Cheese Paradox - Why Do Vegetarians Continue Eating Cheese And Dairy?

This study examines vegetarians’ rationale behind consuming non-meat animal products (NMAPs). The authors point out that NMAPS share many of the same ethical concerns as meat — for example, NMAPs come from violent industries that harm and kill animals after they are no longer profitable.

According to the authors, most studies on vegetarians ask questions about why they choose not to eat meat, not why they choose to eat NMAPs. To begin to fill this gap in the research, they formed three research questions:

• Do vegetarians view eggs and dairy as an ethical issue? 
• Why do vegetarians include NMAPs in their diet? 
• Is cognitive dissonance involved in vegetarians’ NMAP consumption, and if so, how do they overcome it? 

[---]

Like many meat-eaters, the authors found that participants tended to justify their NMAP consumption using three of the “4Ns” — that it’s nice, normal, and necessary, but not natural. The authors identified four themes in the data: “acknowledging harm,” “personal benefits,” “social norms,” and “neutralizing dissonance.”

Regarding the “acknowledging harm” theme, participants cited different reasons for becoming vegetarian, but all of them had ethical concerns about animals in the dairy and egg industries. Despite eating NMAPs, they acknowledged that animals used for eggs and dairy may live in gruesome conditions and are killed after they’re done being used. Some people also noted the links between the meat and the NMAP industry. Therefore, in response to the first research question, respondents were generally aware of the ethical harms of eggs and dairy. 

[---]

The authors believe that the “cheese paradox” is an important finding because it puts a spotlight on a major barrier to turning vegetarians into vegans. If advocates can better understand why cheese is so difficult to give up, it may be easier to address this barrier more effectively. 

This research can be used to inform NMAP-reduction strategies. One idea for advocates is to publicize how cheese is connected to the cows it comes from, to increase empathy toward cows. Because of the limited convenience sample, the authors suggest recreating the study with a larger sample to include more perspectives, along with a quantitative study of the cheese paradox. They believe that we can also learn from vegans who were vegetarian in the past to find out why they eventually gave up NMAPs. Finally, they advocate for plant-based nutrition to receive more attention in education and other institutions to help people overcome both personal and social barriers to change.

- More Here

Good Bye Daniel Dennett

Thank you for everything you taught us. You will be missed sir.

Ongoing Quest for Ethical Treatment of Animals...

For more than fifty years now, I’ve been trying to persuade people of the need for fundamental ethical transformation of the way we think about nonhuman animals. Yet, despite some progress, and a welcome increase in the number of vegans, that transformation – call it animal rights, animal liberation, an end to speciesism, or whatever you wish - remains a distant goal.  I can’t see any indication that we will get there in a single revolutionary upheaval.  It’s going to take a series of incremental victories that improve the lives of animals while simultaneously educating more people about the deeper and more fundamental wrongs that we are doing to animals, on a vast scale.   

That is why we should welcome McDonald's recent achievement in transitioning to 100% cage-free eggs for its operations in the United States. McDonald’s served 2 billion eggs in the U.S. in 2023, so this is not a minor item on their menu.  It means that each year, something like six million hens who would otherwise have spent the year locked into bare wire cages will now have space to walk around, spread their wings, and scratch in the litter on the floor of the shed in which they live.

This didn’t happen overnight, and it’s worth looking at how it came about. 

he story begins with Henry Spira, the pioneering activist for oppressed humans and oppressed animals. (To learn more about Henry, see this video) In 1989, Henry began talking to McDonald’s about setting standards for the welfare of the animals whose flesh, milk or eggs it was selling.  As he put it: “If McDonald’s moves a millimeter, everyone else moves with them.” McDonald’s was willing to talk, but for several years, it just stalled.  It wasn’t until 1997, and the public relations disaster of the “McLibel” trial - when McDonald’s sued two activists for defamation because they had said, among other things, that the corporate giant was responsible for cruelty to animals, and the court held that this was not defamation because the charge was true - that McDonald’s began to entertain the idea of setting standards for its suppliers.  Later that year Bob Langert, McDonald’s director of environmental affairs, came to New York to meet Henry and me, and the company began to entertain the idea of setting standards for its suppliers. Sadly, Henry died without seeing those standards accepted, but some of the organizations working for farmed animals – among them People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the Humane Society of the US, Mercy for Animals, and The Humane League - continued his work. In 2015, McDonald’s pledged to phase out eggs from caged hens, but said that it would need ten years to do it, because McDonald’s was using 2 billion eggs a year, and at that time, the supply simply wasn’t there – 93% of U.S. eggs came from caged hens.  Today, that figure is around 60%.  and McDonald’s has fulfilled its pledge nearly two years ahead of schedule.

Don’t get me wrong.  The term "cage-free" doesn’t mean that the hens get to range around open pastures and enjoy the sunshine.  Nearly all “cage-free” hens are locked up in a shed crowded with thousands of other birds and the high stocking density can lead to stress and pecking, which may result in injury. This is still not an ethically tolerable way of confining animals.  Still, cage-free systems allow hens to stretch their limbs, move around, perch, and scratch in the litter. That’s a significant improvement over life trapped in a cage so small that even if there were just one hen per cage, she could not fully stretch her wings – and there will be four or more hens in each of those cages.  Such cages are illegal in the entire European Union, the United Kingdom, and a few U.S. states, including California, but remain the way in which most egg-laying hens live in the U.S.

These incremental advances form part of a larger narrative where consumer demand and ethical considerations influence major corporations to alter their practices. McDonald's shift to cage-free eggs reflects growing consumer concern about animal welfare, which is having an increasing impact on corporate policies and practices. The transition to cage-free egg production was no small feat; it required a massive overhaul of existing supply chains. This overhaul was navigated through the collaborative efforts of numerous stakeholders, including the huge agricultural conglomerate Cargill and various family-owned egg producers. These entities faced substantial challenges, such as reconfiguring barn layouts, investing in new infrastructure, and adapting to new animal husbandry practices. Their commitment to adopting cage-free systems demonstrates that industry will change if consumers and investors forcefully express their concerns about poor animal welfare.

Henry Spira's legacy is a powerful reminder that change is within reach when consumers raise their voices for higher standards. The animal movement needs to build on this achievement, striving for standards that reduce harm and promote the health and well-being of animals, pushing beyond cage-free to create a more ethical and sustainable food system.

- Peter Singer

Jane Goodall's Message To Younger Generation

The younger generation has so much they can learn from elders. Who made an impact on your life?

Goodall: I think it’s really important, this exchange of information from the elders to the youngers. I was really lucky; I had an amazing mother. I was born loving animals, and she supported that love of animals. I was one-and-a-half years old, and she came into my room and she found I’d taken a whole handful of wriggling earthworms into my bed. Most mothers would’ve [said], ‘Oh, throw these dirty things [away].’ She just said, ‘Jane, I think they might die without the Earth, you better take them into the garden.’ And so she nurtured this inherent love I had … in all the insects, the birds, the animals, everybody around me.

What is the most important message to convey to the younger generation?

Goodall: The goal that I have is helping young people understand that there is a window of time [to save the planet]. Unfortunately, today I [still] meet more and more people who are losing hope. So many people feel helpless and hopeless because [they question] what can they can do as an individual.

