Currently viewing the tag: "Animal"
Gwen at Sociological Images does a quick survey of yet another place where humans and non-human animals seem to have a brightline but do not: culture.
Over at Oxford’s Practical Ethics, Lena Groegner’s post on the dolphins as “non-human persons” issue is sober and short, but there is one bit that intrigued me:
The word has long been used to refer to non-human entities: in Christianity we find the three persons of [...]
New York Magazine asks and answers the question with the article “The Rise of Dog Identity Politics,” wherein John Homans probes the life of dogs as fashion accessories, the perfect companion, how city life has changed them from working animals, the Victorian mindset of the AKC, the disagreements between rights groups and how we [...]
Ridiculously cute.
via Cute Overload
To justify the above posting, here is a video about how seals, sea lions, and walruses are also much, much smarter than we previously thought.
And Moscow’s wild dogs and beggar dogs are proving it:
[B]eggar dogs have evolved the most specialized behavior. Relying on scraps of food from commuters, the beggar dogs can not only recognize which humans are most likely to give them something to eat, but have evolved to ride the subway. Using scents, and the ability [...]
Dig out your Halloween gear:
Field biologists have observed that crows seem to recognise them, and a few researchers have even gone to the extreme of wearing masks when capturing birds to band (or “ring”) them, so that they could later observe the birds without upsetting them. However, it was unclear whether the birds distinguish [...]
Here are a few of stories about animal prosthetics to start your day off right:
In 2005, the chances of surviving didn’t look good for a bald eagle named Beauty, which was found wandering a landfill in Alaska with no means to feed itself. Sadly, the bald eagle had its [...]
I suspect the next decade is going to be packed with news about animal intelligence. Researcher Lori Marino (the humor of a Marino working on Dolphins is not lost on me) notes two major reasons dolphins are so smart:
First, various features of the dolphin neocortex — the part of the brain involved [...]
Meredith Woerner at io9 brings up the prickly situation of sex in Avatar. As most of us guessed, Na’vi sex happens, at least in part, with their mind-link cords:
If [no genitalia are involved], then we’d have to assume that Na’vi mating only includes the hair tail syncing system. Which puts us [...]
I have been lucky enough to swim with dolphins twice in my life. Once it was as a “swim with dolphins” experience in Mexico where I was pushed around by the dolphins in an awesome little display of power and warned not to “pet them on the tummy, or they might get horny, and, [...]
About
Pop Bioethics, written by Kyle Munkittrick, is an effort to study the ethics of the continuing evolution of the human species via the lens of pop culture and be somewhat entertaining in the process.
Kyle's writing can also be found at Discover's The Crux, Slate's Future Tense, and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. For questions or comments: comments [at] popbioethics [dot] com
All opinions, ideas, and words either explicit or implicit found within this website are my own and represent no other person, organization, or group.Categories
