there are many kinds of bears all of them will mess up your refrigerator
otters can fit under, on, or next to your kayak so what’s the problem
wolves are prehistoric proto-dogs that never left of course they’re huge they are the final evolution that we purposefully chose not to let happen they are almost big enough to ride but you’ll be dead before you or your child can mount one don’t do it
rodents ok
moose and buffalo can both fit two or three of what people think moose and buffalo are. don’t let bullwinkle take your car keys he doesn’t even fit
pigs are proto-boars. that means they are huge once they’re adults but still quite big at adolescents. big enough for wrasslin but I don’t wanna die
Fuck coyotes
foxes vary. some are tiny. cat sized. diminutive. babies but adults.
i warned you about bears, bro. i told you, dawg
platypus are TINY. like, kitten small. A+ smols.
Deer are smaller than you think - stags are larger but not huge, hit em with your car and you’ll dent the deer and write off the car.
Rats are larger than you think. Don’t let that cartoon fool you. if a rat is on your head, you’re gonna look like a RAT IS ON YOUR HEAD. large hat or no.
Pigs are bigger than you expect by quite a bit.
Wild boar WILL KILL YOU.
Hare are not rabbits. They are swol rabbits. think baby kangaroos.
I saw a manta ray once while scuba diving and it was the size of a fucking car.
“The blue-ringed octopus, despite its small size, carries enough venom to kill twenty-six adult humans within minutes. Their bites are tiny and often painless, with many victims not realizing they have been envenomated until respiratory depression and paralysis start to set in.[8] No blue-ringed octopus antivenom is available yet, making it one of the deadliest reef inhabitants in the ocean.”
Holy shit
And this is why I don’t go in the ocean anymore
Also the blue rings literally only show up when it is distressed so this person has angered it!!! You are in danger friend!!!
Actually this guy keeps them as pets they’re on his instagram (william_exotique) and he frequently holds then and I just? Don’t know why? And also every picture or video he posts of them shows the blue rings so they’re always in distress I just do not understand why he’s doing this
I mean OP pretty much covered it. A blue ringed octopus is almost on the level of CONE SNAIL on the list of things you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT PICK UP UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
But ask and you shall receive, On this episode of “Fun Facts With Cuckoo,” DEAD. YOU’RE DEAD. EVERYTHING IS DEAD AND YOU SHOULD NEVER TOUCH ANYTHING IN THE OCEAN EVER AGAIN.
There are many things that will kill you.
[citation needed]
There are fewer, but still many things that will kill you FAST.
There are yet fewer things that kill you fast and by such an overwhelming margin of overkill that nervous laughter is our only solace in the dark of this terrible, surprisingly Lovecraftian world of unearthly horrors that we live in.
Of the things that I know about which will kill you fast via just plain insultingly potent venom, which is a not insignificant number of things because I know a not insignificant number of things, there are about 3 things in the ocean – IN THE WHOLE OCEAN – which are so insanely, mind-bogglingly deadly that there is pretty much no possible hope for survival (I mean you CAN, but god help you if you’re ever in that situation, because god’s just about damn near the only thing that CAN help you). THE. WHOLE. OCEAN.
Those three things are the Irukandji (a tiny (1cm) species of box jellyfish, which has stingers not only on its tentacles but on its BELL, for reasons no one has definitively figured out, and is so toxic despite its size its sting can cause a severe brain hemorrhage), the cone snail (a group of carnivorous sea snails that is accepted to be the most venomous animals on earth, with a STUPIDLY fast acting and extremely powerful neurotoxin that has in at least one case killed a human ALMOST INSTANTANEOUSLY, because the swimmer who found two beautiful shells (unfortunately cone snails tend to have very pretty shells which makes people want to pick them up) was holding them up for a picture and ended up being stabbed in the neck by not one but TWO cone snails at the same time, and it is believed that she was literally dead before she hit the ground, I mean LITERALLY in a 100% non-fictional and non-exaggerated way, in between the time the two cone snails stabbed her and the time her limp body hit the sand, she was not alive anymore), and the blue ringed octopus.
