differentiation

ok it's been awhile since i've actually blogged about something. so here it goes. 

heh, don't let the title scare you. its not about math, its about us.

what separates man from animal? i mean, ultimately everyone with the slightest bit of trust in our biological field knows that the current theory is that ah meng's our long long long long long distance cousin. but so many of us are so certain that there's something different and special about us that separates us from animals. so what's our trait that differentiates us from animals? 

is it intelligence? i don't think so. so far, we've trained dolphins to learn our language. we've taught gorillas sign language. we've taught dogs to specifically pick out drugs (how many of us can stand outside a random kitchen and tell us exactly what are the spices being used and what's being cooked now?). we've trained pigeons to pilot missiles (trust me on this, its true). we've even taught chimpanzees to send electronic signals to a mechanical arm to bring bananas to them. heck, we've taught WASPS to pick out bombs. so far, we've shown how we can use animals, but really, all it has successfully done is to show to every alien in the universe that all the animals here have a significant ability to learn. heck, put food in a bottle and screw the cap on. leave it with an octopus, and it will figure out that the cover opens by unscrewing it. can we do that? i mean we've SEEN people open bottle caps. octopuses haven't. do we possess such abilities? how bout learning what dolphins are saying? or knowing which bark means i'm hungry and which means "dammit, i have to sit again?" all we have done so far is to show that we know how to make other things more knowledgeable. but does that equate intelligence?

is it love? HA don't even get me started. which other freaking species have waged a 106 year war with its own because one thinks that their jesus is better than their enemy's jesus? which other species have created weapons SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED to kill their own kind? i mean honestly speaking, i don't think you can use a gattling gun for ANY other reason. and neither do i think F-16 falcons were designed to kill pigeons. wanna know what other animals exhibit monogamy? lovebirds are monogamous. heck, lets move into the reptile category. shingleback lizards are one such examples. they have only one partner and will always remain faithful to that partner, even after that partner has died. we're talking about reptiles here. 

self awareness. right. some studies have shown that bees possess self awareness. yes there are specific tests to show that one possesses such traits, and yes, it is possible to test it on a bee. so, example of insect. Q.E.D, don't need to go further.

logical mind. heh. if logical mind= beyond animal, then a VAST majourity of humans on earth are no different from savage donkeys. i mean really, honestly, how many of you dare to even sit in a room with an aids patient? even at lower secondary level, where you already know that HIV is only transmittable via intimate body contact. how many would dare share a meal with one of them? logically, they are perfectly harmless, as long as you don't start acting out your fantasies with them. the number of people who smoke, who take drugs, who endulge in alcohol, all with full knowledge that they're just heavily investing in a suicide. "addiction" you say, then why even start? 

it took years to let people realise that they do not have divine right to rule over other people. how much longer do we need to take before we can finally accept the fact that we have no rights over any thing on this earth? if we can never understand such a truth, we don't even possess any of the above mentioned traits, and are really no better than self centred, egoistic, weak monkeys. 

ooh airheaded reptiles

hmm.. so herbivorous dinosaurs might have been warm blooded...

ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2008) — Paleontologists have long known that dinosaurs had tiny brains, but they had no idea the beasts were such airheads.

A new study by Ohio University researchers Lawrence Witmer and Ryan Ridgely found that dinosaurs had more air cavities in their heads than expected. By using CT scans, the scientists were able to develop 3-D images of the dinosaur skulls that show a clearer picture of the physiology of the airways.

“I’ve been looking at sinuses for a long time, and indeed people would kid me about studying nothing—looking at the empty spaces in the skull. But what’s emerged is that these air spaces have certain properties and functions,” said Witmer, Chang Professor of Paleontology in Ohio University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine.

Witmer and Ridgely examined skulls from two predators, Tyrannosaurus rex and Majungasaurus, and two ankylosaurian dinosaurs, Panoplosaurus and Euoplocephalus, both plant eaters with armored bodies and short snouts. For comparison, the scientists also studied scans of crocodiles and ostriches, which are modern day relatives of dinosaurs, as well as humans.

