Why a grizzly gets you shivering—but not global warming
In my Science Confirms the Obvious post today, I discussed the first psychological proof (so say the authors) that humans can indeed experience emotions without immediately knowing why. We do this, they say, because we evolved that way. True, scientists love that explanation, but here it’s quite intriguing.
Say you’re walking through the woods and encounter a grizzly bear. You see it and freeze that instant—even before your stomach drops with fear. “After all, you are likely to live longer if you immediately stop moving at the sight of a growling grizzly bear,” write researchers Kirsten Ruys and Diederik Stapel of The Netherlands’ Tilburg University, “and do not need full awareness for such a response to be instigated.” Given the flood of unexpected stimuli we face moment to moment, quick reactions make sense for survival.
You, that bear, and other animals experience emotions such as fear, anger, or disgust. But only a few species are aware of their emotions. This ability helps humans judge and respond to the behavior of others in order to navigate social situations and, ultimately, grease the wheels of complex society.
The study got me thinking about a talk given by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert at last October’s Pop!Tech conference. He expounded on why humans are so savvy at grasping immediate threats like grizzly bears or baseballs hurtling at our heads but suck at grasping abstract, slowly approaching ones like global warming. According to Gilbert, a “very large part” of our brains is devoted to dealing with immediate threats, but a “very small part” is concerned about planning for the future.
Humans, apparently, are still in the early stages of evolving extended response mechanisms. But it seems likely that by the time we portion more of our brain to long-term dangers, there will be few grizzly bears around to worry about, and a whole lotta global warming.
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- Tags: Brain, EVOLUTION, Future Human, Psychology, Thought
Scientists run a computational model of evolution and discover the originator of animal life is far more complex than previously thought
Much like the way cosmologists and physicists theorize about the origins of the universe by making extrapolations about the past with data from today, so too do evolutionary biologists about the origins of life. And a new study funded by the National Science Foundation has turned up a surprising result about one of the earliest origins. The relatively simple sponge has long been thought to have been the first divergence on the animal tree of life. But by feeding a tremendous amount of data on fossils and living organisms into a high-powered computational model, the authors of the study discovered an even earlier split: that of the comb jelly.
The results were unexpected because the comb jelly is much more complicated than the sponge, having tissues and a nervous system. It is frequently assumed that the more complicated animals would be found further along the evolutionary chain. This finding suggests that the earliest animals were then more complicated than previously assumed. So either the comb jelly evolved its complexity distinctly from other animals after branching off or the sponge became a more simple animal after it branched away. As Casey Dunn, one of the authors on the study hastens to point out, “evolution is not necessarily just a march towards increased complexity. This scenario would provide a particularly dramatic example of that principle.”
Via PhysOrg
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- Tags: Comb Jelly, EVOLUTION, Origins of Life, Sponge
New research on spider species suggests that their inverted lifestyle is energy efficient
Scientists in Spain and Croatia have found that certain spider species that feed, breed and travel upside-down are more energy efficient because of it. For the spiders, it turns out, walking is more of a swing—they use gravity to their advantage. They effectively act as a pendulum, and require less muscle mass in the legs to move themselves forward.
One of the reasons they can do this, the scientists say, is that they don’t need strong muscles to hold on. Instead, they attach to their webs via claws fused to their exoskeletons. The interdisciplinary team of scientists—which included an astrophysicist, for some reason—studied more than 100 spider species, and found that the longer legs of the upside-down spiders enable more efficient inverted travel thanks to these pendulum mechanics, but that they aren’t so great for scurrying along the floor.
The work is important in terms of spider morphology and evolution, but the group says it could also apply to robotics design as well. The paper will be published in PLoS ONE