It is POSSIBLE to survive any of these. But not without immediate medical attention. Of these three, the Irukandji is by far the most treatable, because Australia and other coastal regions (including Florida and other parts of the US) are kind of experienced in dealing with box jellyfish.
The blue ringed octopus will fucking kill you. There’s no antidote for their venom, ONE COMPONENT OF WHICH (tetrodotoxin) is 1200 times deadlier than cyanide. It’s a powerful neurotoxin (most of the worst venoms are because the species that produce them need to kill or at least paralyze their prey quickly, like jellyfish whose fragile tentacles could be damaged if their food doesn’t stop struggling) that attacks the sodium channels and causes muscle paralysis. It doesn’t necessarily kill you quickly. It PARALYZES you quickly, so that you can’t really call for help or describe the problem, and you will probably end up slowly suffocating from a paralyzed diaphragm. Tetrodotoxin can be metabolized by the body in a matter of hours, but it can also kill you in a matter of minutes if you get a lethal dose (which isn’t much, the
LD50
or median lethal dose, the dose at which you have a 50% chance of survival, is only 8 MICROGRAMS per kilogram of body weight (as tested in mice)). This is, by venom standards, not a large amount, which means the animal that is capable of putting this venom inside your body is very very good at killing the absolute shit out of you.
DON’T TOUCH THE BLUE RINGED OCTOPUS.
Now, because overkill is my motto, let me briefly explain why Conus geographus is the undisputed champion of YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE, AND FURTHERMORE FUCK YOU FOR THINKING OTHERWISE.
A cone snail walks into a bar. You’d expect the bartender to ask, “what’s your poison,” but they were paralyzed before they could ask and OH LOOK they’re already FUCKING DEAD ON THE GROUND.
Conus geographus is about 4-6 inches long and nature’s equivalent of Avada Kedavra. Cone snails literally have their own KIND of toxins named after them: conotoxin. Not only is there no antidote, but their venom AGGRESSIVELY RESISTS our ability to find a cure, because we barely understand how it works AND conotoxins are so internally varied, even within a single species, that any one antidote isn’t going to help because they’re constantly mutating and evolving their venom to prevent their prey from evolving a resistance to it. Plus their venom is like, a bunch of different venoms all at once JUST IN CASE any one of them wasn’t good enough.
I want you to read these two sentences from the wiki page on conotoxin:
“Conotoxins have a variety of mechanisms of actions, most of which have not been determined.”
Remember how the
LD50 of tetrodotoxin is 8μg/kg? Conotoxin is 160 times more potent. FIFTY NANOGRAMS PER KILOGRAM HAS A 50% CHANCE OF KILLING YOU. A 220-POUND HUMAN HAS A 50% CHANCE OF SURVIVAL AGAINST JUST 5 MICROGRAMS OF CONOTOXIN.
I DID SOME MATH.
IT WOULD TAKE 7-9 MILLIGRAMS OF CONOTOXIN TO KILL A BLUE WHALE, THE HEAVIEST ANIMAL TO EVER LIVE. (based on weight estimates from 300-400,000 lbs.)
Conus geographus is so fucking deadly that “In two cases of envenomation, only 0.0002-0.0005 mg resulted in severe paralysis.”
THIS THING KILLS STUFF SO HARD THAT BEFORE YOU HEAR THE FIRST “MORTAL KOMBAT” IN THE MORTAL KOMBAT THEME, THERE’S PROBABLY ALREADY BEEN A FATALITY.
And guess what? Cone snails don’t do that NOOB SHIT with the superficial biting or stinging. Your wetsuit or gloves won’t protect you. Because homeboy didn’t bring teeth to evolution’s knife fight. Oh no. It brought a motherfucking radula POISON HARPOON. It’s lightning fast and has way more piercing power than some silly little cnidocytes or salivary bacteria.
Another component of their venom is being researched for its potential as a pain reliever. “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT????” you might reasonably ask. And you would be right to do so, because science has gone too far and has surely sinned against the very image of Mollusca Kedavra. Well, it turns out the answer is “Research shows that certain component proteins of the venom target specific human pain receptors and can be up to 10,000 times more potent than morphine without morphine’s addictive properties and side-effects.” That’s right, the part of their venom that SPECIFICALLY DOESN’T HURT YOU is up to 10,000 times more potent than morphine.
