Simon Ings, in a book review of How The Zebra Got Its Stripes, notes the following eep-inducing biological adaptation – if you can call it that:
And Grasset has even more fun describing the occasions when, frankly, nature goes nuts. Take the female hyena, for example, which has to give birth through a “pseudo-penis”. As a result, 15 per cent of mothers die after their first labour and 60 per cent of cubs die at birth. If this were a “just so” story, it would be a decidedly off-colour one.
This is part of an aggregate review of four books that covers the slippery topic of scientific laws in biology, a convenience which gives us a better comprehension of the enormous biological world, but at the risk of occasionally getting it wrong. It’s a topic worth considering; the idea that laws apply to the biological world is actually a little slippery when we realize how poorly we understand the fine points of such laws. It’s easy enough when you’re dropping a ball off a cliff to measure gravity; it’s a lot harder when it turns out that an adaptation may have a downside. Consider, for instance, human intelligence. I’ve read, somewhere, that the reason we have such big skulls containing those brains that let us think about these things is because a mutation caused our jaw muscles, which attach around our skulls, to weaken. Without that strong muscle to restrain the skull, it grows bigger.
But now we’re more limited in what we can eat.
That’s an easy example. Creating descriptions of “laws” becomes a lot harder as statistical descriptions build on statistical descriptions. It ain’t turtles all the way down … but can you tell?
Makes you wonder about the basic physical laws…
(From NewScientist, 17 October 2016)
