Tag: evolution

Posted in Science & Nature

Natural Design

Posted on by Jinavie

We look around the world we live in and marvel in all its complexity and grandeur. But Mother Nature focusses on one thing when it comes to design: efficiency. That is to say, that nature strives to design things that will do the job best. For example, stars and planets are always round because a sphere is the most effective way to get all the mass as close to the planet’s centre of gravity as possible (a process known as isostatic adjustment). The wings of a bird have evolved to maximise the thrust generated at the least energy cost, while the sleek, teardrop body shape of fish allow for them to slip through water with minimal resistance. One of the best examples of nature coming up with the best design solution is beehives.

If you look closely at a beehive, you will find that it is made up of tiny hexagons. Each hexagon is a room that a bee can fit in and the walls are made from wax. The interesting thing about hexagons is that it has many properties that make it the ideal shape in construction.

Firstly, hexagons can fit together perfectly to tile a plane, meaning that bees can tile thousands of columns without wasting any space. The little columns even end in a unique pyramidal shape that allows them to tile up nicely with each other at the centre.

Secondly, a hexagon has 6 rotational symmetries and 6 reflection symmetries, making it very easy to tile as every bee will know what orientation to build their cell in using the side of any cell as a reference.

Lastly, in a hexagonal grid each line is as short as it can possibly be when tiling an area with the smallest number of hexagons. Therefore, bees can use much less wax when constructing hives, while achieving remarkable strength as hexagons gain lots of strength under compression. This design also allows for the maximum amount of honey stored in each cell.

Bees have mastered this architectural feat not through physics and mathematics, but through evolution – the driving force of nature. Over millions and millions of years, various types of bees will have experimented with square-celled hives or triangular-celled hives, but they could not survive as long as the hexagonal-celled bees because their hives were less efficient. This is exactly why nature is so good at coming up with the best solution to a problem. Because in nature, the best solution to the problem an environment offers is rewarded with survival.

Posted in Science & Nature

Four Fs

Posted on by Jinavie

Biologists state that the driving force behind evolution can simply be summarised as four forces: fight, flight, feed and mate (“fuck”). These are known as the Four Fs. Evolution is described as the process by which species adapt to an environment through modifications in the genomes of successive generations. The Four Fs describe the adaptations most commonly seen in evolution; that is, the four things that species evolve in order to better adapt and survive their environment. For example, carnivores developed sharp teeth and claws to hunt better and herbivores developed faster legs to flee from their predators better. Nature is a vicious battleground where different species compete with each other for survival, and the Four Fs are the most powerful weapons of survival.

As much as we’d like to think that we are higher-order, civilised beings, human beings are still driven by the basic four forces that drive every other species in the world. Obviously, our bodies are well-adapted to these forces, such as our fight-or-flight drive activating in the face of danger to let us fight harder or run faster through adrenaline. Anyone can see that nature has done her job well by bestowing us the gift of satiety and orgasm to promote our feeding and mating. But what is interesting that the Four Fs go beyond our “natural evolution” to affect the evolution of our civilisation.

Consider this: what is the purpose of war? Since the dawn of time, mankind has spent a considerable amount of resources figuring how to most efficiently kill another group of people, or live in fear that other people will kill us. If we study the behaviour of chimpanzees (one of the few species other than us that wage warfare), we can see that their motivation is for food and sex (i.e. mating partners). This also applies to mankind and it is not a story of ancient times. It is well-known that raping and pillaging runs rampant during wars. Less than 800 years ago, a man named Genghis Khan was so successful in waging war that DNA evidence suggests that 0.5% of the world population are descended from him. Even in the present, countries wage war to secure natural resources to ensure that their people can eat, as the health of the economy directly correlates with the ability of people to put food on their plates. Almost every war essentially boils down to a fight for food.

