Two more photos from October 20th 2007, and that’s really it.
First, the painter who painted Venus and The Annunciation, painting The Annunciation:
Maybe you suspected he painted his paintings at home and just taped them to the pavement. No. He painted them in situ.
And later, on the same day, a fish:
Which came out really well, I think. It’s the bottom of a street lamp. To its right, what the top of the street lamp looks like.
Yes, as earlier promised:
There’s a lot I could say, by way of a photo-essay, about these photoer photos. But, do you know what the best thing about them is, in my opinion? How good they are. Oh, technically, they’re a bit rubbish, but I don’t care about that. I just really like them. Even the one of me. But especially the one of the bloke lying face down on the ground playing a guitar behind his head.
The Nurture Only view being, in this case, the claim that all the differences in behaviour and attitude – with regard to such things as casual sex, attaching importance to physical sexual allure, and so on – between human males and human females are all caused by societal pressure.
Says SS-W (on page 90 of The Ape That Understood The Universe):
Arguably, though, the most persuasive argument against the Nurture Only view is that sex differences in sexual inclinations and choosiness can be found in many individuals who have no gender norms, no socialization, and little in the way of culture: that rather sizeable group, so often overlooked by psychologists, known as other animals. The differences aren’t found in all other species, but they are found in many, including most birds, mammals, and reptiles. And when we find the differences in other animals, evolution is the only reasonable explanation. Why should humans be different? It’s logically possible, of course, that the differences are products of evolution in squirrels, turkeys, and frogs, but of learning and culture in Homo sapiens. But it hardly seems likely. In other species, the differences appear when the ceiling number of offspring for males is higher than that for females. Humans meet this condition, and our species presumably evolved from earlier species that displayed the normal sex differences. As such, what the Nurture Only theory asks us to believe is that, in our lineage and ours alone, natural selection eliminated the normal sex differences, despite the fact that the selection pressure that initially created them was still operative. Why would it do that? It’s particularly perplexing given that, when we look around the world, we still find the sex differences that selection supposedly eliminated. Thus, the Nurture Only theory asks us to believe not only that selection eliminated the differences for reasons unknown, but that learning and culture then coincidentally reproduced exactly the same differences in every culture on record. This is not a compelling thesis. Cultural forces clearly influence people’s willingness to engage in casual sex, and to some extent their desire to do so as well. But the idea that culture creates these sex differences out of nothing not only clashes with the available evidence, it clashes with everything we know about how evolution works.
This comes in the middle of the chapter entitled “The SeXX/XY Animal”. Right at the beginning of this chapter, just below the subheading “An Academic Culture War”, appears this academic wisecrack:
“Everyone knows that men and women are different … except social scientists.”
Which doesn’t mean that everyone who knows that men and women are different also knows exactly what those differences consist of. And don’t consist of.
The “Other creatures” category at this blog usually means other creatures besides cats and kittens. But for this posting “Other creatures” means other creatures besides the particular creatures that are humans.
Speaking of animals, as I like to do of a Friday, how does Life get from little tiny single cell thingies to, you know, animals? Well, somewhat like this:
This school of fish swimming together looks like a single creature, shuffling along the ocean floor. Kinda analogous to the nature of multicellularity: Multicellular organisms are, in effect, large, highly coordinated colonies of single-celled organisms (their cells). pic.twitter.com/PZZlkie0Or
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) January 19, 2020
The little tiny cells don’t themselves get that much bigger. No. Instead they combine into cooperating flocks, like the fishes above.
To be clear, the above is not an actual creature evolving. What you see there is merely analogous to how bigger creatures assemble themselves from tiny little cells.
I continue to read this SS-W book. My problem is: I’m already persuaded of the truth of everything he says. But I am learning plenty, so will continue.
Here:
Alternative title: Five Concordes sniffing the arse of another Concorde. A Twitter commenter agrees.
As someone once said about a battleship: “This is how to waste public money.”
One of my most lasting regrets is that I never photoed Concorde, even though my first digital camera predated its demise.
Not ordinary things.
While in France, I read the whole of The Square and the Tower, and then embarked upon The Ape that Understood the Universe.
In the latter book, the matter of how humans get all sentimental about animals is mentioned (pp. 59-60):
… Why do so many people take such delight in staring at infant members of other species? It’s not as if, say, porcupines enjoy staring at baby chickens. As with porn, our love of these nonhuman animals is probably not an adaptation. More than likely, it’s spillover from psychological mechanisms designed for more human-centered purposes. There’s a certain cluster of traits that people everywhere find irresistibly cute. This includes big round eyes in the center of the face, a small nose, and plump, stubby limbs. Our affection for creatures with these features presumably evolved to motivate us to care for our own infants and toddlers. But the same features are found in many other infant mammals, and even in the adult members of some nonhuman species. As a result, we often feel affectionate and protective toward these individuals as well – not because it’s adaptive, but just because adaptations aren’t perfect. By the way, as you might already have noticed, the spill over hypothesis doesn’t just explain our fondness for cute animal videos. It also hints at an explanation for a much older and more pervasive phenomenon: our habit of keeping pets.
Motivated I am sure by exactly this sort of fondness for animals myself, I have become more and more intrigued by this general human propensity. Which is why so many of my photos involve non-human creatures of one sort or another.
Here are some of the non-human creatures photos I photoed while in France recently:
Even the photos involving signs urging dog owners to clear up canine crap (photos 12, 14 and 17) are about our positive feelings towards animals, because the offending dogs are pets. And even the two plastic barrier things (photo 16) are “other creatures”, in the sense that we insist on seeing the faces of creatures where there are none, even though these particular non-creatures each have only one eye. Yes, we do love these creatures.
And yet, by way of a corrective, we also do these kinds of things to particularly tasty creatures, in this case to various mammals and to fishes:
Yum.
Yerevan, Armenia:
Photoed recently by Michael J (this blog’s technical curator). His feet make him look happy.
This sculpture is now the only thing I know about Yerevan, apart from the fact that Yerevan is in Armenia.
For the next week or so I will enthusiastically be doing something else, which means that there may be interruptions to blogging here. The something-each-day rule may be set aside. It may not be. But, it may be. Since I have been sticking up something here every day since I can’t remember when, I thought it necessary to say, just in case my regular readers start suspecting that I have died and am being devoured by my cats. This will not be the case, not least because I have no cats. I will be alive, but otherwise occupied.
My computer is misbehaving, added to which I have been busy doing other things. So just a couple of tweets for today, both concerning one of the things the internet really likes, namely: different brands of animals being nice to each other.
A monkey caresses some puppies. Although, a cynical commenter thinks maybe he’s just checking out how much meat they have on them. Fair to say, though, that the monkey looks like he’s doing just what humans, who mostly don’t have in mind to eat puppies, do with puppies.
A human and a dog play a game. The one where you have to remove a wooden piece from a tower, without knocking over the tower. The dog is very good at it. There seems no limit to what dogs will do to keep our attention and gain our approval.
