I often see foxes referred to as “catdogs” on Tumblr, but I wonder if folks realise how true that really is.
There’s a phenomenon called convergent evolution that occurs when two taxonomically unrelated species exploit the same ecological niche. The features that are needed to best take advantage of a given niche are pretty much the same everywhere you go; thus, over time, those species will become anatomically and behaviourally similar, even though they’re completely unrelated.
And foxes? Foxes are what you get when an ecosystem has no native small felines, so a canine species evolves to take advantage of the ecological niche that would have been exploited by a small feline, if one existed.
In other words, a fox is literally what you get when a dog tries to cat.
Fucking THANK you for this post!! Ive been waiting for the “dominant alpha” theory to die out. It gets me so heated i swear!!!
It’s so ridiculous that people insist on applying an incorrect theory about wolves to dogs, and then try to apply it to humans too
“The concept of the alpha wolf as a "top dog” ruling a group of
similar-aged compatriots,“ Mech writes in the 1999 paper, "is
particularly misleading.” Mech notes that earlier papers, such as M.W.
Fox’s “Socio-ecological implications of individual differences in wolf litters: a developmental and evolutionary perspective,”
published in Behaviour in 1971, examined the potential of individual
cubs to become alphas, implying that the wolves would someday live in
packs in which some would become alphas and others would be subordinate
pack members. However, Mech explains, his studies of wild wolves have
found that wolves live in families: two parents along with their younger
cubs. Wolves do not have an innate sense of rank; they are not born
leaders or born followers. The “alphas” are simply what we would call in
any other social group “parents.” The offspring follow the parents as
naturally as they would in any other species. No one has “won” a role as
leader of the pack; the parents may assert dominance over the offspring
by virtue of being the parents.
While the captive wolf studies
saw unrelated adults living together in captivity, related, rather than
unrelated, wolves travel together in the wild. Younger wolves do not
overthrow the “alpha” to become the leader of the pack; as wolf pups
grow older, they are dispersed from their parents’ packs, pair off with
other dispersed wolves, have pups, and thus form packs of their owns.
This
doesn’t mean that wolves don’t display social dominance, however. When a
recent piece purporting to dispel the “myth” of canine dominance
appeared on Psychology Today, ethologist Marc Bekoff quickly stepped in.
Wolves (and other animals, including humans), display social dominance,
he notes; it just isn’t always easy to boil dominant behavior down to
simple explanations. Dominant behavior and dominance relationships can
be highly situational, and can vary greatly from individual to
individual even within the same species.
Amazing, this is a crinoid swimming (edited after comments)
Never seen one of these before? You have, but they normally look like this:
Crinoids are a type of echninoderm (also in that taxa: sea stars, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers). They were super popular in the Paleozoic and aren’t nearly as common anymore.
For at least one part of their life cycle, they’re anchored to the seafloor and we normally see them looking like the image above – but most eventually become free swimming as an adult.
Like the more well-known types of echnioderms, a crinoid is basically a mouth surrounded by feeding arms. It’s actually swimming using the movement of those feeding arms! This is actually a pretty efficient adaptation, since the feeding arms catch small particles of food and move them towards the mouth – it’s most likely they can swim and snag food at the same time.
The tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur, including bones, soft tissue, and even feathers, has been found preserved in amber, according to a report published today in the journal Current Biology.
A micro-CT scan of the delicate feathers that cover the dinosaur tail. Image: Lida Xing.
While individual dinosaur-era feathers have been found in amber, and evidence for feathered dinosaurs is captured in fossil impressions, this is the first time that scientists are able to clearly associate well-preserved feathers with a dinosaur, and in turn gain a better understanding of the evolution and structure of dinosaur feathers.
We clearly need a new Jurassic Park movie featuring cute feathery dinosaurs.
A reconstruction of a small coelurosaur Credit: Chung-tat Cheung
Okay this is really really cool BUT IT IS CRIMINAL to leave out the funniest part of this story.
