you have got to be fucking kidding me.
it is unbelievable to me what we are willing to do to other creatures to avoid making changes in our own behavior. in sydney, scientists are trying to isolate a bacteria present in the kangaroo digestive system that increases the efficiency of digestion such that they do not produce methane in their flatulence. they want to make transgenic anti-methane-farting cows.
my immediate reaction to this is to emphasize the extent to which we already use hormones and steroids to manipulate the physiology of sheep and cattle to support our consumption habits.
secondarily, i migrate to thoughts about feed production and the amount of grain used to fatten cattle that could be used in fair trade to help poverty stricken areas of drought and lack of food. supposedly, this bacteria increases efficiency of digestion such that farmers could reduce the amount of feed used to fatten cattle... of course, "decreasing the cost to farmers by millions of dollars," but who really cares about what benefit that might have to the animal, right?
here's my dilemma. do you fight against yet another forced alteration in cow physiology in the name of turning the action toward changing human behavior? or do you allow the isolation and transduction of this bacteria that might make our forced feeding protocol easier on the cow, but continue to steer responsibility away from humans?
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=29&art_id=vn20071207092135298C758249&set_id=1
Monday, May 5, 2008
autonoetic awareness and episodic memory
Much of the human experience – the way we characterize ourselves as persons – can be attributed to our episodic memory. This is the ability to travel through time, in the form of recollection, to past experiences in order to know how and why we acquired certain knowledge. Episodic memory is characterized by Endel Tulving by three qualities: sense of time, self, and autonoetic awareness. He describes it as a phenomenological quality distinct to humans, and not experienced by non-human animals. But here's where it gets hazy... it is difficult to assess whether non-human animals exercise episodic memory because they can't linguistically report their personal experiences. As such, our best shot at at studying episodic memory in non-human animal models is to assess the animal’s memory of what happened, where it happened and when it happened. Because such tests do not require a consciously directed inference to memory, they are said to assess episodic-like memory.
This consciously directed inference is what Tulving called autonoetic awareness... being the directed retrieval of a specific object of memory. This is distinct from autonoetic consciousness, which Tulving does not reference in describing episodic memory, but which is important to defining the phenomenon in non-human animals. Autonoetic consciousness has no object; rather, it is the fluid link throughout one’s past memories, present, and future projections.
Autonoetic awareness requires the use of mental time travel: reliving a targeted event of the past and using it to consider possible future scenarios. Autonoetic consciousness, because it does not require identifying the context of a specific event, does not imply mental time travel. One can conceivably travel back in time along a conscious continuum without targeting a specific time and place for an event, but knowing that it occurred somewhere in the past. For example, a person knows when and where they were born without remembering the experience. It becomes difficult to assess which of the two phenomena occurs in non-human animals because they can't declare thoughts about specific events of the past. We can't assume that because non-human animals can’t verbalize mental time travel that they do not have it, and therefore do not have autonoetic awareness. This confound requires the development of tests that allow non-human animals to declare their thoughts not with verbalization, but gesture or other physical expression.
Rhesus monkeys can appropriately refuse to submit to a visual image test when they do not think they will choose the correct answers. This test design successfully demonstrates that monkeys know when they remember a learning event or not. However, it does not directly implicate mental time travel, or presume autonoetic awareness. More likely, it suggests autonoetic consciousness - knowing that a particular piece of information is lodged somewhere in memory, but not necessarily targeting it on the streamline of consciousness. Because studies like this one more closely imply autonoetic consciousness, they support the theory of episodic-like memory, and not human-like episodic memory.
Clayton and Dickinson are pretty famous for their studies on Scrub jays argue, again, that non-human animals exhibit episodic-like memory based on an experimental design which targeted two of the three qualities of episodic memory: sense of time, and self. Clayton and Dickinson designed a caching apparatus in which scrub jays could store both preferred perishable (worms), and less preferred non-perishable (peanuts) foods. After a short period away from the caching apparatus, Scrub jays preferred to recover the worms. But... after a longer delay, they chose to recover the non-perishable although less preferred food. This fairly ingeniusly exemplifies the use of autonoetic consciousness in the birds... but in spite of its brilliant layout does not speak to autonoetic awareness.