But what people have to understand is when it’s 2 million, 1 billion, 2 billion, 3 billion, all taking small actions to make the world a better place, that is changing the world. What matters is people understanding that as an individual, what they do makes a difference. Not because it’s just them, but because they are not alone.

[---]

What message do you have for the world?

Goodall: A message to the world would be, don’t forget that you as an individual make an impact on the environment every single day. And it’s up to you to choose what sort of impact you make. I think once everybody understands the role that they play, whoever they are, is so desperately important, then we move towards a better world.

- More Here

What are you serious about? How far will you go?

Brilliant post!

I agree with his observations but not how he applies this knowledge. 

As I got older it became clearer to me that not many people are really serious about anything. Some people go their whole lives without ever having met anyone else who I might describe as actually serious, so they find it hard to believe that anybody could really mean what they say, since everything everyone says is bullshit. I remember feeling like that myself at some of my low points in life, when I was at my most depressed.

Looking back now I don’t think I was entirely wrong, the issue was that I was overly fixated on unpleasant truths. I find myself compelled to describe it as “LinkedIn World”, where everyone is performing a bullshit role in a bullshit play.

[---]

Anyway so– it’s actually quite rational for most people to assume that any other random person probably isn’t serious. That they don’t really mean what they say. Lots of people play-act seriousness for social reasons, but quit when the going gets tough. So it makes sense that lots of people are broadly cynical. Cynicism is a completely reasonable defense against fraud and bullshit. The trouble with cynicism as a defense mechanism is that you can get so good at it that you inadvertently also defend yourself against anything good happening for you.

[---]

I mean something closer to ‘dynamic persistence’, and a sense of humor is often critical to that. It’s hard to persist for a long time if you ‘take yourself too seriously’. You become rigid, stiff, the opposite of dynamic, and eventually you bang up against something that breaks you one way or another, because you weren’t able to back down, or laugh it off.

So the point is to take the work seriously but you don’t take yourself too seriously. 

There’s a riff about this in Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art, where he talks about how amateurs are too precious with their work: 

“The professional has learned, however, that too much love can be a bad thing. Too much love can make him choke. The seeming detachment of the professional, the cold-blooded character to his demeanor, is a compensating device to keep him from loving the game so much that he freezes in action.”

 

Meta Value - 27

All conditioned things are impermanent’ — when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering. 

- The Buddha, Dhammapada, verse 277

Truth - Impermanence of life, and everything else. 

I think within a few months of Max coming into my life, I understood this. My time with him is limited. I have to immerse myself with him "now" like there is no tomorrow. 

I don't remember how I understood this; if I had read Buddha or I understood this viscerally being with Max. 

Our relationships, life, money, fame, friends, wishes, dreams, and decisions all are impermanent. 

Understanding this helped me become a much kinder living being and on the contrary, it also helped me stand up against bullshits of envy, jealousy, self centeredness et al.  

Everyday, even today and as long as I breathe - I live by understanding that everything is impermanent. Ironically, this  truth is beautiful. 

The Signal

The Signal - I loved the unique storyline and final (good) twist. 

Humanity needs more stories like this to think beyond self and their families. This quote says it all!

Somethings are bigger than us. 

I really don't care how humanity was in the past but we need to learn to sacrifice for things bigger than us. Things that reduce pain and sufferings for all beings and more.

Moments During Termor

I was working and was in a meeting. Neo was lazy and lounging on a bean bag. Fluffy and Garph were taking a nap. Weird enough, I could hear Saroo and Blue were having a quintessential sibling fight few minutes ago in the upstairs bedroom (yeah, Saroo is probably the culprit).

Then I heard a weird noise buzzing all around and the whole house started shaking... my heart started pounding. My mind was engulfed with thoughts that NYC has been attacked and there are fighter planes flying above. But yet, part of me said this is an earthquake. 

Those few moments felt like eternity. 

I had no control in front of mother nature. I wanted to save all five in the house and I had no idea how to do it. My mind was refusing to draw a clear plan in those moments.  

And it stopped. 

My heart and body was still pounding, expecting an aftershock which might be worse. But nothing of that sort happened. 

Those few helpless moments, I remembered my favorite lines; a meta value of mine: 

Mind as a River

Understand: the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present moment. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz called this "friction": the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to the current circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be....

Think of the mind as a river: the faster it flows, the better it keeps up with the present and responds to change. The faster it flows, also the more it refreshes itself and the greater its energy. Obsessional thoughts, past experiences (whether traumas or successes), and preconceived notions are like boulders or mud in this river, settling and hardening there and damming it up. The river stops moving; stagnation sets in. You must wage constant war on this tendency in the mind. 

- The 33 Strategies of  War by Robert Greene

No amount of preparation would have allowed me to plan and react accordingly in those moments. 

But this meta value and inner peace, is probably what I depend on most to help me think clearly  if the worse would have happened. No one can preplan in this uncertain life but lifelong meditative understanding of fragility, epistemic humility and the importance of a clear mind without preconceived notions is what I depend on to make decisions during good and bad moments. 

I survived. Everyone around me survived. The gift of life continues. 

Eschew clinging to the past, building future "legacy", and zillion other pleasures humans seek causing so much pain and suffering.  

Heaven on earth is nothing but life itself. 

Meta Values - 26

Lack of pain and suffering is a gift for me. I don't go in search of happiness. 

Years, months, weeks, days and moments without pain and suffering is absolute heaven. 

Inner peace is more precious than happiness. 

A life with more moments of inner peace than anything else is heaven on earth. 

Meta Values - 25

Hardest of all my values but the most valuable - I have to move from explanations to solutions. 

From human nature to animal suffering, my life should focus on offering solutions. 

I have no idea how to go about finding solutions. I will keep trying until my last breath. 

Good Bye Daniel Kahneman

Blind to the obvious, but also we are “blind to our blindness.”  

We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.

- Daniel Kahneman

When his book Thinking, Fast, and Slow came out in 2011, I sent Max's holiday card to him. He was the only person I have ever sent Max's card outside of family and friends. 

David Brooks wrote that this era we live in will be remembered as "Daniel Kahneman's Era". 

Thank you sir for everything you taught me and the world. 

Saroo & Blue!

In the poem of life Max created, two new beautiful sentences were added yesterday. 

Saroo and Blue are brothers who are six years old. Saroo has settled in comfortably in Max's Walden but Blue is acting like Fluffy when she came home six years ago. 

                                                 Saroo

Blue

Happy Birthday Max!

Max turned 18 years today! 

Wow, what ride it had been. I miss you my love. 

Good Bye Frans de Waal

Steve M Wise few weeks ago. and now Frans de Waal...

Giants who lead torch in reducing pain and suffering of non-human animals have passed away. 

The man who brought humans and monkeys together

Frans de Waal died on Thursday evening US time at the age of 75 in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia (USA), as a result of metastatic stomach cancer, his family confirmed.

De Waal was the most famous Dutch primatologist for decades. With his calm speech, great knowledge and undeniable love for our fellow animals, he was also a well-known figure outside of science. Often shown on television, often quoted in debates.