Also, Conus geographus (along with one other cone snail species, C. tulipa) is the only known non-human animal to weaponize insulin. In addition to the normal insulin that the snails produce for their own use, their bodies manufacture an ADDITIONAL insulin molecule that is similar to the kind produced in fish (which they eat) for the sole purpose of stunning their prey through hypoglycemic shock. BECAUSE APPARENTLY THEY DON’T FEEL LIKE THEY’D KILL YOU HARD ENOUGH OTHERWISE.
IF you are going to survive the ALMIGHTY CONE SNAIL, WHO KNOWS NO FEAR, TRIUMPHANT HEDGEMON OF THE MOLECULAR ARMS RACE, TRUE BORN HEIR TO THE SCYTHE OF DEATH ITSELF, FISHSLAYER, GOD AMONG MOLLUSKS, WHOSE WRATH IS MERCIFUL ONLY IN ITS BREVITY, ADMIRABLE IN ITS BEAUTY AND UNSULLIED BY THE UNWORTHY TOUCH OF MORTAL HANDS OR SCALES OR REALLY ANYTHING IN RANGE OF ITS RADULA HARPOON, then literally the only thing that’s going to save you is for you to be kept alive artificially (externalizing your respiratory functions to force your body to continue breathing, basically) until the effects of the venom wear off. And because of how quickly this venom acts, you need to get that medical attention VERY, VERY FAST.
And if you don’t get it, you will still be conscious while the paralysis slowly suffocates you to death.
Railroad Tracks
The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.
That’s an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the U.S. Railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.
Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular Odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So, who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear
of destroying their wagon wheels.
Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
In other words, bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure, or process, and wonder, ‘What horse’s ass came up with this?’,
you may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.
Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.
The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.
The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit larger,
but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.
The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains
and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know,
is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature
of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.
And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important!
Now you know, Horses’ Asses control almost everything.
Explains a whole lot of stuff, doesn’t it?
This is the single most mind blowing fact I’ve read on tumblr, every day is a school day-thank you.
Nice history lesson!
My daughter and I were just discussing this very subject.
The interval between the start and the end of “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” is 3 minutes and 30 seconds, and the International Space Station is moving is 7.66 km/s.
This means that if an astronaut on the ISS listens to “I’m Gonna Be”, in the time between the first beat of the song and the final lines …
… they will have traveled just about exactly 1,000 miles.
If anyone tells you that there are 2-3 sexes in the world I want you to just go ahead and slap them.
I was making a chart this morning, but by the time I got to the twentieth configuration of primary sex characteristics, I got bored and angry, so just fucking slap them. Don’t bother giving them a chart, it’s a pain in the ass to produce anyway.
Here’s some non-chart-form lists.
Primary sex is defined by taking one or more item from each list (roughly, because just as there are double dominant intersex conditions there are double recessive ones too and it’s a whole thing). All potential combinations of these options can be said to constitute their own primary sex category.
Chromosomes:
XX
XY
X/X0
Mosaic
XXY
XXXY
XXX
XYY
Others (there are so many, like I think you can live with up to five chromosomes? So many)
Hormones
Estrogenized
Androgenized
Double dominant (high levels of both estrogenic and androgenic hormones)
Double recessive (low or no sex hormones)
Gonads
Testicle/es
Ovary/ies
Ovotestes
Gonads
Testicular agenesis
Gonadal dysgenesis
Probably more, I’m not a professional here
Genitals
Penis
Vagina
Pseudovaginal pouch
Clitoromegaly
Micropenis
Hypospadias
Diphallia
Definitely more but I am Tired™
There’s like at least several dozen primary sexes, and that’s before secondary characteristic development comes into play and the point is biological sex is a fucking mass hallucination. Slap anyone who says otherwise.
(This is not a professionally sourced and cited resource post please do not treat this like it’s some kind of all powerful reference work I literally just made it in a fit of rage in abt ten minutes based on stuff I already know I didn’t even research it be careful use google etc and so forth)
It so is? Like it’s just ridiculously confusing and complex.