It's worth noting that an argument could be made for the presence of autonoetic awareness in scrub jays based on their ability to distinguish between a 4hr and 124hr time period. This observation (part of the Clayton/Dickinson study) suggests that the jays were able to target a general place in time when they cached both foods so as to be able to discern that the preferred food (worm) had likely decayed since. Inferring this kind of targeting argues for autonoetic awareness... However!, it may also be the case that as with the Rhesus monkeys, the 124hr delay may have allowed scrub jays simply to forget when they cached an item. It has been shown to be the case in both rat and primates modeled in similar tasks that the memory of “when” was poorer than “what,” and “where." So... if this was the case with the scrub jays, then not being able to recall exactly when they cached the food stuff, they may have recovered the less-perishable but less preferable food simply to avoid the risk that the preferred food may have decayed. The propensity of risk averse behavior in scrub jays may give stronger baring to the argument for autonoetic consciousness than autonoetic awareness... eh?
So my last blip of this rant is this: there has been insight into the anatomical component of episodic memory in humans that may provide a link between behavioral demonstrations in humans and non-human animals. In humans, the right prefrontal cortex has been identified as a key brain region in the recall of episodic memories. Given that Clayton/Dickinson claim that their experimental design targets episodic-like memory retrieval, it would be a valuable experiment to investigate the prefrontal cortex activity in these birds as they are retrieving cached food. If the same region of the prefrontal cortex is activated during this activity, it suggests the biochemical validity of the Scrub jay findings. However, the Scrub jay is evolutionarily several orders of phylogeny removed from humans... this presents the confound of their significantly less developed prefrontal cortex. In the primate and rat models of episodic-like memory, it would be invaluable to compare a PET assessment of right prefrontal cortex activity during memory tasks. If, in the primate model, there were both a behavioral correlate in episodic-like memory tasks and activity in the right prefrontal cortex, we might be able to definitively say that animals experience episodic memory in the same way that humans do. That is, that they exercise sense of self, time and autonoetic awareness.
For now, we are only able to infer that non-human animals exhibit episodic-like memory. It remains to be concluded whether non-human animals exercise autonoetic consciousness or awareness. Determining which phenomenon is occuring will give greater insight into the behavior of non-human animals, and better address the question of whether episodic-like memory is as close to episodic memory as non-human animals get. It is entirely possible that non-human animals have only episodic-like memory because they have autonoetic consciousness, and not autonoetic awareness. However, it may also be the case that we have not found a way to enable non-human animals to declare their past experiences in a suitable way...
This consciously directed inference is what Tulving called autonoetic awareness... being the directed retrieval of a specific object of memory. This is distinct from autonoetic consciousness, which Tulving does not reference in describing episodic memory, but which is important to defining the phenomenon in non-human animals. Autonoetic consciousness has no object; rather, it is the fluid link throughout one’s past memories, present, and future projections.
Autonoetic awareness requires the use of mental time travel: reliving a targeted event of the past and using it to consider possible future scenarios. Autonoetic consciousness, because it does not require identifying the context of a specific event, does not imply mental time travel. One can conceivably travel back in time along a conscious continuum without targeting a specific time and place for an event, but knowing that it occurred somewhere in the past. For example, a person knows when and where they were born without remembering the experience. It becomes difficult to assess which of the two phenomena occurs in non-human animals because they can't declare thoughts about specific events of the past. We can't assume that because non-human animals can’t verbalize mental time travel that they do not have it, and therefore do not have autonoetic awareness. This confound requires the development of tests that allow non-human animals to declare their thoughts not with verbalization, but gesture or other physical expression.