De Waal rose to fame in the 1980s with his book Chimpanzee Politics (1982). This book was based on his observations of the power struggle in the chimpanzee colony of Burgers Zoo in Arnhem. The book offers a radical new view of ape leadership: it is not brute force and the direct application of power, but rather the mediation of conflicts and careful management of alliances that characterize the life of an ape leader. The monkey world suddenly became very human. So humane that conservative Republican Senator Newt Gingrich recommended the book in the 1990s as educational reading for young members of Congress.

This is a common thread in De Waal’s work: apes are much more like humans, and humans are much more like apes, than we think. 

As he said in a speech about his work in 2014: “I have moved the monkeys up a little and the people down a little.” …

We have a moral obligation to carry on their work. 

Thank you sir. 

Frans de Waal has died. Below is a photograpgh of Frans' showing a male chimpanzee inviting another to reconcile after a fight with the invitation accepted a few minutes later. One of my all time favorite images. 

 

Max's Gift - How to Live an Unregretting Life

The price we pay for being children of chance, born of a billion bright improbabilities that prevailed over the staggering odds of nothingness and eternal night, is the admission of our total cosmic helplessness. We have various coping mechanisms for it — prayer, violence, routine — and still we are powerless to keep the accidents from happening, the losses from lacerating, the galaxies from drifting apart.

Because our locus of choice is so narrow against the immensity of chance, nothing haunts human life more than the consequences of our choices, nothing pains more than the wistful wish to have chosen more wisely and more courageously — the chance untaken, the love unleapt, the unkind word in the time for tenderness. Regret — the fossilized fangs of should have sunk into the living flesh of is, sharp with sorrow, savage with self-blame — may be the supreme suffering of which we are capable. It poisons the entire system of being, for it feeds on the substance we are made of — time, entropic and irretrievable. It tugs at our yearning for, in James Baldwin’s perfect words, “reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error” and stings with the reminder that eventually “one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed.”

- Maria Popova on George Saunders

I was consumed by these thoughts all through my teens and twenties. I had no idea what to do nor how to tackle nor why it engulfed my life? 

And then Max came. Poof !! all those thoughts were gone while Max taught me to live life in the present with an awareness as humanely as possible. 

Plus what else I can ask from life when I had Max in my life? Everything else is just a bonus. 

Meta Values - 24

Having Max inside me, how do I live amongst self centered humans with insatiable desires?

Roughly, I bucket humans into three kinds. 

First kind dwells in their self centered world while dancing to the tunes of anthropomorphic societal music. I encounter these kinds most and I quietly observe them  to understand mass humanity. In a quiet absorption mode, I try to perpetually understand human nature. 

The next two kinds are barbells or books. 

The second kind are like barbells to strengthen myself. These kinds are convinced they "know" and "understand" life. It is impossible for them to change their minds. I used to waste tons of time talking and arguing with them. Now, I use them as barbells. In other words, I use the weight of their rigid mind to understand how worse humans can perceive reality and most importantly, throw my mind at them and evaluate what comes back from the worst kind of humans. 

The third kind of people are books to me. In complete silence, they unleash so much wisdom. These are the wonderful beings who probably nudged me to bring Max home in my younger years. They help me make better judgments under radical uncertainty. They are the gods of my mind palace. 

Of course, there are some moments when people move between their kinds. I am still working towards being flexible, not rigidly putting them in buckets but being aware of those precious moments when people temporarily switch kinds. Those moments are when mere conversations sparks an insight which eventually might transform into wisdom. 

Incarcerated Women & Buttery Redemption

One of the greatest failures of our generation is crime against incarcerated men and women. 

There is nothing even remotely close to rehabilitation nor reformation for these people. Loss of complete life while living, disintegration of families, economic cost and worst perpetuating cycle of violence. 

I am glad there is some hope with this change. No surprise, this is coming via our fellow sentient beings we share the planet with. This is just hope for incarcerated people but maybe a precursor to who we rewrite our economics and how we work. 

Heather wears her dark hair in braids. She’s also wearing a bright red sweater marked DOC for Department of Corrections, identifying her as an inmate of Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women, a minimum security prison located near Belfair, Washington. Heather is not her real name. She says she feels lucky to be participating in this work while she serves her sentence here. She shows me around with a proud, almost parental smile. Along with eight other incarcerated women, Heather is entrusted with the care and feeding of nearly 4,000 members of an endangered species, the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly. With this trust comes the privilege of working just beyond the razor-wire fence during the day before returning to life among the general prison population each night.

[---]

Recognizing the need for urgent action, the Oregon Zoo began a captive breeding program for the species in 2003. In 2011, the zoo helped establish the breeding program at Mission Creek as part of The Evergreen State College and Washington State’s Sustainability in Prisons Project. Since then, the work undertaken by these incarcerated women has become one of the last best hopes for the species’ survival.

On this mid-March morning, the air inside the program’s two greenhouses is warm compared with the shade of the surrounding forest and the adjacent prison yard. Metal racks containing hundreds of identical plastic cups house hungry caterpillars waiting to be fed the leafy green plantain the women grow in a garden outside.

After spending six months in a hibernation-like state known as diapause, the caterpillars roused in late January and have been busy bulking up ever since. After they’re released, they will continue to eat and grow through mid-March to mid-April, after which they’ll pupate beneath dry wood and vegetation and undergo metamorphosis. Their chrysalises, with cream-and-gray bands alternating with orange and black dots, offer a pastel preview of the butterfly to come. Only a few chrysalises have been found in the wild. In April or May, they emerge as adults and take to the air on wings of vivid red or orange and white, outlined in black, calling to mind the brightly hued geometry of stained-glass windows. Their life as butterflies is fleeting—just one to 14 days—but they use that time to mate and lay clusters of approximately 100 bright yellow, quinoa-sized eggs that take on a maroon hue before hatching. A single butterfly can lay up to 1,000 eggs. From those eggs, new caterpillars will appear, fatten up, enter diapause in June or July, and then awaken in January or February to, hopefully, continue the cycle in the wild.

[---]

“When I told my family what I do,” Brooke explains, “they said, ‘we’re so proud of you, that you are doing something that has such a profound mission in the world.’” She finds the work meditative, and despite the “shocking” amount of data she must record, she says the work provides a feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day.

Heather agrees, and admits the job is also on her mind at night. “I literally have dreams about being able to sleep in these greenhouses.”

Over the course of about a week, most of the caterpillars are taken away for release in the wild. For the women who raised them, it’s surprisingly hard to let go.

“I just didn’t think you could form a bond with an insect like that,” Heather declares. “I cried yesterday, saying goodbye.”

Before they leave, she has a message for them: the fate of the species is riding on your shoulders. “You got this,” she says. 

 

The Myth Of The West

I am exhausted hearing people talking and writing about omnipotent and wise Greeks and Romans. 

A delusion propagated for centuries that these ancients somehow "plucked" wisdom out of thin air. The reality was very different. 

Few years ago, Gladwell wrote a brilliant piece titled "The Tweaker" on Steve Jobs. 

Greeks and Romans (as far as we know) were the best tweakers. They were exceptional at assimilating good ideas from other civilizations. In other words, these folks were open-minded, and integrated wisdom from other civilizations. 

We need to understand this important and powerful trait and stop teaching "magic". 

