The relationship between Chidi (William Jackson Harper) and Eleanor (Kristen Bell) on NBC’s The Good Place (2016-2020) is a perfect example of how interracial romance is becoming an increasingly popular theme in mainstream entertainment. A French-speaking Nigerian-Senegalese professor of ethics and moral philosophy, Chidi is Eleanor’s soul mate and their chemistry together was undeniable.
Next time you see a branch don’t take it for granted. It was this simple structural addition to the first ever land plants that allowed them to thrive and colonize land.
BBSRC-funded Dr Jill Harrison and her lab are uncovering the secrets behind how branching structures evolved by inducing branching in mosses.
The image at the top shows an unbranched moss shoot with a reproductive structure at the tip.
The first land plants that appeared on earth about 450 million years ago had tiny bodies with a single reproductive shoot much like this plant.
The image below shows the same type of moss with a branch point.
The overall shape resembles the earliest branching plants which were tiny, but had a branching form that now only exists in ancient plant fossils.
Once plants learned how to branch, they were able to partition the roles of different branches on each shoot.
This allowed some branches to become specialised for photosynthesis, and eventually led to the evolution of leaves.
Jill and her team were able to induce a branching form in this plant by a simple change in hormone distribution, suggesting that the innovation of branching some 450 million years ago could have been simple.
When thinking of camels, images of hot deserts from the east come to mind. But these peculiar animals had almost all of their history happen in North America, and were first adapted to cold winters.
*The animals represented here are not to scale and don’t represent a direct line of descent, but rather plausible models for how this amazing transition happened.*
A new study suggests that human intelligence may have evolved in response to the demands of caring for infants.
Steven Piantadosi and Celeste Kidd, assistant professors in brain and cognitive sciences, developed a novel evolutionary model in which the progression of high levels of intelligence may be driven by the demands of raising offspring. Their meta-analysis study is available online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ Early Edition.
“Human infants are born far more immature than the infants of other species. For example, giraffe calves are able to stand-up, walk around, and even flee from predators within hours of their births. By comparison, human infants cannot even support their own heads,” said Kidd.
“Our theory is that there is a kind of self-reinforcing cycle where big brains lead to very premature offspring and premature offspring lead to parents having to have big brains. What our formal modeling work shows is that those dynamics can result in runaway pressure for extremely intelligent parents and extremely premature offspring,” said Piantadosi.
In other words, because humans have relatively big brains, their infants must be born early in development while their heads are still small enough to ensure a safe delivery. Early birth, though, means that human infants are helpless for much longer than other primates, and such vulnerable infants require intelligent parents. As a result, selective pressures for large brains and early birth can become self-reinforcing—potentially creating species like humans with qualitatively different cognitive abilities than other animals.
Piantadosi and Kidd tested a novel prediction of the model that the immaturity of newborns should be strongly related to general intelligence. “What we found is that weaning time—which acts as a measure of the prematurity of the infants—was a much better predictor of primate’s intelligence than any of other measures we looked at, including brain size, which is commonly correlated with intelligence,” said Piantadosi.
The theory may also be able to explain the origin of the cognitive abilities that make humans special. “Humans have a unique kind of intelligence. We are good at social reasoning and something called ‘theory of mind’—the ability to anticipate the needs of others, and to recognize that those needs may not be the same as our own,” said Kidd, who is also the director of the Rochester Baby Lab. “This is an especially helpful when taking care of an infant who is not able talk for a couple of years.”
“There are alternative theories of why humans are so intelligent. A lot of these are based on factors like living in a harsh environment or hunting in groups,” said Piantadosi. “One of the motivating puzzles of our research was thinking about those theories and trying to see why they predict specifically that primates or mammals should become so intelligent, instead of other species that faced similar pressures.”
The key is live birth. According to the researchers, the runaway selection of intelligence requires both live birth of a single offspring and large brains—distinctive features of higher mammals.
“Our theory explains specifically why primates developed superintelligence but dinosaurs—who faced many of the same environmental pressures and had more time to do so—did not. Dinosaurs matured in eggs, so there was no linking between intelligence and infant immaturity at birth,” said Kidd.
It was kind of a dick move to create animals that require air, then confine them to the freaking ocean
If you are talking about dolphins they used to be wolf like creatures that due to scarcity of food they had to hunt in water so they slowly evolved into water mammals, dolphins still have claw bones but they are unnecessary and dolphins will get rid of them with time and will develop abilities to breath under water
(This also partially applies to whales)
They were what now?
Mother Nature, come out here I just want to talk
Whales are actually Ungulates, more so hippos, entelodons, etc…
Meaning they were somewhat related to big celebrities such as Daedon (the “hell pig”) and Andrewsarchus.
The appearence of the first ancestors of whales probably looked like a small hoofed thing called Indohyus.
(Illustration by julio lacerda)
(illustration by Tiffany Turill)
Basically they went from tiny hoofed herbivore to bigger hoofed carnivore to crocodile-like thing to seal-like things to big sea predators.
It’s important to mention that we now know dolphins will probably never need to develop true water breathing, because the fact that they breathe air from the surface is actually an ADVANTAGE for them. They get more oxygen at once than an animal with gills and it permits a much higher, more energized activity level for longer periods of time.
They are murderous monsters empowered by their access to the forbidden air
I can’t remember if it was Daeodon specifically, but wasn’t there some paleontology news that some kind of entelodont was less “hell pig” and more “fully terrestrial hell hippo”? Because I think that’d be much, much scarier to encounter.
The very concept of a middle ground between “wild boar” and “hippo” fills me with fear
Zomg it’s like nature found the best way to build muscle over bone to help with movement.
Wheres the post on people being confused about the same pyramids shapes being found everywhere?
As an anthropologist focusing on functional anatomy, let me assure you that nature absolutely did not find the best way to build muscles over bone. It found a good enough way for something fish-shaped to move and had been iterating mostly adequate variations on that plan ever since. Which is the complete opposite of the pyramid thing; it IS about common origin, not about being the best form for the purpose. The principle is beautifully illustrated here with a dance dance dance.
Um … anyone else having trouble uploading/editing multiple-picture-posts? Is this a my dumb internet thing? Or a new post-version thing? Ugh, annoying. I will try not to let it get me down and color my opinion of today’s lichen, M. polyphaea. This crustose lichen has a thin, wrinkled, gray-green thallus with black-disked apothecia. The surface is often coated in a thin layer of powdery pruina. M. polyphaea grows closely attached to smooth tree bark in the SW U.S. Pretty sure. There are records of it growing elsewhere, but the description I am reading is pretty specific about that range. IDK, a lot of things aren’t making sense to me today. But you know what does make sense? Falling in love with little dudes like this.