Rhesus monkeys can appropriately refuse to submit to a visual image test when they do not think they will choose the correct answers. This test design successfully demonstrates that monkeys know when they remember a learning event or not. However, it does not directly implicate mental time travel, or presume autonoetic awareness. More likely, it suggests autonoetic consciousness - knowing that a particular piece of information is lodged somewhere in memory, but not necessarily targeting it on the streamline of consciousness. Because studies like this one more closely imply autonoetic consciousness, they support the theory of episodic-like memory, and not human-like episodic memory.
Clayton and Dickinson are pretty famous for their studies on Scrub jays argue, again, that non-human animals exhibit episodic-like memory based on an experimental design which targeted two of the three qualities of episodic memory: sense of time, and self. Clayton and Dickinson designed a caching apparatus in which scrub jays could store both preferred perishable (worms), and less preferred non-perishable (peanuts) foods. After a short period away from the caching apparatus, Scrub jays preferred to recover the worms. But... after a longer delay, they chose to recover the non-perishable although less preferred food. This fairly ingeniusly exemplifies the use of autonoetic consciousness in the birds... but in spite of its brilliant layout does not speak to autonoetic awareness.
It's worth noting that an argument could be made for the presence of autonoetic awareness in scrub jays based on their ability to distinguish between a 4hr and 124hr time period. This observation (part of the Clayton/Dickinson study) suggests that the jays were able to target a general place in time when they cached both foods so as to be able to discern that the preferred food (worm) had likely decayed since. Inferring this kind of targeting argues for autonoetic awareness... However!, it may also be the case that as with the Rhesus monkeys, the 124hr delay may have allowed scrub jays simply to forget when they cached an item. It has been shown to be the case in both rat and primates modeled in similar tasks that the memory of “when” was poorer than “what,” and “where." So... if this was the case with the scrub jays, then not being able to recall exactly when they cached the food stuff, they may have recovered the less-perishable but less preferable food simply to avoid the risk that the preferred food may have decayed. The propensity of risk averse behavior in scrub jays may give stronger baring to the argument for autonoetic consciousness than autonoetic awareness... eh?
So my last blip of this rant is this: there has been insight into the anatomical component of episodic memory in humans that may provide a link between behavioral demonstrations in humans and non-human animals. In humans, the right prefrontal cortex has been identified as a key brain region in the recall of episodic memories. Given that Clayton/Dickinson claim that their experimental design targets episodic-like memory retrieval, it would be a valuable experiment to investigate the prefrontal cortex activity in these birds as they are retrieving cached food. If the same region of the prefrontal cortex is activated during this activity, it suggests the biochemical validity of the Scrub jay findings. However, the Scrub jay is evolutionarily several orders of phylogeny removed from humans... this presents the confound of their significantly less developed prefrontal cortex. In the primate and rat models of episodic-like memory, it would be invaluable to compare a PET assessment of right prefrontal cortex activity during memory tasks. If, in the primate model, there were both a behavioral correlate in episodic-like memory tasks and activity in the right prefrontal cortex, we might be able to definitively say that animals experience episodic memory in the same way that humans do. That is, that they exercise sense of self, time and autonoetic awareness.
For now, we are only able to infer that non-human animals exhibit episodic-like memory. It remains to be concluded whether non-human animals exercise autonoetic consciousness or awareness. Determining which phenomenon is occuring will give greater insight into the behavior of non-human animals, and better address the question of whether episodic-like memory is as close to episodic memory as non-human animals get. It is entirely possible that non-human animals have only episodic-like memory because they have autonoetic consciousness, and not autonoetic awareness. However, it may also be the case that we have not found a way to enable non-human animals to declare their past experiences in a suitable way...
