Category Archives: biology

Menstruation Explained! (Don’t Worry, Not By Me)

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I just read a great explanation on Pharyngula of the mystery of menstruation. It isn’t a mystery in terms of the mechanism, we have understood menstruation for a very long time. However, the question that is posed is why we humans and only a handful of other mammals menstruate, and that has been an unknown for quite some time. However, research may have found the answer, and that answer may have significant potential for solving several women’s health issues.

At any rate, I found PZ’s breakdown of the research quite fascinating, and I hope you do too.

Jim

Why Babies Are Dumb (And Why That’s Cool)

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Babies are dumb. Maybe not as dumb as people who buy wigs for their dogs, but still, they’re pretty damned dumb. If you ask a baby to solve for x, the odds are the baby won’t even come close to getting it right. Take for example this recent conversation that I just made up:

Jim: Hey baby, if 2x + 17 is 38, solve for x.
Baby: That would mean that 2x = 21, so therefore x=10.

That’s right. Babies wrongly round down. Dumb baby.

I’m being silly, of course, but it actually is fascinating stuff. Most if not all other species (I’m no expert here) pop out of their moms and are essentially ready to roll. They may take some time to get the wobble out of their legs, but that’s hardly the same thing. So why are people so dumb at birth?

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Mind And Brain

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One of the first steps I took towards my eventual atheism happened when I met someone who had been brain injured. The trauma they experienced had very dramatic impacts to the person’s personality. As a young Christian, I wondered about the “fairness” of allowing God to judge us on actions that took place after significant brain injury. If someone were suddenly “turned naughty” at no fault of their own, how could they be judged for sinning? What of the soul of the person? Is that still good? Do they get a pass on bad behavior? And if so, why not other people?

The end result of that train of thought for me was clear. Our physical brains dictate our actions. There is no soul guiding us. The mind is, at least in my opinion, a subset of the brain. The mind is the part of us that confuses us into thinking we have free will.

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Tornado Is To Trailer Park As Ken Ham Is To Thinking

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I try not to give too much time to Ken Ham or his ilk, but every now and then I feel the need to comment on something he says or does. But honestly, if I were to comment every time Ken Ham did something stupid, this blog would be impossible to keep up with. As for today’s comments, I read a post on Pharyngula about his book, Already Compromised, and there were a couple of things in it that I needed to smug away about.

Point 1, In Which Ken Ham (Potentially) Proves His Detractors’ Point For Them
One of my biggest complaints against Ken Ham and Answers In Genesis is the notion that they are biblical literalists. I mean, let’s face it, there is absolutely no way that the Bible is meant to be taken exactly literally. Everything we learn about the world around us shows that it is at best a collection of stories told by people who didn’t know what we do now, and who wanted to explain things as they made sense to them. But the Ken Hams of the world want you to absolutely believe that every word in the bible is an absolute truth.

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Free (Will And) Love

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Again, I’m taking baby steps here that have probably been handled by brilliant philosophers the world over, making my seemingly-to-me massive shift in view around the topic of free will see about as exciting as the local newspaper switching from Times New to Times New Roman, but this whole free will thing has been tugging my brain a lot over the past few days.

So last night, after reading my blog post and some conversation on the topic, the Lovely Lady looked at me coyly and asked, “So what does all this mean in terms of you loving me?”

Tread carefully, Jim. You have entered dangerous territory, and you are a novice.

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Free Will Hunting

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I think I accidentally blew my head open. I had actually a few days ago started on a piece here about the debate around free will. I’m not a philosopher, but it is something I have been thinking about lately, and I wanted to share my thoughts.

But the trouble was, I talked myself out of my position.

I had wanted to say that I believed that we were free to think for ourselves, that we were not the playthings of the divine, and that we were not merely clumps of chemicals reacting to the various forces in the physical universe. I had wanted to express that that sort of thinking leads to nihilism. I had wanted to express that I felt free will came from the ridiculous power of our amazing brains.

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Queen Of The Fruit Flies

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I just read an interesting bit of news and thought I would share it. It turns out that researcher Masaki Kamakura has isolated a protein within royal jelly that is integral in the formation of queen bees. Royal jelly, aside from being a major fixture in the alt med community, claiming to boost the immune system, lower cholesterol, and help with inflammatory diseases, is made by and for bees. All bee larvae eat it for the first few days of development, but the queen bee gets it all the time.

Kamakura has published a paper in Nature which describes how he isolated the protein in question, and what happened when he gave it to fruit fly larvae. Essentially, the fruit fly got big. Real big. And he was able to evaluate what genetic trigger he was pushing by exposing the larvae to the protein.

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Interesting Research Into Homosexuality

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I must apologize to my faithful readers for last week. I’m afraid that I was swamped in all aspects of life, and that resulted in my writing damn near nothing all week. There were several scratched attempts at blog entries, but I would lose the thread of what I was trying to say due to the crush of other pressures, and the writing wasn’t worth publishing by the time it was finished. So as much as you missed me, I missed having coherent thoughts.

However, this morning I stumbled across an article on NeuroLogica about some fascinating findings in the area of sexual preference that I thought I would share. It turns out that the pattern of same-sex relations in mice can be impacted by manipulating the way their brains handle serotonin.

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Extra Right Hands And Bionic Ninjas

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I have heard in the past about the brain’s ability to be tricked into thinking a limb is present. I don’t know if this is one of those “works every time” things or not, but you can relieve the phantom pain from someone who has lost an arm (for example) by fooling their brain with mirrors. That’s pretty amazing stuff, all related to the way that the brain maps out its understanding of the body, called a body schema.

But it doesn’t end there. Today, I read about a fascinating observational experiment where the brain gets fooled into accepting a limb that isn’t there. A rubber arm is placed beside the subject’s real right hand, and rather than knowing the difference, the brain takes the lazy way out and simply assumes that it now has three hands.

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Dolphinspeak

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I love dolphins. They’re neat. Their physiology is interesting and tells a fascinating tale of returning to the seas, they have blow-holes (who doesn’t love blow-holes??), and they seem smart. They are also real jerks from what I understand, practicing things like gang rape and murder for fun, and that makes them far more interesting a species. It also lets me be smug to hippies who tell me that we should be more like the sweet and loving dolphin.

I’ve always been impressed with the intelligence displayed by dolphins, who if I’m not mistaken (and this is me remembering something I had heard and not citing specific sources, so it might be crap) have a similar brain to body mass as humans and crows. The cool waterpark shows we put them in seem patronizing when you think about just how amazing these creatures are. And now they have a new thing to brag about.

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