Same as all the crap that gets sold today. Some scammer, recognizing the inherent gullibility or natural cognitive biases of people invents a product or service or story, claims expertise and success, and gains some combination of wealth, power, and fame.
For example Gwyneth Paltrow makes bank by selling all kinds of crap on her Goop website.
Humans are easy to fool because our brains don't work the way we think they do and other humans exploit that for their own gain. Some, like Penn and Teller, do it honestly for entertainment, others, like Sylvia Browne, do it dishonestly by claiming powers they don't have.
That is a another good concept, but that is exactly not what this study was about, haha! This study was about using land that had been farmland for solar and restoring the natural plant life of the area. This increased the insect population dramatically, including many pollinator species, so using less productive fields for solar/natural habitat instead could further increase the yields of better fields in the area.
Absolutely! Industrial agriculture techniques can easily destroy soil & are very carbon intensive themselves due to the way we get a lot of fertilizer from fossil fuels, transport & fuel everything.
For a more wholesome example, you can put chicken coops on top of the lauded
Actually, surprisingly, I recently had a text on topic during my English studies, and it actually describes a useful perspective:
"Is play the new tool to use? A recent paper recounts bumblebees rolling tiny wooden balls, not for
a reward, but apparently just for fun. The authors conclude that the behavior fulfills the criteria for
play, with one noting: “It goes to show... that despite their small size and tiny brains, they are more
than small robotic beings.” Put another way, bees just wanna have fun, and that presumably makes
them more like people.
This discovery underscores a long-standing conflict in our view of animals. On the one hand, we
want to find the features that distinguish humans from other animals: tools, language, a theory of
mind (in which animals can infer the mental states of others). On the other, we delight in finding
animals that breach those boundaries: chimps, crows and now bees that use tools, dolphins with
signature whistles. But what do those boundaries mean?
Not much, or at least not what people sometimes think. As an evolutionary biologist who studies
animal behavior, Lam is bemused by this effort to rank animals by their capabilities. The ranking
is wrong not because animals lack amazing abilities, but because evolution doesn't produce an
organization like the military, with the equivalent of amoeba privates and primate generals.
Instead, everything that is alive today is just as evolved as everything else. Some species
(crocodiles and cockroaches, for instance) look more like their ancient ancestors than others and
may well behave more like them, but that doesn’t mean some creatures are more or less highly
evolved than the rest.
You might think that calling attention to bees and other animals that do things we didn't think they
could do would be a way to circumvent this ranking and make our view of nature more realistic.
But it isn’t. It is pointless to elevate creatures, whether bumblebees or chimps, so that we can put
them in an exclusive club that used to only contain humans.
Underpinning these efforts is a desire to show that animals, even tiny ones with lots of legs, are
like us and shouldn't be dismissed as automatons. I applaud that desire. But we can recognise
animals for what they are, and be awestruck at their abilities, without having to make their behavior
mirror that of humans. Bees may play, but that doesn’t mean they are like children with
exoskeletons.
Once we get out from under the tyranny of those rankings, of thinking that animals have to be like
people with human motivations and feelings, we are freed up to consider the mechanisms behind
the behaviors. Often, that involves convergent evolution. For example, the same neurotransmitter
— serotonin — influences anxiety in humans and maze exploration in crayfish. In a tank divided
into well-lit and shadowy areas, crayfish explore both, but prefer the dimmer areas, consistent with
their nocturnal lifestyle. Crayfish stressed by mild electrical shocks avoided the light sections of
the maze, a response that was linked to their serotonin levels and that could be altered by a
serotonin inhibitor.
If we can let go of the impulse to rank animals, we might find out that our intuition is wrong. And
being wrong is one of the most productive things about science."
TL;DR Animals evolve to have all sorts of traits we may perceive as "humanlike", but that's just a product of our fallacies that drive us to put animals into an exclusive "human club" - in fact, they just evolve to have various traits we see in ourselves, just like animals with other unique properties.
The declaration was published Friday at an event at New York University, where scientists engaged in active and at times heated debate about the state of the science on animal consciousness, and the wisdom of releasing such a statement at all.
The problem of considering animal consciousness is that it “immediately brings us into contact with serious imaginative limitations,” signatory Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, told attendees.
All scientists, he said, ”are familiar with articles that summarize research that people do not trust — because they feel they are cherry-picking the data, they are relying on studies that are not objective.”
He added that while the signatories themselves disagreed on the dimensions of animal consciousness and its ethical implications, they agreed “big steps have been taken in the last 10 years,” and that these needed to be part of the conversation.
Per a summary of the recent research in Quanta Magazine, “we now know, for example, that octopuses feel pain and cuttlefish remember details of specific past events … and that zebra fish show signs of curiosity.”
In the insect world, Quanta noted that “bees show apparent play behavior, while Drosophila fruit flies have distinct sleep patterns influenced by their social environment.
The original article contains 824 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
My stylist just got seven baby chicks and was startled that they seemed to be developing distinct personalities. “I thought chickens were, ya know, just chickens”.
My theory is that it's the possible terrestrial-equivalent to carcination ( the convergent-evolution of "crabs" evolving 6 separate times, in the sea, from different origins ).
I've no idea if cladistics will back that,
and don't really care,
but it seems that convergent-evolution would operate both in the air and in the water, so .. possible .. why not, eh?
Yep, success is success, in any medium. convergent evolution can be found wherever we find life, from vents to the upper atmosphere. Terrestrial biology has had four and a half billion years to try everything, and try it in 50 different ages. Where characteristics impart a benefit to passing on genes, it'll probably find success.
I wonder after all those billions of years if we've had all the options tried, or if we're just getting going. Probably depends on having a viable ecosystem tho. :|
You don't fuck with the carrot family. There's lots of poison in there.
Mint family, violet family (True violets, not African violets) and onion family go crazy. They are pretty much all safe for human consumption. Carrots be cautious
"These bugs are also known to bite unsuspecting humans between the toes, hence why they're called "toe-biters," though this bite is nontoxic and we're far too big to be their prey."
"But other hybrids have five copies of each chromosome: They somehow received the equivalent of their sturgeon mom’s full genome plus a half-genome from their paddlefish dad."
Biodiversity
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