He found that pathological liars have on average more white matter in their prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that is active during lying, and less gray matter than people who are not serial fibbers. White matter enables quick, complex thinking while gray matter mediates inhibitions.
One gorilla used a long stick to test the depth of a pool of water before wading into it. Another used a stick to help search for food and then as a bridge over a muddy puddle.
“This is a truly astounding discovery,” said Thomas Breurer of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “Tool usage in wild apes provides us with valuable insights into the evolution of our own species and the abilities of other species.”
To my mind (and many others), the single greatest challenge currently facing our species is reconnecting people with nature. From the standpoint of education, ecology and evolution together provide a robust scientific foundation for telling the big story, the story of ages—that of who we are, how we got here, and our intimate links with nature. We must take up the challenge of unifying and de-mystifying these fundamental concepts. These efforts will contribute directly to reconnecting people with nature, and allow them to foster a renewed sense of place. Particularly if this eco-evolutionary education incorporates outdoor, “natural” laboratories, it will also help to instill that all-important—indeed essential—sense of wonder and passion for the non-human world.
This study wasn’t about subliminal messages, of course. Like many psychological studies, this one was meant to be an allegory. It suggests that under some circumstances people can misattribute the uplifting work that their brains have done to a fictitious external source. Brains strive to provide the best view of things, but because the owners of those brains don’t know this, they are surprised when things seem to turn out for the best. To explain this surprising fact, people sometimes invoke an external source—a subliminal message in the laboratory, God in everyday life.
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.”
At least two species of honeybees there, the native Apis cerana and the introduced European honeybee, Apis mellifera, engulf a wasp in a living ball of defenders and heat the predator to death. A new study of heat balling has described a margin of safety for the defending bees, says Tan Ken of Yunnan Agricultural University in Kunming, China.
Thus, current promoters of “intelligent design” generally accept the power and primacy of natural selection to generate small-scale evolutionary change. (The evolution of antibiotic resistance among bacteria, for example, is beyond dispute.) Ditto for the biochemical and genetic similarity of closely related species. But when it comes to their fundamental belief system, advocates of intelligent design aren’t really very intelligent at all. Or rather, like Brahe, they have checked their intellects at the door, clinging desperately to the illusion that human beings are so special that only a benevolent god could have produced them and, therefore, the material world—like Brahe’s sun and its five planets—must revolve around them.
