A couple of days ago I spotted a pair of young barn swallows perched on the pergola. Their parents were still feeding them. I suspect that it’s high time they learned to fend for themselves…

 

 

 

 

 

 

PZ Myers, over at Pharyngula, draws attention to a startling thought: it wasn’t a rib that God took from Adam to make Eve, but a bone from lower down in the body – the baculum. It’s perfectly true that, unlike most mammalian species, the Homo sapiens male does not possess a baculum, which is a bone inside the penis. Perhaps the original writers of Genesis were a bit too embarrassed to write the truth. 

I’ve mentioned this visualisation of the processes that go on inside each and every one of our cells before. It was made for the biology courses at Havard University. The version that I originally came across was this edited version with a music soundtrack. That emphasises the beauty and wonder of these microscopic processes, but does not explain what’s going on. Take, for example, the kinesin molecule at about 1:17 minutes into the video. It’s an extraordinary image – a tightrope walker pulling a huge balloon – but how does it work? I’ve now come across another video that explains the processes that power the kinesin molecule; it’s the second video in this post. Finally, I’ve found the original visualisation video, restored to its full eight minutes, shorn of the music soundtrack, and with the explanatory voiceover restored. That’s the third video embedded in this post. Wonderful to see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s a fascinating article by Simon Baron-Cohen on the human characteristic of dishonesty, and the fact that the only people incapable of being dishonest are autistic. By the way, I don’t mean to imply from my somewhat tongue-in-cheek title that I don’t think people with autism are not human…

 

(hat tip to The Mouse Trap for the link)

Charlie Brooker has one of his excellent columns in today’s Guardian, this time ruminating on the phenomenon of who’s really in charge of his mind. While it’s funny, like all the best humour there’s an underlying seriousness, and that is: how does consciousness and personality come about anyway? It’s a topic that, as I mentioned before, I find fascinating.

 

One set of theories that I personally don’t accept about the mind and consciousness is that it has anything to do with dualism, certainly not Descartes’ substance dualism. Property dualism also seems to me to be introducing an unnecessary level of indirection into what seems to me to simply be emergent phenomena arising out of physical causes. And I’m still trying to get my head around what predicate dualism actually is. I’m a simple soul at heart, and that’s probably why, armed with Occam’s razor, I find any theory of dualism of the mind rather unsatisfactory. 

 

There’s a good chapter in Stephen Law’s The Philosophy Gym titled, appropriately enough, The Consciousness Conundrum dealing with the subject. He deals with both substance and property dualism, but not predicate dualism (perhaps this is a recent development?). For further reading, Law recommends (amongst others) the "now quite old but nevertheless still excellent" The Mind’s I. I can concur – this book is very good indeed and well worth reading on the topic of what is the Mind?