The paleontologist who “discovered” this sample didn’t dig it up, he and his team found it in an amber market where the amber it was preserved in had been shaped and was being sold as jewelry. This is both ridiculous and exciting though, because on one hand it’s a shame this sample was cut and shaped before anyone who knew what it was could get their hands on it, it also gives us an idea of how many other samples might be in that particular amber mine.
Also this amazing quote from Xing:
“I was not sure that (the trader) really understood how important this specimen was, but he did not raise the price.”
Honestly it was a study I read about four years ago and I haven’t been able to re-find it (anthropologists: help? and/or correct me if I’m using outdated info?) but the upshot is that humans are bred to remember our screwups and associate negative emotion with them, because our brain doesn’t want us to EVER screw up the same way again. Mistakes have a cost which used to be much higher – fuck up hunting and you might starve, commit a big enough social blunder and you might be cast out of the tribe. So our brains tell us that if we were lucky enough to survive the screwup we just made, we cannot EVER DO IT AGAIN. It’s not limited to things that you’ve found embarrassing, but it definitely includes them, because socializing was so incredibly vital to the survival of early humans. People who remembered their screwups survived because of it. (So I guess congratulations, you are the product of the fittest!)
Part of where I got this comes from related theories about storytelling and evolution – I’ve written about that here, where storytelling may have evolved as a way of knowledge-sharing. The more evocative your story, the better chance your knowledge will be passed on, which means others will benefit from your risks without having to take that risk personally, which improves your odds of survival as a group. The more emotion you have attached to an action, the more likely you are to do it again or not do it again depending on the sensation.
I mean it’s not necessarily helpful because it’s all hard-coded, so it’s not like telling yourself “no, I don’t have to care about that stupid thing I said ten years ago at a party anymore” is going to help. But if you can turn it around so that you think “That stupid thing I said ten years ago at a party still bothers me. I’m going to learn from that and not speak so much when I feel awkward” you can potentially resolve some of that negative emotion.
I’m not saying this always works, I still shudder about shit I said and did when I was twelve. But consciously reminding yourself that it was a learning experience can make the shudder pass more quickly.
Also, basically, it’s that quote about “we live our blooper reel but see everyone else’s highlight film” – we are the most important person to ourselves, and rightly so, but it means we pay waaaaaay more attention to our fuckups than anyone else does.
Overview: This is a systematic review, which is considered an empirical method to review a body of literature about a specific topic to understand the field’s consensus on that topic. In this study, the authors did a systematic review on how people without mental illness understand the causes of mental illness and how that impacts their view on people with mental illness.
Major Points to Consider:
• There has been an argument that assigning a biological or genetic cause to mental illnesses (like, “chemical imbalance” or “brain disease”) will decrease stigma (societally-held negative stereotypes that cause discrimination) against people with mental illness.
• However, the authors found little or no support for this argument.
• People who believed that mental illness is caused by biological or genetic issues were actually more likely to reject people with mental illness, particularly schizophrenia and sometimes depression.
• People generally did not think that people with mental illness are responsible for their illness, and perceived responsibility was not related to stigma in most studies.
• Perception of dangerousness was often associated with greater stigma.
• The authors conclude that biogenetic explanations for mental illness are more likely to be harmful and increase stigma, rather than decrease it.
Criticisms:
• I have no criticisms of this study, it was conducted correctly and the authors were very thoughtful and thorough in their discussion.
• I think they miss two area that additionally causes concern for use of a biogenetic explanation. First, we know that the biogenetic explanation is at least not complete, and at most inaccurate. Biological and genetic causes do not fully account for mental illness, and ignoring personal, social, cultural and environmental causes is harmful and misleading. Second, although perception of a biogenetic cause can lead people to seeing an MD about the issue, it can also decrease willingness to engage in psychological therapies and other non-traditionally “medical” therapies, so people who believe in biogenetic causes may be less likely to improve.
What Should You Take From this Study? Promoting biological or genetic causes of mental illness is inaccurate and does not decrease stigma- in fact, it increases stigma, especially among people with schizophrenia. Stigma is more associated with perceived dangerousness than perceived responsibility for the disorder. Anti-stigma campaigns would be more effective if focused on dismantling beliefs about dangerousness and promoting treatability of mental illness.