Review of Josephine Quinn's new book How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History:

This book is written in opposition to “civilisational thinking”, which suggests that there is such a thing as “Western civilisation” existing independently of all others. To Quinn, the concept is not only a manifestation of arrogance on the part of the Westerners who promoted it (especially 19th-century imperialists): it is also a recipe for sterility. Civilisation thrives on cross-pollination.

Quinn’s second big idea is that the notion of “influence”, suggesting that successor cultures are shaped by those that precede them, is misleading. A conventional narrative relates that the collective European mind was formed by the thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, with modifications by Christianity. On the contrary, says Quinn: the past is dead. It is the living who pick and choose the ingredients they will throw into the stew of their own culture. Peoples of the “West” cooked up their material and conceptual world using the wheel from the Central-Asian steppe, poetry from Persia, legal codes from Mesopotamia, mathematics from Babylon and India, Mongolian stirrups, gold from sub-Saharan Africa, maritime skills from the people of the Levant and the far north, and an Asian religion. The founders of “Western civilisation” didn’t limit themselves to any hemisphere, geographically or intellectually, and without their interminglings the mongrel culture we have inherited would have been infinitely poorer and less dynamic.

[---]

She is more interested in trade than in conquest, less impressed by Alexander and Julius Caesar than by the Phoenician sailors who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the sixth century BCE, nearly 2,000 years before the Renaissance explorer Bartolomeu Dias. Readers are likely to seize upon old acquaintances, but she nods only briefly at Achilles and Abraham (whom she describes approvingly as a “travelling man”) and at William the Conqueror. Her project is to remind us that if these names are familiar, it is because the caprices of fate and propaganda have made them so. She prefers to dwell on less celebrated names and societies – not Rome but Etruria; not Sparta but Uruk; not the Egypt of the pharaohs and Cleopatra, but the Garamantes, who built a city that dominated trade across the Sahara for a thousand years, digging tunnels up to five kilometres long to bring water from underground lakes to irrigate their crops.

Her time-scale is immense, and she manages it in quick-quick-slow rhythm. An empire can rise and crumble, four centuries passing, in one sentence. Other times she slows right down to focus on a single encounter. Her geographical reach is equally large. Constantine is in York when he is proclaimed “Augustus” (a term Quinn prefers to “emperor”), and from there he crosses all Europe to establish his capital in the Greek town of Byzantium, on the Roman empire’s easternmost edge.

[---]

Quinn is a professor of ancient history at Oxford, and year after year she reads applications from students saying dutifully that they want to study classics to familiarise themselves with the roots of Western culture. Wrong, she says. This book is a reminder of how much more widely they need to look.

The Hidden Language Between Flowers and Bees

In short, the team discovered that bumblebees can sense a flower’s electrical field, distinguish between fields formed by different floral shapes, and tell whether another bee recently visited a flower.

See, both flowers and bees have electrical fields. As they fly, bees bump into charged particles, such as dust and other small molecules. The friction of these tiny collisions knocks electrons off the bee’s surface, leaving them with a positive charge.

Meanwhile, flowers usually have a negative charge, particularly during mild weather. A plant’s roots in the ground give it a slight negative electric charge. The higher the plant grows, the higher the electric charge it has because the air around the plant also has an electric charge that increases every meter above the ground. This creates a faint electric field around the plant.

Now for the fun part.

One interesting observation is that pollen will hop from the flower to the bee when a positively charged bee approaches the negatively charged flower. Robert told National Geographic:

“We found some videos showing that pollen literally jumps from the flower to the bee, as the bee approaches… even before it has landed.”

Further, the positively charged bees slightly increase the charge of any flower they land on beginning just before landing and lasts for just shy of two minutes — much longer than a bee usually spends visiting a flower. The team demonstrated that when a bee lands on the stem of a petunia, its electrical potential increases by approximately 25 millivolts.

Bees sense this slight change in a flower’s electrical field, which communicates that the flower has recently been visited and is likely low on nectar. It’s sort of like the flower is telling the bee, “I’m out of stock. Check back later.” Meanwhile, when a bee makes contact with a flower, it cancels out the single — which tells other bees, “I’m occupied.”

No one knows for sure how bees actually sense electrical fields. But Robert and others believe the electric fields affect part of a bee, like its antennas or the tiny hairs on its body. 

[---]

One of the best things about this knowledge is that you don’t have to travel or book a vacation to see it. From now on, you’ll know the miraculous interaction happens anytime you see a bee and flower interacting. You can watch the interaction and know there is an exchange between these two vastly different species, one we humans can only observe and not experience.

Not only does this knowledge make previous mundane observations more magical, but it’s also a humbling reminder that as brilliant as the human species can be, other animals experience the world wholly differently than we do and are capable of doing things we may never fully understand.

- More Here

The Man Who Tricked Nazi Germany - Lessons From The Past On How To Beat Disinformation

Brilliant piece! 

Adam Smith's insight of self interest matters most for human beings will be relevant as long as humans evolve into something else.

First, such media has to match the emotional power of authoritarians. Counter-propagandists need their own visceral dramas, YouTubers and the whole spectrum of today’s channels. They don’t need to hide their provenance like Der Chef, though they may have to give people the necessary “cover” to watch safely if in a dangerous dictatorship. But they do need to delve into the operating theatre of our darkest desires. Think of the difference between the cult leader and the therapist. Both dig into people’s unspoken fears and needs. The cult leader, like the authoritarian propagandist, uses that insight to make people dependent on their power. The therapist helps them to become more empowered and self-aware.

Second, we need to be much more attuned to the needs of audiences – think of media less as dispensing information and more as a social service. We are, by the looks of it, going to be in a long struggle with Russia. Now is the time to start investing in media that engage the parts of society that are critical to their war effort: workers in munitions factories or, most obviously, soldiers. It’s much easier than in Delmer’s time to obtain evidence of what they care about. Last month there was, for example, a large leak of documents from Russia’s military that showed how the leadership lies about losses on the front. The aim is not to make these people, who are often involved in war crimes, “good” – it’s to help win the war by getting them to disobey their orders.

Third, such media need to nurture a sense of community, especially in polarised democracies where there is still a chance of displacing malign propaganda before it reaches total dominance, and where there are audiences up for grabs. Instead of experiencing power through a strongman, this community needs to empower people to act for themselves. There are many small initiatives that already pioneer this. Hearken, for example, is an online platform where users can help media choose which topics they should focus on, taking power away from aloof editors and grounding it in local needs. vTaiwan is another platform whose algorithm helps people find solutions to polarising issues by identifying common ground on which to build policies. Such examples are tiny and experimental, and need to be scaled massively.

Sefton Delmer had as many bad lessons for us as good. But the most fundamental one is related to his sense that all social roles are somehow performed. We have a choice. We can either play the role prescribed by propagandists – which makes us dependent on them. Or we can invent media that welcome people into a relationship where they become active players.

You can’t shove “the truth” down people’s throats if they don’t want to hear it, but you can inspire them to have the motivation to care about facts in the first place.

- Lessons from Sefton Delmer

Benefits Of Forgetting

Far from signifying failure, forgetting may be the brain’s frontline strategy in processing incoming information. Forgetting is essential, some researchers now argue, because the biological goal of the brain’s memory apparatus is not preserving information, but rather helping the brain make sound decisions. Understanding how the brain forgets may offer clues to enhancing mental performance in healthy brains while also providing insights into the mechanisms underlying a variety of mental disorders.

