From The New York Times science section:Researchers from the University of South Carolina Upstate and Indiana State University placed pregnant crickets in an enclosure where they were stalked, but not eaten, by a wolf spider, whose fangs had been coated with wax to protect the crickets. The young of the spider-exposed mothers turned out to be more predator-savvy than those with mothers who were not exposed to the wolf spider; they stayed hidden longer, and were more likely to freeze when they encountered spider feces or spider silk. In a second experiment, the researchers placed the juvenile crickets in an arena with a starving wolf spider with fully functioning fangs. Eventually, the spider got all the crickets, but the young born from spider-exposed mothers lasted longer in the arena of death. The research was published last month in The American Naturalist. What remains unclear is exactly how the crickets are warning their unborn. “We don’t know a specific mechanism,” said Jonathan Storm, a professor at the University of South Carolina Upstate in Spartanburg and one of the authors of the paper. Although it is conjecture at this point, he said, “It’s possible that there could be some sort of hormone transmitted.”
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Maybe that Lamarck bloke wasn't as wrong as everyone thinks? Er, no, he probably was. Anyway, for my issues with Richard Dawkins click here. And for a really interesting look at where those little Hobbit people on Flora came from check out this fascinating theory in last Sunday's Observer.
32 comments:
As Spock would say, "Fascinating."
Wouldn't it be something if Lamarck got the last laugh?
I mean, he's not going to...is he?
I saw this clip on BBC world last night about elephants' secret language. It's not really secret, it's just that our ears aren't designed to hear most of it. Seems like all kinds of interactions between creatures could be going on that we just don't have the tools to witness.
I'm not a vegetarian, but I always hate the kind of experiments where you put living things in a sealed box with their natural predators. Seems like there should be some escape route so that a lucky remnant could, in this case, chirp another day.
What a coincidence. I watched a viral video just yesterday of a mama wolf spider. It’s fascinating because baby wolf spiders get a free ride on mama’s back for about a week but will disperse sooner if threatened, sometimes jumping several feet.
Seana: I'm with you on that. I can't handle seeing anything fight for its life and therefore just can't stomach nature shows anymore. A lot of them are supposed to be just fantastic, like Planet Earth, but I get an ulcer thinking something's going to jump out of the wild at any minute and rip to pieces some poor old unsuspecting animal in the scenery. It’s my loss, I guess.
Holden, that wolf spider does not look big enough to catch and eat even baby crickets.
Nature documentaries do make us all into ghouls. I think the worst one I ever watched was the one about the migration of the wildebeests, which do a huge migratory circle every year without learning anything from their (many) travails. Apparently they do not give off the same kinds of signals to the next generation that even crickets do.
Nature is BRUTAL.
Related to the Dawkins question, I once interviewed Seth Shostak of NASA's Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Charming bloke. I asked him, "How can you be certain we haven't encountered other life forms already and simply not recognised them as such?" He didn't exactly chortle and pat me on the head, but I think he wanted to. "Oh no, other life forms will be carbon based," he said. But like Dawkins, he can't be sure he's right, he simply has faith that he is.
Brian
No I think natural selection and sexual selection pretty much explain everything, but the scientist guy's vague "hormones" explanation is no explanation at all.
Seana
Well you know it might be secret. I've always thought elephants were up to something. What I'm not sure, but their brains are enormous.
Holden
I'm always amazed by people like poor deluded Timothy Treadwell who think nature is full of fuzzy animals. It is red in tooth and claw and relentlessly grim.
DP
Do you have a link to that somewhere?
My beef with Dawkins, Hitchens, AC Grayling (who I'm going to see talk in Perth on Friday) etc. is a little bit definitional and a little bit substantive. I just dont see how they can go around saying that they are atheists (strictly speaking they do not believe in god or gods) and also that the Drake Equation leads them to the belief that there are almost certainly aliens out there (or here) and that since the universe is 13.7 billion years old, the aliens out there will almost certainly have "god like" powers and abilities. Isnt that a contradiction? How can you say that there are probably god-like aliens hanging around but claim to be an atheist and mock those people who pray to gods or god?
I think there is a lot more to discover about hormones. There is an excellent book by Michel Odent called The Scientification of Love which may have some pathways into the answer for the cricket question.
As for Dawkins et al. I think the difference is that they don't say they are right, they say. like all good scientists, that all available evidence leads them to believe 'X'but if further evidence comes to light then they will consider it.
There was a chap on Sunday Night Safran last year who summed it up quite well when he said that why, when we can't understand something, do we take the impatient, lazy way out and say "Oh, it must be god/aliens/ghosts" instead of investigating the actual cause. He said we need to accept that we may be long dead before the answer is found but we have to accept that instead of killing our curiosity.
That was all really badly explained but I hope you can make some sense of it
Rob
Yes that's what a reasonable man would say, but I dont think Dawkins, Grayling, Hitchens, Gervais are reasonable men. Why? Because of their certainty. An agnostic says that on the balance of the available evidence he's unconvinced by any claims of any divinity (this is broadly my position) but an atheist says that he or she is certain that there is no divine presence in the universe. An agnostic is the reasonable man on the Clapham Omnibus (to use an example from my lawyering days) an atheist is the nut who claims to "know" stuff he cant possibly know.
Interestingly (or not) I read this just now
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/46636
Which kind of covers the same thing. Not the bit about stingrays, obviously.
At the risk of sounding like a Dawkins defender (I love his science but he can be terribly preachy at times) he does put himself at about six on his Theist Scale and says he would be surprised to meet anyone who put themselves at seven.