Sunday, May 4, 2008
lng
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIpDwMusgGE
"thinking of things like 'the world' and 'the highway of life' are a little too absolute to be practical. it makes trying new things too insignificant"
-andy
"we’re piping liquefied natural gas through the soil, gaseous clouds of coal dust through the pipes of lungs and greenhouse fumes through arctic walls while hot air pipes through shards of clay drenched in drought, and exacerbated monsoon seasons make new pipelines through crops and homes and fashion environmental refugees.
"immigration lines pummel through desert through mountains because poverty does not recognize boundaries and when survival is hard we fall into lines to trick ourselves into thinking that we are leaving these volatile seasons behind, but don’t think that your cultural walk is distinct from the walk of industrial revolution whose footprint stamps over the pipelines of refugees seeking life beyond inhospitable domain because we are what’s gotten us here.
"climate chaos charges in waves but waves are crashed into lines and redirected back to the sea where this all begins and ends and I feel as though if we were more directly evolved from fish we would know this – that when streamlining pipelines get dirty and breakdown they are not suitable for rebuilding our home.
"we can’t break this by putting down any more pipelines. human lines are our green sanctuary and the invincible indispensable inexorable force against the chaos of fuel. we are cultivators and innovators tide breakers and bullion bulwarks rising higher and louder than the rising tides, against the pipelines. "
- ride your bike, wear slippers, flush selectively, talk to your senators.
"thinking of things like 'the world' and 'the highway of life' are a little too absolute to be practical. it makes trying new things too insignificant"
-andy
"we’re piping liquefied natural gas through the soil, gaseous clouds of coal dust through the pipes of lungs and greenhouse fumes through arctic walls while hot air pipes through shards of clay drenched in drought, and exacerbated monsoon seasons make new pipelines through crops and homes and fashion environmental refugees.
"immigration lines pummel through desert through mountains because poverty does not recognize boundaries and when survival is hard we fall into lines to trick ourselves into thinking that we are leaving these volatile seasons behind, but don’t think that your cultural walk is distinct from the walk of industrial revolution whose footprint stamps over the pipelines of refugees seeking life beyond inhospitable domain because we are what’s gotten us here.
"climate chaos charges in waves but waves are crashed into lines and redirected back to the sea where this all begins and ends and I feel as though if we were more directly evolved from fish we would know this – that when streamlining pipelines get dirty and breakdown they are not suitable for rebuilding our home.
"we can’t break this by putting down any more pipelines. human lines are our green sanctuary and the invincible indispensable inexorable force against the chaos of fuel. we are cultivators and innovators tide breakers and bullion bulwarks rising higher and louder than the rising tides, against the pipelines. "
- ride your bike, wear slippers, flush selectively, talk to your senators.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
fanaticism.
The idea of getting it right every single time is not realistic. Too much pressure to make the right choice at every step makes us frustrated and filled with angst... and we are more likely not to make any of the choices we ambitiously intended at all.
This is where so many doctrines are flawed; they don't function corroboratively with pragmatism. Religion, environmentalism, science, policy... strive to be louder and more important than their ism peers, and in so doing, become campaigns of hysteria. They lose their stalwart integrity and become gritty and desperate. And as they take on this nature we, as humans, agnize the ridiculousness of abiding by every rule at every step... and most unfortunately, rather become cowed by our own fanaticism than turn to pragmatic innovation of our behavior.
If we wait for the perfect leader, nothing will ever get done. If we set out to be immediately flawless, we are doomed to fail. Deliberation is what gives integrity to a campaign, and holds it shy of fanaticism. But we are hungry for a coherent package of rules... and deliberation encourages clauses of exceptions, which teeter precariously on the stilts of innovation with which we have not yet learned to walk confidently. Why are we so pusillanimous of breaking the rules in the name of pragmatism? It doesn't seem physically plausible to be so entirely unaccepting of philosophical integration without becoming dysfunctional - without undermining our precious capacity to critically assess the balance of things.
I'm rather doomed to be a little pragmatic, and not tied to the rigidity of certain campaigns. Avoid some things generally. Pay attention. Be cognizant that I can't do everything.