[---]

“An overly precise memory is maybe not really what we want in the long term, because it prevents us from using our memories to generalize them to new situations,” she said in San Diego at a recent meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. “If our memories are too precise and overfitted, then we can’t actually use them to … make predictions about future situations.”

[---]

Getting just the gist is especially helpful in changing environments, where loss of some memories improves decision making in several ways. For one thing, forgetting can eliminate outdated information that would hamper sound judgment. And memories that reproduce the past too faithfully can impair the ability to imagine differing futures, making behavior too inflexible to cope with changing conditions. Failure to forget can result in the persistence of unwanted or debilitating memories, as with post-traumatic stress disorder.

- Why forgetting may make your mind more efficient

Jon Stewart Remembers His Best Boy, Dipper

 Boy! My wish for you is to find that one dog. 

 

I got more than I dreamt for in this life from Max. People don't understand that unique oneness which transcends everything I know as a human being. 

I am blessed because of you Max. 

I miss you and miss me in you my love. 

But I have you in me which keeps me going.

Why We Remember

Memory does not work like a recording device, preserving everything we have heard, seen, said, and done. Not remembering names or exact dates; having no recollection of the details of a conversation; being unable to recall where you left your glasses or your keys; or watching movies you saw in the past as if you are seeing them for the first time — these are not the symptoms of a failing brain.

They are, on the contrary, signs that your brain is doing just what it was designed to do: prioritize and store important information and let nonessential facts and details slip away, a function that was essential to survival for our evolutionary ancestors. That task has become substantially more difficult with the steady bombardment of email, texts, social media, pop-up ads, and 24-hour news that most people contend with on a daily basis, and as a result, much more extraneous information is forgotten. Even a president might forget a thing or two.

But that doesn’t mean something is wrong. “The problem isn’t your memory, it’s that we have the wrong expectations for what memory is for in the first place,” Ranganath writes in his introduction, a theme that he returns to throughout the book. “Severe memory loss is undoubtedly debilitating, but our most typical complaints and worries around everyday forgetting are largely driven by deeply rooted misconceptions.”

[---]

Far from being static, Ranganath writes, memory, like the brain itself, is malleable, and constantly being updated. It can be shaped by where we are, what we are feeling, what other people say and do, and whether it is a negative or positive memory we are trying to recall. And though people often think about memory as having to do only with the past, Ranganath holds that this is misconceived: Memory also is intimately intertwined with the present and with the future.

“Only when we start to peek behind the veil of the ‘remembering self,’’ he writes, “do we get a glimpse of the pervasive role memory plays in every aspect of human experience and recognize it as a powerful force that can shape everything from our perceptions of reality to the choices and plans we make, to the people we interact with, and even to our identity.”

[---]

Yet Ranganath is the first to admit that what scientists know about memory pales in comparison to what is yet to be learned. “Science is not about having all the answers,” he writes. “It’s about asking better and more revealing questions. There is always going to be a missing piece of the puzzle. But searching for an answer forces us to see the world in new ways, challenging our most stubborn assumptions about who we are.”

- Review of the book Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters by Charan Ranganath

Why I like Hitchens

His nimbleness of mind allowed him to see threats brewing that dawned too late for many.

- Why Hitch Still Matters: On Christopher Hitchens’s “A Hitch in Time”

And he is one of the few people I know who had immense skin in the game plus was never afraid to say he was wrong. 

Observe, Observe, Observe Perpetually - 0

The greatest of all gifts from Max. He knew so much about his surroundings without a single word spoken. It blew my mind way. 

I became his disciple to learn that skill. I got better than I was before Max was born. The onus was on me to hone it constantly. I tried and will try as humanly as possible until my last breath. 

What are some of my observations which most miss?

I will capture those here as long as I can. 

Every cell in my body tells me these observations are accurate but who knows? I might be wrong - prove it to me outside of anomalous cherry picking. 

These are statistically relevant not by sheer number of data points. They are relevant for a single person to observe data points in first person and second hand by reading. Most importantly, I have observed these consistently over decades and kind of have a Lindy Effect. 

I will also add most likely causal reasons behind those observations. The observations and causal reasons are separate entities. I am more likely to be wrong in my causal inference than observations. 

In machine learning, there is a concept called Transfer Learning. When there is not enough data to learn for one task, the model can learn from another task. Most humans suck at transfer learning. This problem is grossly underrated. 

Humans overfit or under fit constantly. 

I wrote this within four weeks of Max passing away:

No one is capable of thinking about death constantly. I see Memento Mori as a struggle between virtue and vanity. 

How to be virtuous when we all know its all vain and how to sprinkle vanity when the body feels strong and virtuous (or more complicated term for this is "catalepsis" which was coined by Martha Nussbaum -  "a condition of certainty and confidence from which nothing can dislodge us.”). 

Some days the former take the forefront and somedays the latter but most days, I hope to get a balance between both.

The trick is to have a healthy balance between virtue and vanity every moment without too much effort. 

Everything I write might be wrong & that gives me something new to learn.

Meta Value - 23

I never even dreamt that an academic paper would not only make it my value system. Plus, I think about this paper almost every time I interact with a human. 

Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory by Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber have definitely reduced my probability of dying soon because of high blood pressure. 

Abstract 

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. 

Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. 

Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

Along the similar lines, Clay Christensen's wise words helped me understand humanity better: 

Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.

The value is not to waste time arguing and reasoning with humans. 

For example, I don't talk to adults about eating non-human animal dead bodies for pleasure and causing immense pain and suffering. There is no way on earth they will change their mind. 

Instead, I focus on kids. They are more open minded, they have unanswered questions in their mind.  If they change their mind, then an entire generation to come via them can stop killing animals. 

As far as adults, they will not kill animals only after they die. Sad but that is the reality. 

Meta Values - 22

I am not special. 

I am equal to any living being on this planet. No less nor more. 

My life isn't so special that my non-human animal brothers and sisters such as rats, pigs, monkeys, dogs, or cats are experimented on and suffer immensely just to save me someday so that I get extra time. Nor kill them for my gastro intestinal pleasures. 

My life is not special in any unique way when compared to all other living beings.  And more importantly, I cannot exist without them - in a literal sense. Humans would have never existed without other living beings.

The possibility of life in any universe is so rare and impossible that all lives on this planet are special.

Max lived his life for 13 years. The same goes for me. 

I will bid adieu someday in future with immense gratitude for this opportunity to share time and place with other living beings.

Very Good Sentence On Cooking & Eating Vegetables

There were so many things I didn’t think about Chinese food until I read it in Fuchsia Dunlop. Her new book Invitation to Banquet is organized around 30 dishes to explain every aspect of Chinese cuisine:

Cantonese sashimi, for example, to discuss knifework; and Mapo tofu to talk about the intense flavors that comes from fermenting the bean. 

Fuchsia raises the questions I have: “Where is the creativity, where the delight, in simply roasting a chunk of meat and serving it with bald potatoes and carrots, as the English like to do?” 