Then what about sex? Like it or not, sex has been a tremendously influential force in history. From Cleopatra’s seduction of Caesar preventing Rome’s invasion of Egypt, to Henry VIII turning against the Catholic Church to marry Anne Boleyn, sex has been a timeless motivator for humanity. Although the consequences would not be as dramatic as those described, a significant proportion of our actions are also based on our primal desire to reproduce.

Of course, this is not always the truth and human beings are capable of acting on less wild motivators such as happiness and altruism. However, the next time you make a decision or see a conflict on the news, question this: how much of an impact did food and sex have to motivate that?

Posted in Science & Nature

Imaginal Cells

Posted on by Jinavie

How does a caterpillar become a butterfly? Every child and adult knows that they undergo a process of metamorphosis while in a chrysalis. But few know that the caterpillar has to dissolve all of its internal organs to form a pool of raw materials that it will use to build itself into a new butterfly. Although from the outside we only see a beautiful shell that appears to be just sitting there, in reality the caterpillar is undergoing a change so profound that it completely rebuilds its foundation.

What is interesting about the metamorphosis process is that it is not as simple as breaking down a caterpillar and rebuilding the pieces into a butterfly like one would do with Lego blocks. Once the puddle of cells is formed within the chrysalis, a new type of cells called imaginal cells appear. We do not know where they come from, but they just appear at a certain time. These cells are completely different from the original caterpillar cells – so different that the original cells begin attacking it as if it was a virus. However, even with all this cellular genocide, more and more imaginal cells pop up, until eventually the original cells cannot keep up. The imaginal cells start to cluster together, multiplying at an exponential rate. These clusters then grow and differentiate to form the parts of the new butterfly, such as wings and antennas. The original caterpillar cells slowly wither away as they are overrun by the new, fresh imaginal cells. The caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

Human beings, in general, are not good with change. We as a society fear something that would completely shift our paradigms and proceed to attack it viciously. Throughout history, ideas that would shake the foundations of society were often challenged and oppressed: the concept that the Earth is round, that the Earth revolves around the Sun or that we are the product of millions of years of evolution. These “imaginal cells” of society such as Charles Darwin and Galileo Galilei were faced with criticism, mocking and even punishment by those who could not accept the fact that what we know can be wrong. However, their ideas spread among like-minded people, until the number of people who believed in these new ideas greatly outweighed the people who did not. This is how society evolves and metamorphosed over time.

Change is difficult and scary, whether you are on the receiving end or on the side trying to change the world. Being the first imaginal cells of society is a painful road one to travel, but the effects of your actions can cause ripples throughout society to change the world for the better. Or perhaps you are experiencing change at a more personal scale, with your traditional way of life being threatened by some new force. But no matter what the change is – for better or for worse – you will adapt and society will adapt. Great ideas persevere and change for the better is inevitable.

There is no reason to be afraid, for everything is and will be okay.

Posted in Science & Nature

Chicken Or The Egg

Posted on by Jinavie

One of the most well-known philosophical questions is what came first: the chicken or the egg? A chicken is born from an egg, and an egg is birthed by a chicken. This means that the cause and effect are intertwined in a never-ending cycle. This kind of problem is known as circular cause and consequence or circular reference.

In some ways, this question is extremely easy to answer. In biology, many different creatures lay eggs to give birth to their young, but there are no examples of a chicken being born without an egg being involved. The chicken is most likely a product of a lineage of evolving species that ultimately resulted in the genetic makeup of a chicken. That “proto-chicken” would have laid an egg, which had enough mutations in its genome to be sufficiently different from the proto-chicken to be called a “chicken”. Therefore, the egg must have come before the chicken. Even if we use the strict rule of defining “egg” by as a “chicken egg”, the egg that birthed the first chicken contained the original genetic makeup for chickens; ergo the chicken egg came before the chicken.

Science and philosophy aside, a completely unrelated point about chickens and eggs is that there is a Japanese dish called oyakodon, which is made with chicken and egg over a bowl of rice and vegetables. The name comes from the Japanese for parent (“oya”, 親) and child (“ko”, 子), giving away the cruel nature of the relationship between the main ingredients in the dish.