This is where so many doctrines are flawed; they don't function corroboratively with pragmatism. Religion, environmentalism, science, policy... strive to be louder and more important than their ism peers, and in so doing, become campaigns of hysteria. They lose their stalwart integrity and become gritty and desperate. And as they take on this nature we, as humans, agnize the ridiculousness of abiding by every rule at every step... and most unfortunately, rather become cowed by our own fanaticism than turn to pragmatic innovation of our behavior.
If we wait for the perfect leader, nothing will ever get done. If we set out to be immediately flawless, we are doomed to fail. Deliberation is what gives integrity to a campaign, and holds it shy of fanaticism. But we are hungry for a coherent package of rules... and deliberation encourages clauses of exceptions, which teeter precariously on the stilts of innovation with which we have not yet learned to walk confidently. Why are we so pusillanimous of breaking the rules in the name of pragmatism? It doesn't seem physically plausible to be so entirely unaccepting of philosophical integration without becoming dysfunctional - without undermining our precious capacity to critically assess the balance of things.
I'm rather doomed to be a little pragmatic, and not tied to the rigidity of certain campaigns. Avoid some things generally. Pay attention. Be cognizant that I can't do everything.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
empty thoughts VII
7. Prepare for a long wind...
Experiment I: I wonder why the experimenters didn’t comment on the distance the animals maintained from each respective speaker. This seems like it would be a factor in sound-side preference because at the apex of the V-apparatus, sound waves from both high and low amplitude sound could be experienced to the same degree. So if an animal lingered near the apex of the V-apparatus it would suggest that the animal prefers a mixture of the two frequencies. However, if animals tended to spend more time at the tips of the V-arms, it would indicate a more selective preference for a particular sound amplitude over the other. It makes perfect sense that animals would prefer softer sounds, and when trained to expect that softer sound to come from a particular arm of the V-apparatus they would spend more time in that arm in the session directly following the sound-side switch. The observation that animals switched arms in order to spend more time in proximity to the soft sounds speaks to the integrity of the apparatus. It shows that animals were clearly making a sound-preference and are able to re-orient themselves relative to that sound preference.
Experiment II: Because the experimenters used the same animals for the distress call experiment as the loud/soft experiment, I think it was a good choice to test them with loud/soft stimuli first. Had animals been tested with distress/feeding sounds first, and the soft sound happened to be played from the same V-arm as a distress call, the animals may have shown preference for loud amplitude which would have been associated with the same arm as the feeding call, which would have hindered the validity of the results. It is interesting that animals do not show as drastic a preference between distress/feeding calls as between loud/soft calls. I think this may be an artifact of having been previously tested with loud/soft calls, because it seems contrary to evolutionary survival to have a sharper preference with regard to random loud/soft amplitudes than to distress/feeding amplitudes, as the latter distinction is far more ecologically relevant to survival than the former.
Experiment III: The data from this experiment are fascinating. What if the preference of humans for consonant sounds comes from the parameters of sound frequencies in our language? Especially because these participants were all (presumably) English-speaking - or at least Latin-derived language speaking – it seems that in our language, the tones we produce in sequence (sentences and longer) may have something to do with this preference. For instance, other languages which are not Latin-derived may use vowels or consonants in dissonant combinations, whereas English tends to have a very consonant flow between letters, words and phrases. Whereas tamarins, because they do not have a language of distinct vowels and consonants, but of variations in sound frequency, may not have a preference between consonant and dissonant sounds because these are both part of their typical language. I REALLY, REALLY WANT TO SEE THIS EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN USED TO COMPARE DIFFERENT LANGUAGE SPEAKING HUMANS TO ANY OTHER ANIMAL.
Experiment IV: As in experiment III, it seems likely that an explanation for the lack of preference between screech/noise control in tamarins might have something to do with their language. Humans do not communicate with screeching noises and in fact the only populations of us who seem to enjoy them are punk-metal emo kids. Tamarins, on the other hand, and many other primate species seem to use screeching variables in their communication patterns, which seems an important explanation for their lack of preference in this experiment.