The analysis of the predatory dinosaurs revealed large olfactory areas, an arching airway that went from the nostrils to the throat, and many sinuses—the same cavities that give us sinus headaches. Overall, the amount of air space was much greater than the brain cavity.

The CT scans also allowed Witmer and Ridgely to calculate the volume of the bone, air space, muscle and other soft tissues to make an accurate estimate of how much these heads weighed when the animals were alive. A fully fleshed-out T. rex head, for example, weighed more than 1,100 pounds.

“That’s more than the combined weight of the whole starting lineup of the Cleveland Cavaliers,” Witmer said.

Witmer suggests that the air spaces helped lighten the load of the head, making it about 18 percent lighter than it would have been without all the air. That savings in weight could have allowed the predators to put on more bone-crushing muscle or even to take larger prey.

These sinus cavities also may have played a biomechanical role by making the bones hollow, similar to the hollow beams used in construction — both are incredibly strong but don’t weigh as much their solid counterparts. A light but strong skull enabled these predators to move their heads more quickly and helped them hold their large heads up on cantilevered necks, explained Witmer, who published the findings in a recent issue of The Anatomical Record.

Though most researchers have assumed that the nasal passages in armored dinosaurs would mimic the simple airways of the predators, Witmer and Ridgely found that these spaces actually were convoluted and complex. The passages were twisted and corkscrewed in the beasts’ snouts and didn’t funnel directly to the lungs or air pockets.

“Not only do these guys have nasal cavities like crazy straws, they also have highly vascular snouts. The nasal passages run right next to large blood vessels, and so there’s the potential for heat transfer. As the animal breathes in, the air passed over the moist surfaces and cooled the blood, and the blood simultaneously warmed the inspired air,” said Witmer, whose research is funded by the National Science Foundation. “These are the same kinds of physiological mechanisms we find all the time in warm-blooded animals today.”

These twisty nasal passages also acted as resonating chambers that affected how the ankylosaurs vocalized. The complex airways would have been somewhat different in each animal and might have given the dinosaurs subtle differences in their voices.

“It’s possible that these armored dinosaurs could recognize individuals based on the voice,” said Witmer, who noted that his research team’s studies of the inner ear revealed a hearing organ that probably had the capability to discriminate these subtle vocal nuances.

Though Witmer found few similarities between the dinosaur and human sinuses—our brain cavities take up much more space relative to our sinuses— the scientist did find a resemblance between the air spaces of the crocodiles and ostriches and the ancient beasts under study.

“Extra air space turns out to be a family characteristic,” he said, “but the sinuses may be performing different roles in different species. Scientists have tended to focus on things such as bones and muscle, and ignored these air spaces. If we’re going to decipher the mysteries of these extinct animals, maybe we need to figure out just why it is that these guys were such airheads.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081209052145.htm

hypocrisy, another fact that we need to think about..

i've been outdone.. but really, a nice article to ponder over. sometimes, the emotional us can lead us to our undoing. 

The Truth about Hypocrisy

Charges of hypocrisy can be surprisingly irrelevant and often distract us from more important concerns

By Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Former U.S. vice president Al Gore urges us all to reduce our carbon footprint, yet he regularly flies in a private jet. Former drug czar William Bennett extols the importance of temperance but is reported to be a habitual gambler. Pastor Ted Haggard preached the virtues of “the clean life” until allegations of methamphetamine use and a taste for male prostitutes arose. Eliot Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings as attorney general in New York State, but he was later found to be a regular client of one such ring.

These notorious accusations against public figures all involve hypocrisy, in which an individual fails to live according to the precepts he or she seeks to impose on others. Charges of hypocrisy are common in debates because they are highly effective: we feel compelled to reject the views of hypocrites. But although we see hypocrisy as a vice and a symptom of incompetence or insincerity, we should be exceedingly careful about letting our emotions color our judgments of substantive issues.

Allegations of hypocrisy are treacherous because they can function as argumentative diversions, drawing our attention away from the task of assessing the strength of a position and toward the character of the position’s advocate. Such accusations trigger emotional reflexes that dominate more rational thought patterns. And it is precisely in the difficult and important cases such as climate change that our reflexes are most often inadequate.

