Our Animal Friends (2)

By P. M. Jaworski -
Speaking of interesting animal adaptations, consider the "cuteness" adaptation. It seems to me that one significant evolutionary advantage is big eyes, small nose, and floppy ears.

Does anyone really care to save the Striped-back snail? Or any other sort of snail? But threaten to kill a bunny and you get all sorts of attention (and contributions. Scroll down to see just how much this threat has netted this guy thus far). Or club a few baby seals and get the wrath of the rest of the world unleashed on your country (and from some hair care product site?).

Survival of the cutest.

(As for foxes, Gene, have a look at the picture I took of the fox that trotted in to the courtyard at my apartment. Yes, I would post this photo directly if I knew how.)

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