolutionary origin (which is pretty obvious, when you consider damn near all animals find symmetry attractive, and many choose mates based solely on how symmetric they are) which is actually based on fetal development. When a fetus is developing, ideally it should develop to be ( Read more... ) -
Nature Versus Nurture
Classes started last Thursday, but we haven't really learned much yet (as is expected during the first class). In my animal behavior class, we're discussing the different levels of analysis. I think it may be very useful to explain this concept here, since many laymen (and scientists, too) are not aware of or do not consider this when examining ( Read more... ) -
Rat-Eating Plant, Ancient Squid, and Flashy Worms
Rat-Eating PlantSummary: A pitcher plant was discovered in the Philippines that is so large and complex, it can trap and digest rats! Natural selection at its best, people ( Read more... ) -
Science, Laypeople, and Opinions
Classes don't start for almost another four weeks, so I figured I'd discuss some politics in the meantime ( Read more... )