Thanks, came to post the same thing. Here's the Wikipedia article. Anyone wanting to read the transcript for the This American Life story the relevant section is about 3/4 down.
Article itself is kind of short on details; the original paper is quite a bit more interesting:
Spaceflight was observed to increase the number of viable cells, biofilm biomass, and thickness relative to normal gravity controls. Moreover, the biofilms formed during spaceflight exhibited a column-and-canopy structure that has not been observed on Earth. The increase in the amount of biofilms and the formation of the novel architecture during spaceflight were observed to be independent of carbon source and phosphate concentrations in the media. However, flagella-driven motility was shown to be essential for the formation of this biofilm architecture during spaceflight.
I don’t think you need crazy theories to suspect that there’s an essential quality to the totality of life that is highly adaptable, especially at the cellular and microbial level. Like there’s something going deeper than DNA, mutations and all of that. Some generalisable self organising ability that’s been cracked by the assembly of proteins/fats etc of cells. We shouldn’t underestimate it. Hell, we are literally one such adaptation.
Otherwise, yea, earth life has prior experience in space and it’s been busted!
Either adaptability/organizational ability, or some form of chaos. Under the specific environmental conditions of earth, one set of outcomes are favored, but under other conditions different outcomes are favored.
And the interplay of these outcomes and mutations can result in novel adaptations. Or something like that ¯\(ツ)/¯
The chin is situated near the area where the tongue and jawbone interact during speech. It's possible that the chin provides a surface for the tongue to move against, allowing for more complex sounds and articulations. The development of language is believed to have occurred around the same time as the emergence of Homo sapiens. While other primates have similar facial structures, they don't possess a distinct chin. This suggests that the chin might be related to the unique demands of human language.
Bingo -- other animals don't have a chin because they didn't invent languages like humans did for communication, and thus the demands of speaking weren't evenly distributed.
Next time on interesting questions 104: Why did homo sapiens develop language when other animals such as Corvids did not?
This makes more sense than the need to put on pillow cases (which has been my prevailing theory up to this point), but your question about corvids intrigues me. Partially because I'm not entirely certain of what a corvids is.
Corvids/Corvidae is a species of birds which include crows and ravens - they have demonstrated complex intelligence via tool use and social circles, so they're comparable to human intelligence of some specific various ages/milestones, but didn't invent a spoken language.
I read somewhere sometime ago that the theory that makes the most sense is that we evolved chins to take a punch, which animals besides our immediate evolutionary relatives do not do.
So we evolved chins as an evolutionary advantage over our immediate evolutionary relatives who would logically be competing for the same resources.
I read something at some point about how our fists seemed to have evolved or at least adapted to be well suited to delivering a punch. Many people do not use proper hand forms for it, but I suppose it's a learned skill if not at least through trial and error.
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