Runs, Squirms, and Squeals

By -
I'm reviewing Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel at present. While I don't think his overall thesis works, it is a fascinating book, a cornucopia of interesting information. For instance, did you know that a single wild plant is the ancestor of our modern vegetables cabbage, kale, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts, brocoli, and cauliflower, all produced by human breeding of the original?

Or, did you know what the 14 animals of over 100 pounds that have been domesticated by humans are?
  • Sheep
  • Goat
  • Cow
  • Pig
  • Horse
  • Arabian camel
  • Bactrian camel
  • Llama and alpaca (thought to be one species)
  • Donkey
  • Reindeer
  • Water buffalo
  • Yak
  • Bali cattle
  • Mithan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more