Thus, listeners should temper such knee-jerk reactions toward the messenger and instead independently consider the validity of the message itself. It also pays to examine closely what the duplicitous deeds really mean: from some vantage points, such behavior may actually support a hypocrite’s point of view, significantly softening the hypocrisy charge in those cases.

Undermining Authority
One surprising truth about hypocrisy is its irrelevance: the fact that someone is a hypocrite does not mean that his or her position on an issue is false. Environmentalists who litter do not by doing so disprove the claims of environmentalism. Politicians who publicly oppose illegal immigration but privately employ illegal immigrants do not thereby prove that contesting illegal immigration is wrong. Even if every animal-rights activist is exposed as a covert meat eater, it still might be wrong to eat meat.

More generally, just because a person does not have the fortitude to live up to his or her own standards does not mean that such standards are not laudable and worth trying to meet. It therefore seems that charges of hypocrisy prove nothing about a topic. Why, then, are they so potent?

The answer is that such allegations summon emotional, and often unconscious, reactions to the argument that undermine it. Such indictments usually serve as attacks on the authority of their targets. Once the clout of an advocate is weakened, the stage is set for dismissal of the proponent’s position. Consider the following two examples:

Dad: You shouldn’t smoke, son. It’s bad for your health, and it’s addictive.
Son: But, Dad! You smoke a pack a day!

Amy: Have you seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth? We need to reduce our carbon footprint right away.
Jim: Al Gore? You know he leaves a huge footprint with all his private jet flights!

In the first example, the son feels that his father is not an appropriate source of information on smoking because Dad is a hypocrite. The accusation of hypocrisy does not so much defeat Dad’s position as nullify it, almost as if Dad had never spoken. The same holds in the case of Gore’s airplane, although the speaker, Amy, is not the alleged hypocrite but rather Gore, the authority to which she appeals. In both cases, hypocrisy is proffered as evidence of the insincerity or incompetence of a source, providing ammunition for ignoring his or her advice or instruction.

Such ammunition is particularly potent because of the power of such personal portrayals. Once people have characterized someone in a negative light, they tend to ignore evidence to the contrary. In a 2007 study psychologists David N. Rapp of Northwestern University and Panayiota Kendeou of McGill University asked student volunteers to read 24 different stories involving a character who behaves in a way that suggests he is sloppy or lazy. Later in each story, however, the individual acts in a manner that contradicts this judgment. Nevertheless, less than half of the respondents revised their view of the character.

These results suggest that a first impression of someone as lazy or hypocritical actively inhibits the consideration of other information that might be important to understanding that person or the issue at hand. In the smoking and airplane examples, the son and Jim foolishly focus on the father’s and Gore’s hypocrisy rather than on the perils of smoking or the human contribution to global warming.

Duplicity Understood
In fact, if the son and Jim had focused on the issues, they might have viewed the father’s and Gore’s behavior radically differently. Consider what Dad’s smoking suggests: Dad believes smoking is bad for him, yet he continues to smoke because, of course, he is addicted. So Dad’s behavior—his hypocrisy—actually supports his point that smoking is addictive. Gore’s behavior also bolsters one of his arguments for change in national energy policy: that certain ingrained aspects of the American lifestyle, such as our penchant for driving SUVs and distaste for riding city buses, lead to environmental irresponsibility—even Gore cannot escape it. (To his credit, Gore compensates for his plane trips by buying carbon offsets, which pay for projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.)

Of course, hypocrisy does not always support the hypocrite’s view. Spitzer’s visits to prostitutes do nothing to reinforce his official opposition on prostitution. And in some cases, hypocrisy has precisely the significance that the son and Jim assign to it: it is reason enough to dismiss a source because the person has lost his credibility. For example, when the preacher who presents himself as a moral authority gets caught having an adulterous affair, his followers may rightly call his teachings into question.

Thus, hypocrisy is sometimes sufficient to undermine a person’s authority. It can warrant the thought, “Why pay attention to what he says?” But hypocrisy does not always have this effect, as the Dad and Gore cases show.