And I feel like she is speaking for me when she is lamenting the poor use of leafy vegetables in western cuisine: “either overcooked or served brutally raw as some strange kind of virtue,” compared to the Chinese greens, which are “more generously portioned than the apologetic little dishes of spinach served on the side… and cooked as carefully as anything else.” 

I wish that there was a book like this for every cuisine to introduce techniques and traditions through personal stories.

- Dan Wang's 2023 Letter

The Tiny Ant and the Mighty Lion

Talk about complex systems and inter-connectedness of all living beings in this beautiful planet! 

Read this and train your organs to be humble and not hurt any living being.

This real-life fable begins with the iconic umbrella-shaped acacia tree, also known as the whistling thorn tree. Graceful and resilient, the acacia tree dominates the savannah landscape and often provides most of the tree cover for thousands of square miles. Hidden in the branches of this tree are great numbers of tiny acacia ants, which make their home there and act as protectors. With their painful stings and bites, the ants ward off large herbivores such as elephants and giraffes, and allow the trees to thrive.

But lately, the trees have come under the growing influence of a globe-trotting intruder: the big-headed ant. Named for its large heart-shaped head and thought to have originated on the island nation of Mauritius, this aggressive ant has quickly spread across the savannah over the past 20 years, outnumbering and, in some places, eradicating the acacia ant. 

Here’s where the lion comes in. As an ambush predator, the lion is heavily reliant on the cover provided by the acacia trees. The trees’ branches and foliage serve as a hiding place from which the lion can sneak up on its favored prey, the zebra. Without the acacia ant, the acacia trees are susceptible to hungry passersby. When elephants extract the nutrients in the bark and roots with their trunks, the acacia trees are stripped and often left broken. As more and more of these trees are consumed, the landscape has radically changed, becoming open and bare.

Conservationists, noticing the change in tree cover, have worried lions might struggle to capture their prey and feed themselves and begin to die. With nowhere to hide, how would they get their dinner?

Recently, an international team of biologists set out to answer this question. They collected data about ant invasions; tree cover; zebra, elephant, and giraffe populations; and the behavior of lions and their prey across the 300-square-kilometer Ol Pejeta Conservancy in northern Kenya. What they found surprised them, says Douglas Kamaru, a University of Wyoming Ph.D. student and the lead author of a new paper about their study. 

Kamaru and his colleagues expected lions to starve and their populations to shrink, but that’s not what happened. “The lion population was stable,” says Kamaru. In areas invaded by big-headed ants, the lions simply changed their diets, swapping out zebras for African buffalo. The buffalo aren’t as skittish as the zebras, so the lions are less reliant on stealth and surprise.

In 2020, zebra kill occurrence was nearly three times lower in areas invaded by big-headed ants. Zebras also accounted for less than half of total prey kills that year, down from about two-thirds in 2003, while buffalo accounted for 42 percent of all prey kills, up from zero. These changes were unrelated to zebra or buffalo densities, which remained unchanged from 2014 to 2020.

[---]

The ant and the lion offer a dramatic example of the ripple effect—how a seemingly diminutive change in a web of relationships can fundamentally alter an entire ecosystem. The tiniest creature can upset the mightiest beast on the land.

Meta Values - 21

A powerful writing has a wonderful awakening power to change one's life for good.  Ever since I read these lines, I try to evaluate myself everyday and try to change myself with time. 

And this happened yesterday. For 18 years I was always home for Max's birthday on March 21st. This year, I am scheduled to travel for work on his birthday. 

I can refuse to go and follow the pattern for the rest of my life. But I need to change with the situation. 

I have become Max and he has become me. Where it starts and where it ends is blurry to say the least. 

Home is where Max is and I am Max. 

So for the first time in 18 years, I will not be home for his birthday and I will treat my mind as a river. 

Mind as a River

Understand: the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present moment. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz called this "friction": the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to the current circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be....

Think of the mind as a river: the faster it flows, the better it keeps up with the present and responds to change. The faster it flows, also the more it refreshes itself and the greater its energy. Obsessional thoughts, past experiences (whether traumas or successes), and preconceived notions are like boulders or mud in this river, settling and hardening there and damming it up. The river stops moving; stagnation sets in. You must wage constant war on this tendency in the mind. 

- The 33 Strategies of  War by Robert Greene

 

Good Bye Steven M. Wise

Steven, founder of Non-Human Rights Project passed away. 

You have done the foundational work for future animals to be free from human animal. Thank you sir.

You have made a huge impact on how I live rest of my life. 

From NhRP email: 

We’re heartbroken to share the news that Steven M. Wise–our founder, president, and friend–passed away yesterday. 

No words will be sufficient to describe the immense sadness and sense of loss we feel with his passing. Steve inspired us every day with his relentlessly cheerful determination in the face of any and all obstacles, his fearlessness, his utter clarity on the injustices nonhuman animals endure, and his vision for a world where nonhuman rights are recognized alongside human rights. Steve spent almost every waking hour for the last four decades thinking about the struggle for nonhuman rights. Among lawyers and legal scholars, he was one of the greats–a true visionary, pursuing fundamental change with an awe-inspiring breadth of knowledge of law, history, science, and social justice. 

Whether walking into court together, digging into a court decision with the team on Zoom, or just checking in at the end of a long, difficult workday, working with Steve was always energizing because everything he said and did was infused with his unfailing optimism and his total commitment to the Nonhuman Rights Project. In our fight against human tyranny over nonhuman animals, he also brought a self-deprecating sense of humor and a deep sense of care for the individual well-being of our staff–knowing, from his years of experience, that we’d need both in order to stay strong and keep going. 

As a result, our small, close-knit team has a sense of purpose and solidarity we know will carry us through this extraordinarily difficult moment. 

Steve, we will miss you. We’re grateful beyond words for everything you did to make the world a better place for everyone during your 73 years on earth, and we’re honored to be able to carry on this work in your memory–for as long as it takes. 

 

Is AI Anti-Animal?

I am in the field and stupid me,  I missed this. 

The data behind training the models are created by humans. And humans look down on animals. This is not good for the future of animals. We need a way to minimize this biased data. 

In general, AI should go beyond data but we are not there yet. So we are stuck with "cleaning" the data to remove bias (and good luck with that). 

It should come as no surprise, then, that AI is also a replicator, perpetuator, and normalizer of speciesism.  

We need to work with big tech to eradicate this bias before it spreads into the future this anti-animal virus infected human brains. 

Speciesism – or “the belief that a mere difference in species justifies us in giving more weight to the interests of members of one species (usually our own . . . ) than the similar interests of members of other species” – is a prejudice, similar to sexism and racism” that underlies all human exploitation of other-than-human animals, including inside laboratories. 

Unlike other forms of human-on-human discrimination like sexism and racism, however, speciesism is not “widely accepted” to be “wrong”, and its “biased views and actions [] are shared, accepted, and performed by a large majority of society”. As a result, its elimination from AI is not a “high priority” (if it’s even on the list at all…):

“Massive efforts are made to reduce biases in both data and algorithms to render AI applications fair. These efforts are propelled by various high-profile cases where biased algorithmic decision-making caused harm to women, people of color, minorities, etc. However, the AI fairness field still succumbs to a blind spot, namely its insensitivity to discrimination against animals.”