As a whole, I really like this experiment design and the questions that it is addressing. It somewhat reminds me that solid research in the realm of evolutionary cognition is being done (which as you may have noticed, has thus far been forgotten...). However, I’m sorely disappointed with the lack of creative discussion of the implications of their results (as usual). There is such a huge window of consideration opened by this research about sound preferences and their correlations with behavior, language and evolutionary divergence in humans and non-human primates.
(McDermott and Hauser 2004)
Experiment I: I wonder why the experimenters didn’t comment on the distance the animals maintained from each respective speaker. This seems like it would be a factor in sound-side preference because at the apex of the V-apparatus, sound waves from both high and low amplitude sound could be experienced to the same degree. So if an animal lingered near the apex of the V-apparatus it would suggest that the animal prefers a mixture of the two frequencies. However, if animals tended to spend more time at the tips of the V-arms, it would indicate a more selective preference for a particular sound amplitude over the other. It makes perfect sense that animals would prefer softer sounds, and when trained to expect that softer sound to come from a particular arm of the V-apparatus they would spend more time in that arm in the session directly following the sound-side switch. The observation that animals switched arms in order to spend more time in proximity to the soft sounds speaks to the integrity of the apparatus. It shows that animals were clearly making a sound-preference and are able to re-orient themselves relative to that sound preference.
Experiment II: Because the experimenters used the same animals for the distress call experiment as the loud/soft experiment, I think it was a good choice to test them with loud/soft stimuli first. Had animals been tested with distress/feeding sounds first, and the soft sound happened to be played from the same V-arm as a distress call, the animals may have shown preference for loud amplitude which would have been associated with the same arm as the feeding call, which would have hindered the validity of the results. It is interesting that animals do not show as drastic a preference between distress/feeding calls as between loud/soft calls. I think this may be an artifact of having been previously tested with loud/soft calls, because it seems contrary to evolutionary survival to have a sharper preference with regard to random loud/soft amplitudes than to distress/feeding amplitudes, as the latter distinction is far more ecologically relevant to survival than the former.
Experiment III: The data from this experiment are fascinating. What if the preference of humans for consonant sounds comes from the parameters of sound frequencies in our language? Especially because these participants were all (presumably) English-speaking - or at least Latin-derived language speaking – it seems that in our language, the tones we produce in sequence (sentences and longer) may have something to do with this preference. For instance, other languages which are not Latin-derived may use vowels or consonants in dissonant combinations, whereas English tends to have a very consonant flow between letters, words and phrases. Whereas tamarins, because they do not have a language of distinct vowels and consonants, but of variations in sound frequency, may not have a preference between consonant and dissonant sounds because these are both part of their typical language. I REALLY, REALLY WANT TO SEE THIS EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN USED TO COMPARE DIFFERENT LANGUAGE SPEAKING HUMANS TO ANY OTHER ANIMAL.
Experiment IV: As in experiment III, it seems likely that an explanation for the lack of preference between screech/noise control in tamarins might have something to do with their language. Humans do not communicate with screeching noises and in fact the only populations of us who seem to enjoy them are punk-metal emo kids. Tamarins, on the other hand, and many other primate species seem to use screeching variables in their communication patterns, which seems an important explanation for their lack of preference in this experiment.
As a whole, I really like this experiment design and the questions that it is addressing. It somewhat reminds me that solid research in the realm of evolutionary cognition is being done (which as you may have noticed, has thus far been forgotten...). However, I’m sorely disappointed with the lack of creative discussion of the implications of their results (as usual). There is such a huge window of consideration opened by this research about sound preferences and their correlations with behavior, language and evolutionary divergence in humans and non-human primates.