Posted in Philosophy

Fundamental Malevolence

Posted on by Jinavie

Human beings are fundamentally evil. This was a theory concerning human nature put forward by Xunzi – a leading Chinese Confucian philosopher, along with Confucius and Mencius. Xunzi stated that human beings naturally seek out only their own interests and greed, envying and hating each other so much that they are bound to fight if left alone. He suggested that people needed to learn etiquette and culture themselves to correct this.

Xunzi’s philosophies are on a background of the chaotic setting of the Warring States Period. The Warring States Period was a period when China was split into many different countries, all warring with each other to gain dominance over each other’s lands. During these wars, Xunzi saw countless cases of people looting and killing each other, which led him to the conclusion that people are naturally selfish beings. He believed that human beings focus on their greed and self-preservation from the moment of birth. He also believed that leaving people without order would indubitably lead to social chaos. Thus, to effectively rule over the people, a leader must place limits such as laws, ethics, etiquette and culture.

From an evolutionary point of view, the theory of fundamental malevolence (성악설, sung ak sul) makes sense. Would a starving lion mourn the death of a baby zebra? Protecting one’s own interests is a great way to increase your chance of survival and propagating your genes.

The more you carefully observe people’s behaviour, the more credibility the theory seems to gain. Human beings are selfish beings who become jealous of others for having more than themselves, kill someone because they tried to take away their love and engage in fratricidal war because others do not share their beliefs. You as the reader may state that you cannot imagine hurting anyone, let alone taking a life. In that case, let us examine the following thought experiment.

One day, you are kidnapped. When you come about, you find that you are trapped in a pitch-black room, tied to a pole. The room appears to be completely empty and you cannot see or hear anything. Suddenly, you hear a voice coming from the other side of the room. The voice talks about how it will murder you in a violent, excruciating way, over and over. The voice continues to threaten you in a macabre way for three days. Just when you are near your breaking point from the overwhelming fear of imminent death, another voice appears. The voice says: “If you nominate someone you are close to that I can kill in your stead, I will let you go and not harm you in any way”. Would you have the courage to not give a name?

Posted in Science & Nature

Mother Horse

Posted on by Jinavie

Female horses (mares) exhibit a very strange behaviour after they mate with a male. A mare will mate with every other male in the stable, almost immediately after mating with the first one. This strange post-coital promiscuity does not appear to make any sense from an evolutionary perspective, as one would think that pregnancy would lead to a decrease in libido so the mother can focus on caring for her embryo. However, this promiscuity is part of a strategy that helps protect the baby horses.

It is common behaviour in the animal kingdom for a male to kill a female’s young so that he can mate with her and produce babies with his own genetic material. This also happens in horses, where stallions engage in infanticide, kicking a foal to death if it is not his. For a mother horse, this is not only heartbreaking, but also a tremendous waste of the energy she put into pregnancy. So to protect her offspring and conserve energy, she ensures that no male knows who the father of her baby is. It has been shown that males who mated with a female who gave birth will not attack the foal, as there is a chance that it is his. Thus, a mother horse guarantees the protection of her child by prostituting herself to all of the males around.

Although the story of a mother willing to sacrifice everything, even her dignity, for the safety of her offspring may be inspiring, it has also been observed that if a mare cannot mate with all of the males in the stable, she will instead abort the pregnancy. For example, if a new horse is brought into the herd after the mare becomes pregnant, the mare senses the danger to her eventual foal and proceeds to abort it. In a study involving zebras, it was found that bringing in a new male made the foal’s chances of survival fall to less than 5 percent.

Posted in Science & Nature

History Of The Earth

Posted on by Jinavie

The Earth has been around for a good 4.6 billion years. Let us compress the long time from the Earth’s birth to today (2012) into one year to put everything in perspective.