Ideally, this is a discussion, so- what do you think?
Yes, this makes sense!
I’d only like to add that focusing on biological causes for mental illnesses and neurodivergence feeds into eugenics – like people fantasising about finding a schizophrenia gene and then testing fetuses for it so they can be abortet… whereas I don’t know if there would be any benefit to schizophrenic people from finding a gene? Would it (if it existed) help to find better treatments?
I think that’s absolutely a risk.
The researchers in genetics of schizophrenia (and other disorders) usually talk about creating “gene therapies” once the genes are identified. I’m not a genetics person so I don’t know the ins and outs of that. My understanding is that it could mean manipulating genes of zygotes or fetuses if anomalies are identified. It’s hard for me to understand how a gene therapy would work on an adult or child, but I think that’s a long term goal.
Manipulating genes in utero is of course a version of “designer babies” and carries a lot of ethical questions. Pretty easy to see how this could lead to changing undesirable genes vs. genes that risk the life of the fetus.
Scientists have identified a part of the brain responsible for the placebo effect
It’s not all in your head.
David Nield
Scientists think they’ve located a region of the brain that’s linked to the placebo effect – a psychological phenomenon where patients feel better because they think they’ve been given real drugs, when in fact all they’ve been given is sugar pills.
The findings could not only help researchers identify those who are more likely to experience a placebo effect – it could also lead to more personalised treatments for those suffering from chronic pain, giving scientists a new way to tailor drugs to particular brain types.
The numbers are in. We can now precisely count how many cancer-related DNA mutations accumulate in smokers’ organs over time.
On average, there is one DNA mutation per lung cell for every 50 cigarettes smoked, according to a new analysis. People who smoke a pack of 20 a day for a year generate 150 mutations per lung cell, 97 per larynx cell, 39 per pharynx cell, 18 per bladder cell and six per liver cell.
Epidemiological studies previously linked tobacco smoking with at least 17 classes of cancer, but this is the first time researchers have been able to quantify the molecular damage inflicted on DNA.
Ludmil Alexandrov at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and his colleagues achieved this by comparing tumour DNA from 2500 smokers and 1000 non-smokers. This allowed them to identify which mutations were associated with smoking.
Theoretically, every DNA mutation has the potential to trigger a cascade of genetic damage that causes cells to become cancerous. However, we still don’t know what the probability is of a single smoking-related DNA mutation turning into cancer, or which mutation types are likely to be more malignant. “This is research we are currently pursuing,” Alexandrov says.
What if oxygen is poisonous and it just takes 75-100 years to kill us?
My science teacher said he thinks that’s true actually
Yeah this is actually pretty much exactly what is going on. It’s why anti-oxidants are such a big deal. Bonus fact: oxygen oxidizes stuff in your cells or, in other words, it’s not toxic, just setting you on fire very very slowly.
What if there are aliens out there but they subsist on entirely different substances and they’re just scared as shit of us and our crazy ass hell planet? Once in a while some alien anthropologist type suggests checking out the people on this inhabited planet out towards the galaxy’s edge. The other aliens just look at the naive academic with horror. No!! We do not go to that world. That is where the DEATH BREATHERS live. They recreationally consume poisons and are more or less composed of biological fire. Their atmosphere is made of rocket fuel. We must leave the DEATH BREATHERS in peace. Do not go there. Do not.
I tend to always reblog posts about humans being terrifying weirdos to aliens.
okay but…that is actually what went down on earth about 2.5 billion years ago.
Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).
We are literally descendants of the DEATH BREATHERS and cyanobacteria is our deadly mother.
The cyanobacteria holocaust is so big, it doesn’t even have a cool name; it’s just called “The Great Oxygenation Event”; the *second* most apocalyptic extinction event in our planet’s history is the one that’s called THE GREAT DYING (the Permian-Triassic event, about 252 million years ago).
This shit makes like the rock-throwing that wiped out the dinosaurs look like kindergarten.
The Great Dying is my absolute favorite nickname for an epochal event.
Caesuria 