Evolution graffiti in my hometown

The late Stephen J. Gould would puke in front of this masterpiece, it’s phylogenetically definitely wrong but it’s not bad at all! Click on the thumbnail to see the whole image (1.2 MB). The location is Prato, Italy, not far from Florence.

Read Full Post »

Neoteny as a human sexual trait

ne·ot·e·ny   [nee-ot-n-ee] –noun Biology.
1. Also called pedogenesis. the production of offspring by an organism in its larval or juvenile form; the elimination of the adult phase of the life cycle. 2. a slowing of the rate of development with the consequent retention in adulthood of a feature or features that appeared in an earlier phase [...]

Read Full Post »

Cephalopods, give ‘em a million years

Octopi are smart guys, they evolved, over millions of years, a sort of brain, a fusion of the small ganglia present in other mollusks into a specialized neural mass. Octopi (and to a certain extent cuttlefish) exhibit spatial learning and, for someone, even observational learning. But some Cephalopods, like the Caribbean [...]

Read Full Post »

Morris, Congo, chimera ethics and bonobo telegraphs

.
Big soup post. Zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter Desmond Morris trained a chimp, Congo, in the 1950s in abstract expressionist painting. His (its?) paintings (one of which is pictured above) recently scored a record price for chimp-art at a london auction. Picasso reportedly owned and loved a Congo painting.
In the meanwhile reserchers are trying to [...]

Read Full Post »

Gorilla hermeneutics

So this gorilla walks into a bar. The gorilla slaps a $10 bill on the counter and says, “Give me a beer.”
Bartender figures what does a gorilla know? So he gives him the beer, but only gives him $1 in change. It’s a slow night, though, so the bartender figures he should make some conversation. [...]

Read Full Post »

Wish I was there…

Or maybe not, as «Nature is red in tooth and claw».
But what have people been doing for the last 200,000 years? And in particular what have they been doing for the 194,000 that precede historical record? Early civilization dates back to 6000 years ago, the invention of agriculture to 10,000. So you want me to [...]

Read Full Post »

M-theory to explain the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

I was just kidding, but there is indeed a certain familiarity between noodles and strings. String theory is almost incomprehensible for most people, but theists (or pastafarians) and materialists alike can enjoy the extra simple explanations provided by the flashy PBS Nova series The Elegant Universe, hosted by the Columbia physicist Brian Greene and now [...]

Read Full Post »

Sumerian Me, memes, neurolinguistics and information warfare

Ok, the inspiration for this post stems from the cult classic Snow Crash (Stephenson, 1992), so most of you may have already encountered this stuff.
It goes like this, more or less:
The Sumerians developed a set of rules and regulations called me that encompassed every aspect of life, belief, technology, behaviour and human conditions. They [...]

Read Full Post »

Early Cambrian food chain

Studies are trickling out on the fauna of early Cambrian, as you certainly know (Gould, 1989) fossil sediments in shale deposits (such as the Burgess Shale in British Columbia and the Maotianshan Shale in China) are the evidence that in early cambrian a lot of animal phyla (that is body plans) evolved and extinguished themselves, [...]

Read Full Post »

Cone snails and cellular automata

Cone snails shells, in particular the Conus textile exhibit patterns similar to those of cellular automata (Wolfram, 1982-1988). Their cells secrete pigments when stimulated from the neighbour, provoking a chain reaction and a form of equilibrium that looks like it’s based on a mathematical rule.
Oh, some of them are deadly poisonous, like the Cigarette [...]

Read Full Post »