[---]

To spark change ourselves, all we have to do is change the world (something we in the animal rights movement were already planning to do anyway, right?!)!

At present, “none of the major AI companies [] have any mention of animals in their ethical guidelines, and they’re not instructing data workers to consider how responses affect animals”. This means that speciesism will continue to be “hardwired into algorithms running our lives”.

And, this means that those of us in the animal rights movement must remain vigilant in our opposition to oppression in all of its forms – for changing our machines’ reflections of our world requires changing our world itself; and changing our world itself requires each and every one of us taking action. 

Obelisks - Virus-Like Entities in Our Gut

Another example of epistemic humility; we have not even scratched the surface of knowledge (leave alone humans who act like they have passed the end of knowledge). 

Viroids are small, infectious, and circular RNA molecules that are distinct from typical viruses. Unlike viruses, viroids do not possess a protective protein coat. They were initially discovered in plants, causing various diseases, and were later identified in fungi. Viroids are known for their ability to replicate autonomously within host cells, co-opting cellular machinery for their own reproduction.

Initially believed to exclusively infect plants, recent research suggests viroids may extend their reach to other hosts, including animals, fungi, or bacteria. In the current study, researchers delved into the genes of microbes inhabiting the human body, exploring the potential existence of viroids in this domain. They termed newly found viroids “Obelisks” due to their predicted 3D structure resembling a thin rod when they fold onto themselves.

[---]

Recently discovered Obelisks appeared to include instructions for replication enzymes, rendering them more intricate than previously described viroids. However, akin to most viroids, they still lacked directives for a protective outer shell. The impact of these viroids on human health remains uncertain, although they could potentially influence the human microbiome by infecting bacteria. Additionally, ongoing discussions surround the evolutionary relationship between viruses and viroids — fueling the debate & questioning whether viruses evolved from viroids or vice versa.

In essence, these recent discoveries not only add layers to our understanding of human anatomy but also underscore the ongoing process of discovery and refinement in the field of medical science. The impact lies in the potential to enhance our ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent various health conditions through a more comprehensive understanding of the human body’s intricate workings. 

How To Live a Resilient Life - Nassim Taleb

I love to listen to this once in a while to evaluate myself at a given point and time. Plus it gives me insight about myself which I was unaware of. 

Today, I understood why I moved away from so many "friends" :

Tell people what you do not what they should do. 

When I talk about things I do and act on; I think it irritates and intimidates those people. They prefer talking abstract bullshit or signaling topics. 

I prefer not do those mating dances. 

Next one: 

If something is nonsense... say it!

This one is more elegant. People who can digest that fact I am calling their "bullshit, are more open minded and have an ability to change their mind. Plus they are mature enough to understand that I can be trusted and I will be a shoulder they can rely on.

This has been my technique to weed out crappy humans out of my life.  It not only saved me time but helped me avoid unwanted psychological drama. 

Here's Taleb's 11 rules: 

1. Do not disappoint your 18-year-old self. 
2. Sacrifice for others
3. Seek self respect
4. Do not read newspapers (or consume news) 
5. If something is nonsense... say it!
6. Be most respectful to manual workers
7. Avoid things that bore you
8. Don't do to others what you don't want them to do to you
9. Start a business
10. Tell people what you do not what they should do
11. I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.

Things to avoid completely: 

• Muscles without strength
• Friendship without trust
• Opinion without risk
• Change without aesthetics 
• Age without values
• Food without nourishment 
• Power without fairness
• Facts without rigor 
• Degree without erudition 
• Militarism without fortitude
• Progress without civilization 
• Complication without depth
• Fluency without content
• Religion without tolerance

Non-Human Animal Talk

It is clear that some animals have the potential to use language in the sense that we understand it. This is not realised in the wild because it would not give a selective advantage. African grey parrots are the obvious example. One famous African grey, Alex, lived in Professor Irene Pepperberg’s lab. Every night, when she left for home, he said to her, ‘You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow.’ That’s not particularly impressive: the parrot could simply have been copying her. But Alex could do much more than that. He knew that words related to concepts, which is probably a defining element of any true language. If presented with a tray of objects of different shapes and colours and made of various materials, he would accurately answer questions such as ‘How many triangles?’ or ‘How many red squares?’ or ‘How many wood?’ And he learned not just the associations of words, but their meanings too. He looked into a mirror and asked, ‘What colour?’ That was how he learned the word ‘grey’. This has been described as the only known example of a non-human asking a direct question. Alex, says Kershenbaum, had ‘the core of what is necessary for language’ – and probably ‘that’s an understatement’.

‘Do animals have language?’ is a bad question. They talk, concludes Kershenbaum, but not in the way we do. We are pathologically linguistic. We chop the world up into propositions and, if we’re not careful, examine those rather than the world itself. The behaviourist Temple Grandin speculates that non-human animals might rely on mental images rather than something tantamount to language to conceptualise ideas (as people like her, with autism spectrum disorder, do). We can’t know, but Kershenbaum is sympathetic to the notion. 

Kershenbaum no doubt sees Why Animals Talk as a book about biology. I prefer to see it as a humble, genial, scholarly, impeccably clear meditation on our own Umwelt. He challenges us to consider that there are ways of being in the world other than ours. Our old instinct is right: if we learn how to listen properly, animals really can tell us something significant about the world that we wouldn’t know without them.

- Review of the book Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication by Arik Kershenbaum

From A Recent Study - At Least 65 Species Of Animals Laugh

Many people were surprised when they saw Max laugh! I have seen my Max laugh almost everyday. I miss his smile and his kisses. 

This is a slap in the face of sapiens who look down on animals. Another reason to treat our fellow non-human animals. 

Researchers at UCLA have identified 65 species of animals who make "play vocalizations," or what we would consider laughter. Some of those vocalizations were already well documented—we've known for a while that apes and rats laugh—but others may come as a surprise. Along with a long list of primate species, domestic cows and dogs, foxes, seals, mongooses and three bird species are prone to laughter as well. (Many bird species can mimic human laughter, but that's not the same as making their own play vocalizations.)

[---]

The UCLA researchers shared that the study of laughter in animals can help us better understand our own evolutionary behavior.

“This work lays out nicely how a phenomenon once thought to be particularly human turns out to be closely tied to behavior shared with species separated from humans by tens of millions of years,” Bryant said, according to UCLA.

“When we laugh, we are often providing information to others that we are having fun and also inviting others to join,” Winkler said. “Some scholars have suggested that this kind of vocal behavior is shared across many animals who play, and as such, laughter is our human version of an evolutionarily old vocal play signal.”

I knew about Rat's laughter since Max was a puppy. 

And we treat them horrible with animal testing. Wake up humans!

Last-Chance Pets & The People Who Rescue Them

This is a moral area I fail miserably. 

Rescuing old pets and seeing them die will kill me daily. I know who I am,  what drives me and what kills me. 

I will be emotionally drained. I don't know if this is an excuse to protect myself. 

One thing I know about myself is that I do change everyday. I hope I become stronger to give these beautiful animals one last chance soon or work ways that this horrible fate doesn't happen to any animal. 

This piece is about my human heroes who rescue them. I bow in front of you. Thank you. I hope your acts will change my mind.