WHICH IS WHY PEOPLE WHO SAY IT’S SIMPLE AND COMES DOWN TO “MALE OR FEMALE”/”MALE, FEMALE, OR INTERSEX” NEED TO SHUT THE FUCK UP AND ACCEPT THEIR SLAPPING PEACEFULLY INSTEAD OF SENDING ME DOZENS OF ANGRY LETTERS
This has gotten more attention than expected so I figure I will put it here as well.
My favorite is that there’s a good chance that people so insistent on the existence of a binary may be intersex and never know unless: they don’t get a first period, develop unexpected secondary sex characteristics during puberty, or struggle with infertility later in life, or GET KARYOTYPED
These are also very human-centric! There are vertebrate animals that don’t use chromosomes as their sex-determination system (reptiles and some birds can also use the environment to determine sex) and there are vertebrate animals that use different chromosome arrangements.
Birds for example, don’t use XX/XY, they’re ZW/ZZ. In birds, the egg determines the sex (not the sperm) and females are the heterogamous sex (with ZW chromosomes). There is plenty of room for variation, too - a ZZW bird who presented as female successfully laid and hatched her own eggs (x)
Platypuses, meanwhile, have a system that resembles both XX/XY and ZW/ZZ in function, but the form is a little baffling. Platypus males are XYXYXYXYXY, and females are XXXXXXXXXX.
Clearly, there is nothing perfect, universal or holy about XX/XY - and anyone who insists there is has demonstrated that they don’t know anything about biology.
And it’s a fluid system even once you grasp the idea of chromosomes - we know that you can hack sex in lizards to create “superfemales” (by incubating an egg with “male” chromosomes at a temperature that hatches “female” babies). Superfemales present as females and can lay viable eggs. You can do it with lizards that happen to use the XX/XY system, and hatch fertile males with XX chromosomes. You can do this with chickens as well - take a “genetically male” fertilized egg and incubate it at the perfect temperature, and you can hatch a “male” chicken that will lay eggs for you. The difficulty is that this only works some of the time in chickens - the cooler temperatures that hatch female chickens tend to kill the male embryos that don’t transition, which is wasteful. Otherwise, this would revolutionize the poultry industry.
So now we know that XX/XY is like the Windows 7 of sexual determinism (lots of people use it, but would be silly to call it the only operating system in the world) how fixed is “sex” anyway? Well, most of us know that clownfish can change sex - if there are changes in their social structure, the dominant female can transition from a reproductively functioning egg-fertilizing male to a reproductively functioning egg-laying female. Bio textbooks say that clownfish “don’t have” sex chromosomes, but I think it’s more likely that they do, but that they don’t have any function. At any rate, the change is down to hormones, which change in response to the social environment the fish is in.
So are hormones, then, the Thing That Totally Definitely Determines What Men and Women Are? Not really. Before puberty, human children don’t have many sex hormones circulating in their bodies, and human children are often quite clear about their own gender. Humans who have had ovaries removed, or who go through menopause, no longer have waves of “female” hormones sloshing around - but we still call most of them “women.” Humans who have had their testicles removed or their androgens depleted (usually because of testicular or prostate cancer, which can feed on hormones) are usually still called “men.” And ovaries produce natural levels of testosterone quite happily, because they need to - just at lower levels! Pregnant humans often have particularly high levels of testosterone. Weirdly, “male” partners of pregnant people often drop to lower levels of testosterone than usual - their pregnant partner’s hormones influence their own biology. But a cisgender father of a fetus does not stop being a male just because he has less testosterone.
Pregnancy gets weirder, too - decades after the fetus has moved out, a pregnant person who once harbored an XY fetus will have XY cells in their body and brain. If you looked at, say, Molly Weasley, you’d be able to find “male” tissue in her brain - where her body traded for some fresh young stem cells from her fetuses, and used them to replenish her own older tissues. So a cisgender person born XX can exhibit microchimerism later in life and never know it. But having XY tissue in your brain doesn’t make you a man.
Okay, so what about gender roles? Surely those are clear - surely those are necessary for sex and sexuality and the Natural Order and all those things?