The Earth’s history starts on January 1, 00:00:00. The Earth is a hard sphere, barren as any other planet. Incessant wind and rain erode away the barren mountains and tectonic forces create new ones. Nothing much happens for the next three months. Then, around the start of April, life begins in the form of bacteria. Over the course of the next few months, the bacteria divide and mutate, slowly forming new life forms that are multicellular. However, all life on Earth are still in the oceans.

Life on land only starts in the end of November, when plants begin to settle on land. Plants expertly take the abundant carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and convert it into oxygen. By early December, the oceans are teeming with fish, some of which adapt to living on land by developing lungs. These become the first amphibians. Insects also populate the land and become one of the most diverse types of life.

In December 12, reptiles evolve and the land is ruled by dinosaurs, but only for 9 days until they are wiped off the face of the Earth by a meteorite on December 20. Mammals quickly take the niche left by dinosaurs, populating the entire world. Even at this late time, there are no signs of humans.

December 31, humans have still not arrived on Earth. They only appear around 8pm, where the first hominids venture on to the plains of Africa. At 10pm, the Ice Age begins and the Earth is covered by a thick white sheet of ice. The ice comes and goes three more times. At 11:59pm, human civilisation begins as cities begin to rise. 22 seconds before the end of the year, the Egyptians build their pyramids. More monuments arise within seconds. At 11:59:47pm, Jesus teaches the people to love one another, until he is killed a millisecond later. In the last second of the year (about 150 years), humanity: has two major world wars, take to the skies, create the nuclear bomb that can wipe out all life on Earth and even step foot on the Moon.

We may like to think that we have made a significant impact in the history of the Earth, but we have only existed for an infinitesimally small fraction of the history. We are but a dot on the grand scheme of natural history.

Posted in Science & Nature

Slavemaker Ant

Posted on by Jinavie

Slavery is considered one of the most inhumane acts in humanity’s history, where a group of people enslave another group of people to do their bidding in harsh conditions. Slavery is an interesting concept as at the cost of other members of your species, you can greatly increase the productivity of your own society. Some may argue that only humans are evil enough to enslave their own kind, but there is one other species that enslaves other animals: ants.

Certain species of ants, known as slavemaker ants, are known to enslave entire ant colonies to do the bidding of their own colony. The way slavemaker ants enslave colonies is as follows. First, a pregnant queen ant lies in front of an enemy nest after mating and feigns death. Scouts from the nest carry the “body” back to their queen so that she may devour the fallen enemy. When the two queens are left in the same room, the queen slavemaker ant springs back to life and proceeds to eviscerate the other queen ant. She then rolls around in her remains to coat herself in pheromones – the substance through which ants identify each other. The ants of the colony now believe the queen to be their own queen and serve her and her eggs. When the brood fully matures (only soldier ants), they swiftly overrun the nest and completely enslave the colony, forcing them to fill the role of the worker ants, which the slavemaker ants lack.

Eventually, the original slaves die out and the colony becomes short on worker ants (as the queen only produces soldier ants). To overcome this issue, the colony sends out massive raiding parties to attack other colonies, after which the ants steal the eggs and larvae of the captured colony to breed them into new slaves. Interestingly, it has been observed that slavemaker ants tend to attack the most defended nests, knowing that they contain the most eggs and larvae. There are variations on how the army attacks and raids a colony depending on the species. Some choose to launch a full-on assault, decimating the colony and leaving only the eggs and larvae. Some secrete chemical gases that force the colony to evacuate, leaving their young behind in the rush. In some cases, a fertilised queen ant will sneak into a raid and kill the queen ant in the midst of the battle, commandeering whatever is left of the colony following the raid.

One difference between human and ant slavery is that slave ants are not aware they are slaves. Since they have been brought up since birth to work for the colony, they simply believe that they are worker ants birthed by the queen. Thus, they have no objections to serving the colony as to them they are merely fulfiling their objectives. 