Whether hypocrisy is relevant to a person’s credibility usually depends on the content of the hypocrite’s statements. And yet hypocrisy charges, as they are popularly deployed, tend to short-circuit rational examination of that content. To skirt this danger, people should suppress their instinctual responses to accusations of duplicity so that they can focus on the real issues at hand. Such concentration is essential to our ability to rationally judge our leaders, colleagues and friends as well as to make decisions about important social issues that affect our lives.

ants-fungus-bacterium: 3 way mutualism. nature still surprises us.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2008) — One of the most important developments in human civilisation was the practice of sustainable agriculture. But we were not the first - ants have been doing it for over 50 million years. Just as farming helped humans become a dominant species, it has also helped leaf-cutter ants become dominant herbivores, and one of the most successful social insects in nature.

According to an article in the November issue of Microbiology Today, leaf-cutter ants have developed a system to try and keep their gardens pest-free; an impressive feat which has evaded even human agriculturalists.

Leaf-cutter ants put their freshly-cut leaves in gardens where they grow a special fungus that they eat. New material is continuously incorporated into the gardens to grow the fungus and old material is removed by the ants and placed in special refuse dumps away from the colony. The ants have also adopted the practice of weeding. When a microbial pest is detected by worker ants, there is an immediate flurry of activity as ants begin to comb through the garden. When they find the pathogenic 'weeds', the ants pull them out and discard them into their refuse dumps.

"Since the ant gardens are maintained in soil chambers, they are routinely exposed to a number of potential pathogens that could infect and overtake a garden. In fact, many of the ant colonies do become overgrown by fungal pathogens, often killing the colony," said Professor Cameron Currie from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. "Scientists have shown that a specialized microfungal pathogen attacks the gardens of the fungus-growing ants. These fungi directly attack and kill the crop fungus, and can overrun the garden in a similar fashion to the way weeds and pests can ruin human gardens."

A curious observation was that some worker ants had a white wax-like substance across their bodies. When they looked at it under a microscope scientists discovered that this covering was not a wax, but a bacterium! These bacteria are part of the group actinobacteria, which produce over 80% of the antibiotics used by humans. The bacteria produce antifungal compounds that stop the microfungal pathogen from attacking the garden. This discovery was the first clearly demonstrated example of an animal, other than humans, that uses bacteria to produce antibiotics to deal with pathogens.

"Research in our laboratory has revealed a number of interesting properties between the bacteria and the pathogenic fungus. The bacteria appear to be specially suited to inhibiting the pathogenic fungi that infect the ants' fungus garden," said Professor Currie.

The interaction between the ants and their fungus crop, and the ants and the bacteria is known as a mutualistic relationship. In general a mutualism is established when both members of the interaction benefit from the relationship. In the ant–fungus mutualism, the ants get food from the fungus. This mutualism is so tight that if the fungus is lost, the entire colony may die. In return, the fungus receives a continuous supply of growing material, protection from the environment, and protection from disease-causing pests.

So what do the bacteria get out of producing pesticides for the ants? "For starters, they get food. Many species of fungus-growing ants have evolved special crypts on their bodies where the bacteria live and grow. Scientists believe that the ants feed the bacteria through glands connected to these crypts," said Dr Garret Suen, a post-doctoral fellow in Professor Currie's lab. "Also, the bacteria get a protected environment in which to grow, away from the intense competition they would face if they lived in other environments such as the soil."

"Interestingly, the tight association between ant, bacteria and pathogen will sometimes result in the pathogen winning. This interplay has been described as a chemical 'arms race' between the bacteria and fungus, with one side beating the other as new compounds are evolved," said Professor Currie. "At the moment, we are beginning to understand the chemical warfare at the genetic level, and it is likely that these types of interactions are more prevalent in nature than previously thought."

So how exactly does an ant go about forming partnerships with a fungus and a bacterium? No one really knows. With new advances in molecular and genetic technologies, such as whole-genome sequencing, Professor Currie and Dr Suen hope to discover how these associations were established, and to understand how these interactions resulted in the remarkable fungus-growing ability of the ants.