No, I don't think our hit-and-miss archive has a copy of the Shostak piece.
But I know what you mean about Dawkins - fanaticism in any form is unsettling, whether it's scientific or religious. I would have thought it's incompatible with reason.
Rob
I'd probably be a 6 on Dawkins's Scale too or maybe a 5.8 but what he's talking about there is an infinite, universal a priori god (that most monotheists seem to believe in). However he's said that its a virtual certainty that there are god-like aliens in the universe so wouldnt that put him at about a 2 on his own scale?
I just dont see what all the fuss is about. If the theists said that the god they believe in and have "expienced" is the product of evolution from somewhere and somewhen in the universe would he be happy, or would he still condemn them for their stupidity?
DP
By the way I think the SETI people are wasting their time looking for alien radio transmissions in the galaxy. I'm pretty sure an advanced alien civilization would have moved beyond radio waves as a method of communication.
The elephants may have gotten in contact already.
As I'm still strolling very leisurely through that Jacques Barzun book (From Dawn to Decadence, for those who missed that post), its' interesting that I just recently came upon his comment about faith in Reason vs. reasoning. It' a bit too long to get into here, but I did like what Barzun says about the Chinese and their character for heart and mind: "They perceived that the urge to reason is itself is often a drive from the heart, which explains why rationalists are often fanatics."
I've met a few fanatical rationalists. They tend to be very full of themselves.
Seana
Jacques Barzun is his own reward isnt he?
Yes, I agree with that. David Hume who was right about nearly everything (not slavery) said that reason was always a "slave to the passions."
Rob
BTW I meant to say "experienced" not "expienced".
On several occasions I have tried to "experience" the divine:
At a christian evangelist revival when I was a kid.
Under the Bodhi tree where the Buddha attained englightenment.
At the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, the holiest place in Hinduism.
In Newgrange, Stonehenge, The Church of the Holy Speculchre, even the frickin Great Pyramid of Khufu and every single time - nothing.
He is indeed. Barzun, that is. And being me, I will likely be able to finish the book and start all over again, finding it all news to me.
Your spiritual quest reminds me of a Zen story. Unfortunately, we don't have the wise Zen ending of it yet.
Seana
There may be spiritual places out there but Earth is a profane place.
Adrian -
You might have a point about SETI. Then again, the odds of us encountering sentient, advanced aliens are way long anyway. Not saying they don't or didn't exist, it's more a matter of timing.
I find ghosts far more credible than supreme beings. Could be the Irish thing. As Pound once remarked of Yeats. "Willie and his spooks."
As for the spider thing: I imagine conservatives love this kind of research. "See? beating the crap out of my kid at 18 months (or earlier) didn't just tutor him in the difference between (my) right and (his) wrong, but it alerted him to the dangers in the world, made him savvier. A survivor!" Some new research suggests conservatives have heightened startle reflexes, and are more attuned to threats real or imagined, than liberals. Which explains a lot to my mind. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck would run screaming from the wolf spider like pigtailed sisters at a birthday party gone terribly wrong for a while but would eventually get eaten. John Stewart would try to make the hairy thing laugh. Then die.
See? We really aren't that different. Why can't we all get along? (Enter, spider.)
Corbett
At least from Holden's video, wolf spiders appear to be tiny. It's funny that they got the name of wolf in the first place. And how do you coat their fangs with wax anyway?
Adrian, Joyce would say that you're supposed to look for the spiritual within the profane. Or at least that's what my friends tell me he would say as we muddle our way through Finnegans Wake. Me, I'm just trying to keep up.
Brian
I think the odds are higher than the SETI people think. Assuming there is no FTL travel but there are fusion drives etc. that could get 10% light speed, any civilization worth its salt could have explored the entire galaxy in about 900,000 years which is nothing in geological time. Why they arent here already is the mystery if you ask me.
David
As Senator James Webb said of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Dick Cheney etc funny that their courage kicked in twenty years after they were no longer eligible for the draft.
Seana
You're reading Finnegans Wake for your book group? My God whats for next month The Man Without Qualities? Remembrance of Things Past?
Different group. We just get together every two or three weeks, have a pint and read aloud, pretending that we know what the hell he's talking about, or that we do.
The other group is now reading Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston. Seemed like a good idea to read something about Haiti right now. We've tried some more ambitious things, like Don Quixote but people's spirits fail at some point.
If it's all about balance, I should trade in one of my discussion groups for an aerobics class or something, but it's not going to happen.
I'm not so sure about those odds, man. Sure, the Universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old, but then again, you need a few billion years for suns and planets to form, another few for single cell organisms to form, another few billion for evolution to (hopefully) occur, another few million for intelligent life to figure out how to get into space, hundreds of years to travel to another planet filled with intelligent life, etc...
Taking all that into consideration, it's unlikely the timing would ever work out for two alien species to ever encounter one another, without one or both civilizations coming to an end first.
Brian
I dont know about that.
There are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way and most of them are older than our sun. As astronomers are discovering, almost every star has a solar system of planets about it. I'd think its very probable that there are millions of Earth like worlds in the galaxy and even if only a few .01 percent of them produced them intelligent life, we're looking at tens of thousands of civilizations who should be able to colonise huge chunks of the galaxy and be obvious. But they're not obvious, which means that they're not there, or as you say maybe destroyed themselves.
As Arthur C Clarke said "either we're alone in the universe or we're not alone in the universe - both propositions are extraordinary."
Why they arent here already is the mystery if you ask me.
PMFBI
The thing that freaks me is the thought that they already are, and we don't recognise them.
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