This type of interaction between species is known as social parasitism, where one group benefits and survives at the cost of another group. Interestingly, “parasitism” also suggests that slavemaker ants cannot survive without their host. The reason being, slavemaker ants are so specialised in infiltrating and raiding other colonies that they cannot feed themselves or construct a colony by themselves. Even their mandibles are evolved into perfect killing machines, so much that they cannot use it to feed (slave ants have to feed them). In some cases, it has even been observed that slave ants had to carry their masters from one colony to another.

Slavemaker ants enslave not because they are tough or superior, but because they are desperate and have adapted to this unique form of surviving. Thus, if there was an Abraham Lincoln ant, he would certainly kill his colony within one generation.

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Laughter

Posted on by Jinavie

We laugh when we are happy. Laughter provides us with happiness and is the best medicine available to us, relieving the pain and stress of life. In fact, when we laugh we secrete a neurotransmitter called endorphin, which as the name suggests (endo(inside) + morphine), has the same properties as morphine.

What makes us laugh? The best theory to date is that laughter is an instinctive response to the passing of danger (also called the relief theory). For example, if our ancestor came across a predator but it passed by without noticing him, he would have laughed in response to the relief he felt. Others would see from his laugh that the danger had passed and laugh also (possibly explaining why laughter is contagious).

This theory also explains why humour makes us laugh. When you throw a joke, you are essentially giving the other person a “cognitive riddle” with a logical inconsistency. This inconsistency causes the recipient’s subconscious to become confused: “Why is it funny? Why can’t I understand it?”. As jokes are fundamentally a “surprise” to the other person’s mind, they try to solve it and figure it out whether it is a danger or not. If they get the joke, the inconsistency is solved and the person feels relief (as it has been revealed that the confusion brought on by the inconsistency was not dangerous). Once the confusion passes, the person laughs in response. But if the person does not get the joke, the “danger” has not passed and the person does not laugh. This is the basis of one of the laws of comedians: “if the audience is confused, they do not laugh”.

Laughter is beneficial for your health. Frequent laughter lowers the blood pressure, boosts the immune system, relieves pain and lowers the levels of stress hormones such as cortisol. Laughter is especially good for your mental health, therefore having a five-minute laughter yoga session every day where you just laugh as hard as you can will help you lead a happier life. However, ironically laughter can kill you too. Cases of “death from laughter” have been recorded since ancient Greek times to the modern day. The cause has not been identified but it is known that intense laughter can cause cataplexy, which is a paralysis induced by extreme emotions. It is possible that intense laughter overloads the nervous system and causes a heart attack.

Whatever it is, anything is toxic in excess.

Posted in Science & Nature

Red Queen’s Hypothesis

Posted on by Jinavie

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, there is a scene where the Red Queen says to Alice: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”. Essentially, it means to spend all the effort you can just to keep the status quo. In life, there are so many times when it seems like you’re frantically running just to realise that no progress has been made. Interestingly, the same rule is seen in biology and evolution.

The simple rule of natural selection is that the best adapted species wins. Unfortunately, this means that no matter how well you are doing in the environment, as soon as another species becomes better adapted to a new change, you become the lesser species and eventually destroyed. To prevent this, a species must continuously evolve and adapt just to stay in the same position. Nature despises stagnancy and loves progress. For example, a predator always strives to evolve to better catch the prey while the prey evolves to avoid the predator. This cat-and-mouse arms race allows for continuous evolution and ever-improving fitness. This is the Red Queen’s Hypothesis.

A fascinating extension of the hypothesis is that it may be a cause for having sex. Sex is one of the most intuitive inventions of Mother Nature that allows for massive genetic variation. The Red Queen Hypothesis has been used to suggest that this may have evolved to speed up the process of evolution so that hosts could beat parasites in the ongoing arms race. The greatest act of love may simply be a mechanism for us to stay competent in this ever-changing world.