Part 1:
Part 2: Remix
High fives to Jurgen Otto for this work.
“Meet the…” is a collaboration between The Finch & Pea and Nature Afield to bring Nature’s amazing creatures into your home.
Category: Curiosities of Nature
Crying
Human population structure is such that it would require either (or both) a strong selection pressure or a big increase in fitness for natural selection to dominate the evolutionary dynamics. I submit as evidence that humans were not subject to intense selection pressure from predation one word: crying, specifically the crying of small children.
The idea that a primitive band of reproductively successful humans could remain hidden from things like leopards boggles the mind of this father. And, I have thought this for a long time, before I had children. It is in no way related to the fundamental conflicts generated by bed time and potty training in the mind of a two year old child. Nothing at all.
Power Up!
Statistical Power! It sounds like something a math textbook superhero would exclaim while collecting data points. I’ll be honest, even though I have a PhD, my stats background is very weak. My college major required all sorts of delightful calculus and differential equations but I’ve never taken a statistics course. My graduate work required only the most basic of statistical analysis (which lucky for me, our software could handle without my input). It turns out that I am not alone, and this is a major problem. Continue reading “Power Up!”
Quanta Sutra
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent more than 42 seconds on the Internet that there is a small, but erudite niche of love/sex humor based on particle physics and quantum mechanics. I like to refer to this branch of comedy collectively as the Quanta Sutra. I’m telling you this, because I recently found the following effort, at the expense of physics students, by Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
An argument between Dawkins & Wilson
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal features an argument between Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson, with a cameo by Michael Lynch.
*I fear this may be a very inside evolutionary biology joke which greatly oversimplifies the positions held by all three individuals.
The Finch and Pea 