Well, we also know that animals practice a range of gender roles. Again, a lot of it is more obvious in fish, reptiles and birds, partly because sexual dimorphism tends to be more pronounced in these animals. But there are plenty of species in which you get multiple “types” of sexes. The most common is the territorial/satellite male arrangement, in which there are multiple distinct types of males, with different genetics, behavior, life history, physical appearance and courtship strategies.
Ruffs, a type of sandpiper, have distinct territorial and satellite males, plus “faeder” males that were only recently discovered to be male; faeders are identical to females in appearance and most behavior, and plenty of previous sightings of lesbianism in ruffs were probably faeder/female matings. Satellite and territorial males top faeders, but as faeders also top satellite and territorial males, researchers have interpreted this as “ruffs are perfectly aware that faeders aren’t the same as females, and none of them give a shit.”
Above are some different forms of masculinity in ruffs. The bird on the top left is a female; the birds below are the different male types. In the picture on the right, the independent and satellite male are vying for the attention of the female; the faeder is the brown one on the left. The territory belongs to the territorial male, who will defend it from other territorial males, but he doesn’t attack the satellite and faeder males, because they aren’t in competition. (Imagine your OT4.)
Outside of that, gender roles aren’t as important as humans pretend they are. There isn’t really a Breadwinner/Housewife divide in the animal kingdom because most animals don’t practice capitalism. Performative masculinity only benefits species that gain an evolutionary advantage from it. Non-human mammals don’t find mammary glands to be sexually arousing. Mostly, animals just try to survive in complicated, complex environments that are constantly trying to kill them. The rules are: 1) adapt to changes in environment by being resilient, adaptable and diverse; and 2) successfully pass on the genes that succeed in your environment. You don’t need to be “fit” or fierce or have lots of bright plumage - those are not your objectives and may, in fact, distract you. You don’t even need to mate, or be fertile, or have children of your own - you just need to make sure that your traits survive, and hopefully help your species after your death.
There is nothing in the rules about the superiority of special genital configurations, which animals are allowed to touch the color pink, and who gets to grow a beard.
Tl;dr : every time a human tries to come up with a hard-and-fast rule about what “sex” or “gender” or “male” or “female” means, there is a bird somewhere that has quietly devoted the past 2 million years of its existence to proving that person wrong.
everyone here secretly harboring a massive science!crush on elodie raise your hand now plz
I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.
Also, it was not the apple falling from a tree that made Issac Newton “discover” gravity. He was reading the books of Ibn Al Haytham, an Arab Muslim from Iraq, who pioneered the scientific method, discovered gravity and wrote about the laws governing the movement of bodies (now known as Newtons three laws of motion) some 600 years before Newton existed. Without him, modern science as we know it wouldn’t exist. Read on him. His achievements are far greater than what I’ve just mentioned here.
yo, the two people you’re talking about are both really cool dudes and yes they should be more widely known but stop spreading misinformation. do not use lies to spread the word about cool people and things.
the concept that things evolved from other things was already an idea floating around for basically ever in any scientific circle not completely dominated by creationism. like, darwin didn’t come up with it and he never claimed to. you can find dozens of natural philosophers throughout history like “yo i’m pretty sure that there’s some evolution going on here.”
it was not like the scientists in the 1850s were finding fossils of transitional forms and being like “LOL well dragons i guess!” it was already getting pretty obvious to academics in the 19th century that the earth was really old, life had gone through some serious changes, and there were common ancestors and related species. once maps got good enough for people to go “fuck dude africa and south america fit together” young earth creationism was fucked.
the problem was that there was no mechanism they could devise that would explain how creatures changed from one form into another, which was really kind of the vital piece of the whole thing. they had evidence that there was an evolution of life, but no way to build a theory because they had no way of showing how it might happen. some people were playing with the idea that creatures picked up traits from the environment and passed those to their kids.. somehow, but they had no evidence. they had a chain with no links.
then darwin comes along with some sketches of birds and he’s like “hey so here’s what going on. gregor mendel has shown that traits can be passed along, i’m gonna propose that what’s happening is, creatures that are best suited for an environment to flourish, so this preserves and eventually exaggerates certain traits over time to cause divergences. you go back far enough, like billions of years, all life coulda started from just a few basic types, or maybe even just one ancestor.”
