{"id":6374,"date":"2016-11-03T08:16:30","date_gmt":"2016-11-03T13:16:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=6374"},"modified":"2016-11-03T08:17:56","modified_gmt":"2016-11-03T13:17:56","slug":"wait-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2016\/11\/03\/wait-what\/","title":{"rendered":"Wait, What?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Simon Ings, in a book review of How The Zebra Got Its Stripes<\/strong><\/em>, notes the following eep-inducing biological adaptation – if you can call it that:<\/p>\n

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 \u201cpseudo-penis\u201d. 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 \u201cjust so\u201d story, it would be a decidedly off-colour one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u00a0world, but at the risk of occasionally getting it wrong<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

But now we’re more limited in what we can eat.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Makes you wonder about the basic physical laws…<\/p>\n

(From NewScientist<\/strong><\/em><\/a>,\u00a017 October 2016)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6374"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6386,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6374\/revisions\/6386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}