(McDermott and Hauser 2004)
Monday, April 7, 2008
kulongoski.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIpDwMusgGE
"thinking of things like 'the world' and 'the highway of life' are a little too absolute to be practical. it makes trying new things too insignificant"
-amm
"we’re piping liquefied natural gas through the soil, gaseous clouds of coal dust through the pipes of lungs and greenhouse fumes through arctic walls while hot air pipes through shards of clay drenched in drought, and exacerbated monsoon seasons make new pipelines through crops and homes and fashion environmental refugees.
"immigration lines pummel through desert through mountains because poverty does not recognize boundaries and when survival is hard we fall into lines to trick ourselves into thinking that we are leaving these volatile seasons behind, but don’t think that your cultural walk is distinct from the walk of industrial revolution whose footprint stamps over the pipelines of refugees seeking life beyond inhospitable domain because we are what’s gotten us here.
"climate chaos charges in waves but waves are crashed into lines and redirected back to the sea where this all begins and ends and I feel as though if we were more directly evolved from fish we would know this – that when streamlining pipelines get dirty and breakdown they are not suitable for rebuilding our home.
"we can’t break this by putting down any more pipelines. human lines are our green sanctuary and the invincible indispensable inexorable force against the chaos of fuel. we are cultivators and innovators tide breakers and bullion bulwarks rising higher and louder than the rising tides, against the pipelines. "
- ride your bike, wear slippers, flush selectively, talk to your senators.
"thinking of things like 'the world' and 'the highway of life' are a little too absolute to be practical. it makes trying new things too insignificant"
-amm
"we’re piping liquefied natural gas through the soil, gaseous clouds of coal dust through the pipes of lungs and greenhouse fumes through arctic walls while hot air pipes through shards of clay drenched in drought, and exacerbated monsoon seasons make new pipelines through crops and homes and fashion environmental refugees.
"immigration lines pummel through desert through mountains because poverty does not recognize boundaries and when survival is hard we fall into lines to trick ourselves into thinking that we are leaving these volatile seasons behind, but don’t think that your cultural walk is distinct from the walk of industrial revolution whose footprint stamps over the pipelines of refugees seeking life beyond inhospitable domain because we are what’s gotten us here.
"climate chaos charges in waves but waves are crashed into lines and redirected back to the sea where this all begins and ends and I feel as though if we were more directly evolved from fish we would know this – that when streamlining pipelines get dirty and breakdown they are not suitable for rebuilding our home.
"we can’t break this by putting down any more pipelines. human lines are our green sanctuary and the invincible indispensable inexorable force against the chaos of fuel. we are cultivators and innovators tide breakers and bullion bulwarks rising higher and louder than the rising tides, against the pipelines. "
- ride your bike, wear slippers, flush selectively, talk to your senators.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
empty thoughts VI
6. Hare and Tomasello (1998) speak to the differences between the way wolves and dogs respond to human gaze cues. Previous studies suggest that the ability of dogs to respond to the gaze of humans is a derivative of their ancestral skill of reading behavior of fellow hunters. Contrarily, wolves, even when reared by humans don’t exhibit such skill. The domesticated dog line has been evolving for thousands of years. It is, of yet, not conclusive as to when dog domestication began. Mitochondrial DNA says the wolf and dog lines split around 100,000 years ago. It is my perspective on this issue that for the wolf and dog genetic lines to split, there had to have been a large era of domestication that occurred first. Historical perspective entices me to infer that dogs are more evolutionarily equipped to respond to a human gaze cue than a wolf, who is more equipped to respond to peer gaze cues or hunting posture. I suppose my reaction, then, to H & T’s reference is that I don’t feel that it portrays anything novel to contribute to their article. Of course wolves don’t respond as well as dogs to the gaze cues of humans; being reared by humans does not replace thousands of years of species domestication and divergence. During their process of domestication, the skill of recognizing peer behavioral cues must have evolved to respond more directly to human (master) cues. I'm bored with their thoughts...
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