darwin didn’t discover evolution. he proposed evolution by natural selection and he was right.
i mean, mostly. we had to correct his theory a whole bunch as we learned more about things like genetics and dna. he was actually kinda wrong about a ton of shit but that’s to be expected.
secondly, what’s important about newton wasn’t his observations, it was his math. ibn al haytham made a lot of important discoveries and advanced a lot of ideas about physics, especially optics, the big science of the middle ages, but the principles he talked about weren’t quite there yet.
like, he did this whole essay talking about planetary motion which, while more accurate than his contemporaries, was fundamentally inaccurate clockwork universe stuff because he actually hadn’t discovered gravity as a useful theory and he wasn’t able to use it to make predictions about motion.
that doesn’t make him stupid or worthy of being forgotten or nothin’. thats not how science works. he made advances, he didn’t quite have the shape of things yet, his work was important.
newton, building on his successes, was like, yo dawg, orbital mechanics. its like falling, but you miss. here’s a form of math i fucking invented to show some proof. lets check that against the universe.
and we did. and when it turned out his predictions were slightly wrong, some other motherfucker named einstein fixed it. and when he was wrong, etc.
its almost like science is totally built in increments on people who came before and trying discrediting the people who made some of those increments for political reasons is basically just as fucked as forgetting the folks who did the foundation work.
spreading misinformation to try to lionize historical figures so they are acknowledged has the opposite effect. it makes people who know shit roll their eyes and ignore similar posts later on. it makes the people who do read them look like dumbasses when they try to spread the word. it makes you look like one of those liberal stereotypes who disregards reality when it is politically convenient and that is not a good thing to look like.
minor point:
then darwin comes along with some sketches of birds and he’s like “hey
so here’s what going on. gregor mendel has shown that traits can be
passed along, i’m gonna propose that what’s happening is, creatures that
are best suited for an environment to flourish, so this preserves and
eventually exaggerates certain traits over time to cause divergences.
you go back far enough, like billions of years, all life coulda started
from just a few basic types, or maybe even just one ancestor.”
Darwin’s work preceded Mendel’s, actually. On The Origin Of Species came out in 1859, Mendel’s paper on inheritance in 1865. That traits could be passed along was known to everybody, though not how; Mendel discovered some particular rules that inheritance follows.
+1
Darwin spent a good chunk of his life wondering what the mechanism of natural selection could be, while ignoring Mendel completely.
To be fair, Mendel was publishing in some obscure-ass local Moravian natural history society journal. I’m not sure how much of that made it into Darwin’s circles.
(And on the original topic: Ibn Khaldun did pretty much legit invent historiography though, as far as we can tell, so there’s that)
This is anecdotal but I’ve heard that in one of the journals in Darwin’s collection, he had scribbled notes on an article across the page from an article by Mendel, which he had ignored entirely.
As I am both a Person Who Loves Promoting Obscure Historical Figures (Especially Non-Western and PoC Figures Who Have Been Shamefully Overlooked) AND a scientist, the original posts made me pretty damn tired and I didn’t have the energy to post corrections about Ibn Khaldun’s work on evolutionary biology. thanks to everyone who did have the energy. It’s a great topic for discussion and those who are interested in the history of science will always appreciate sharing their knowledge with the public, so I’m glad we had this talk.
one of the most famous quotes by Isaac Newton is “If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
out of all the aspects of millennial-bashing, i think the one that most confuses me is the “millennials all got trophies as a kid, so now they’re all self-centered narcissists” theory
like— kids are pretty smart, y’all. they can see that every kid on the team gets a trophy and is told they did a good job; they can also see that not every kid on the team deserves a trophy, and not everyone did do a good job
the logical conclusion to draw from this is not “i’m great and i deserve praise”— it’s “no matter how mediocre i am, people will still praise me to make me feel better, so i can’t trust any compliments or accolades i receive”
this is not a recipe for overconfidence and narcissism. it is a recipe for constant self-guessing, low self-esteem, and a distrust of one’s own abilities and skills.
where did this whole “ugh millennials think their so-so work is super great” thing even come from it is a goddamn mystery
what fucking kills me is, yeah, maybe we got the trophies, but who gave them out
this is not a recipe for overconfidence and narcissism. it is a recipe for constant self-guessing, low self-esteem, and a distrust of one’s own abilities and skills.