In a car on the way back from an animal shelter, with a 12-year-old chihuahua on his lap, Steve Greig felt peace. For months, since the death of his dog, Wolfgang, he had been inconsolable. “I couldn’t make sense of it,” he says. Wolfgang had been hit by a car. Greig had the idea that he could adopt a dog that nobody else wanted, to give an animal a last chance of a loving home. The chihuahua, whom he named Eeyore, was the oldest dog in the shelter and had a heart murmur and four bad knees. Eeyore spent that car journey looking out of the window, tail wagging. “It was not a no-kill shelter, so his future didn’t look that good, but he had a new lease on life,” says Greig. “I’ll never forget it. It felt like Wolfgang had a hand in letting this dog live and it was exactly what I needed.”

It was so rewarding that he soon adopted another old dog – “and one turned into another”. He now has 11. Every so often, a shelter calls him with news of a dog that might be put down and he can’t resist. “The problem with seniors in shelters is they’re the last that are looked at. If you have a senior with health problems, they’re the last of the last.” Greig lives in Colorado, but most of his dogs have been rescued from other states – from “high-kill shelters” where dogs who are elderly, disabled or can’t find homes are euthanised.

Being older – the dogs, not Greig, although he recently retired as an accountant – means they are easier to handle, he says. “It’s not like I’ve got 11 puppies running around. They, like myself, love a routine.” The oldest is 19 and the youngest is eight, but since she is an Irish wolfhound it is as though she were a centenarian. Greig gets up early, takes them out – five can walk without problems; the others usually sit in a wagon – then back for medication and breakfast. Some need more care – one of his dogs is diabetic and has stomach problems. This means boiled fish for his meals and insulin at the same time each day. “I have to plan around that. Others are on special diets as well. A couple are blind, so they won’t go out by themselves; I have to place them outside and bring them in.” Sometimes, he says with an affectionate laugh, they get lost.

[---]

As for the inevitable, everyone goes into it knowing this. “It’s just the idea that you’ve made a difference for a short time to an animal’s life,” says Kennedy. Williams has no idea how long Libby has left, “but every day is a delight”. Crockett says he will mope around for a while once Tia goes, “then reach the conclusion there’s another poor old cat out there who needs a home”. Lewis thinks that, for Sheba and Teddy, “whatever time they’ve got left, they deserve some love”.

For Greig, going through mourning periods fairly regularly has given him an appreciation for life. “I don’t take things for granted. I constantly see how fleeting life is. I see them happy and doing well, usually much better than when they came in, and I feel like I’ve given them the best of whatever time they have left. I don’t mean to say that it’s not hard, but I comfort myself knowing how their lives could have been.”

His last-chance dogs have taught him a great lesson, he says. “The advice I always have if you want to make your life better? Realise that it’s not about you. The people I have seen that are most unhappy think everything is about them. Once you realise that almost everything isn’t, which is what these dogs have taught me, life is so good.”

 

The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories

Abstract

We hypothesize that fictional stories are highly successful in human cultures partly because they activate evolved cognitive mechanisms, for instance for finding mates (e.g., in romance fiction), exploring the world (e.g., in adventure and speculative fiction), or avoiding predators (e.g., in horror fiction). In this paper, we put forward a comprehensive framework to study fiction through this evolutionary lens. The primary goal of this framework is to carve fictional stories at their cognitive joints using an evolutionary framework. Reviewing a wide range of adaptive variations in human psychology – in personality and developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines –, this framework also addresses the question of inter individual differences in preferences for different features in fictional stories. It generates a wide range of predictions about the patterns of combinations of such features, according to the pattern's of variations in the mechanisms triggered by fictional stories. As a result of a highly collaborative effort, we present a comprehensive review of evolved cognitive mechanisms that fictional stories activate. To generate this review, we listed more than 70 adaptive challenges humans faced in the course of their evolution, identified the adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved in response to such challenges, specified four sources of adaptive variability for the sensitivity of each mechanism (i.e., personality traits, sex, age, and ecological conditions), and linked these mechanisms to the story features that trigger them. This comprehensive framework lays the ground for a theory-driven research program for the study of fictional stories, their content, distribution, structure, and cultural evolution.

- Full Paper Here

Archaea, Horizontal Gene Transfer et al.,

Since the late 1970s, there have come three big surprises about what we humans are and about how life on our planet has evolved.

The first of those three surprises involves a whole category of life, previously unsuspected and now known as the archaea. (They look like bacteria through a microscope, but their DNA reveals they are shockingly different.) Another is a mode of hereditary change that was also unsuspected, now called horizontal gene transfer. (Heredity was supposed to move only vertically, from parents to offspring.) The third is a revelation, or anyway a strong likelihood, about our own deepest ancestry. (It seems now that our lineage traces to the archaea.) So we ourselves probably come from creatures that, as recently as forty years ago, were unknown to exist.

One of the most disorienting results of these developments is a new challenge to the concept of “species.” Biologists have long recognized that the boundaries of one species may blur into another—by the process of hybridism, for instance. And the notion of species is especially insecure in the realm of bacteria and archaea.  But the discovery that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has occurred naturally, many times, even in the lineages of animals and plants, has brought the categorical reality of a species into greater question than ever. That’s even true for us humans—we are composite individuals, mosaics.

It’s not just that—as you may have read in magazine articles—your human body contains at least as many bacterial cells as it does human cells. (This doesn’t even count all the nonbacterial microbes—the virus particles, fungal cells, archaea, and other teeny passengers inhabiting our guts, mouths, nostrils, and other bodily surfaces.) That’s the microbiome. Each of us is an ecosystem.

I’m talking about something else, a bigger and more shocking discovery that has come from the revolution in a field called molecular phylogenetics. (That phrase sounds fancy and technical, but it means merely the use of molecular information, such as DNA or RNA sequences, in discerning how one creature is related to another.) The discovery was that sizeable chunks of the genomes of all kinds of animals, including us, have been acquired by horizontal transfer from bacteria or other alien species.

How could that be possible? How could genes move sideways, between species, not just vertically along ancestral lineages? The mechanisms are complex, but one label that fits most of them is “infective heredity.”  DNA can be carried across boundaries, from one genome to another, by infective agents such as bacteria and viruses. Such horizontal gene transfer, like sex, has been a source of freshening innovation in otherwise discrete lineages, including ours—and it is still occurring.

This is an aspect of evolution that was unimagined by Charles Darwin. Evolution is trickier, far more intricate, than we had realized. The tree of life is more tangled.

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These discoveries should not merely complicate our magisterial human self-image, but also help lead us toward a wiser and humbler understanding of our place—collectively and as “individuals” within the “species” Homo sapiens—in the story of life on Earth.

It’s a story in which we humans are important protagonists but not the ultimate and predestined heroes. It’s a story in which heredity has moved sideways as well as vertically and all the conventional hierarchies and boundaries have proven more imperfect, transgressible, and leaky than we had supposed. But these revelations don’t diminish our responsibility, as humans, to respect and preserve the diversity of living creatures, with all their own mosaic genomes and tangled lineages, who cohabit the planet with us. On the contrary, I think. All this should make us only more amazed, respectful, and careful. Life on Earth is wondrous precisely because it’s so complicated.

- More Here