It’s also what I observed happening as a singing teacher: the older kids literally would not believe a positive word I said until I had proved I would tell them they screwed up/had done badly/etc. I did so in as useful a way as possible (“So this passage. We really need to work on this passage. A lot. This passage is not good yet.”), but with almost every adolescent I taught I had to prove I would give them straight-up criticism before they would parse my praise as anything other than meaningless “the grownups always do this” noise.
People horrifically fucking up facts about evolution and genetics too support their stupid beliefs or to seem smart and “rational” is probably one of my big pet peeves
Yeah. An enormous number of racists, misogynists, homophobes and transphobes I’ve met eventually whip out something about evolutionary biology and they never, ever, ever, ever have the slightest shadow of even a half-right idea what any of it means or ever cite a claim ever actually made by a scientific study.
Here’s a quick handy reference list or anyone who isn’t sure:
Homosexuality does exist in almost all social species.
“Alpha males” are not a real phenomenon and in fact the most aggressive males tend to be the least reproductively successful.
“Survival of the fittest” simply means that the success of a species hinges on how well it “fits” its environment. It does not mean that stronger or smarter individuals are supposed to succeed. Those things can even be a detriment in nature by wasting too many resources.
“Race” is not a biological concept. Someone who looks different from you has the same human genes, just a different grab-bag of dominant traits.
Evolution is not a march towards higher complexity, more intelligence or even more adaptability. It’s just a fluctuation of characteristics dictated by environmental pressures and mutation. A slime mold isn’t “less evolved” than a hawk, just adapted for success under different parameters.
People didn’t evolve “from apes.” It’s more complicated than that. We are a category of ape, sharing a common ancestor with the other apes.
No human on Earth is “closer” to an evolutionary ancestor than any other. We all descended from the same one.
Neanderthals were also a “sibling” species of ours. We didn’t evolve from them.
Some of us did, however, cross-breed with Neandethal man. It is exclusively non-African races, such as white people, who still carry hybrid human/Neanderthal genes. Whoops, sorry “white purity” skinheads, you’re actually mixed with a whole other species.
Just had to reblog this because I am honestly so tired of people claiming that Africans are “less evolved” than everyone else
My addition to the above list:
Epigenetics does not have anything at all to do with genetic memories. It is a thing that affects characteristics like health risks, and this speculation floating around about how phobias could be related to some ancestral trauma is complete and utter nonsense.
It’s only a matter of time before such a claim is used as another pseudoscientific tool in the arsenal of people claiming that bloodlines have anything to do with the validity of one’s worship of European pantheons. “My ancestors were Swedish, and because of epigenetics I have genetic memories passed down from those ancestors, so therefore my connection with the gods is better than yours!”
Just, no. Stop. STOP.
gonna also chime in here:
saying the “male brain” works one way and the “female brain” works another way is ludicrous. for so many reasons, even beyond the obvious of imposing that tired old either/or mentality with regards to maleness and femaleness
occasionally you will read about how a study suggests that “men are naturally better at spacial reasoning” or “women are naturally better at cooperation”, but for one thing, given how early the brain wires itself and how easy it is to influence the wiring (like, disturbingly easy), and given the tremendous social expectations we face from pretty much the moment we leave the freaking womb, it’s impossible to study gender differences in a vacuum.
like, do your findings prove that “women are better at reading faces”, or do they prove that, when you are part of a group that has been socialized since birth to be “nice”, to take care of other people, and to above all avoid making folks angry, you damn well have to learn how to read the room, and read it fast.
also, the “left brain, right brain” thing is bunk. there are not, like emotion-driven people and logic-driven people. everybody is primarily emotional. that circuitry is older and reacts much faster, and this is why nobody is immune from sometimes making wildly irrational decisions.
