Fuchsia Shock

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Humans live in environments that are even more challenging than the jungle habitats of chimpanzees, but we can cope in such environments because our greater brain/body size permits us a degree of inventiveness unsurpassed in the animal kingdom.

However, we have needed to retain bonobo-like cooperation in order to survive, particularly in hostile environments.

Further, our greater brain/body ratio has imposed an inordinately long, parent-dependent childhood, and this has necessitated prolonged male-female pair-bonding such as is innate in many bird species, but which is not characteristic of chimp or bonobo societies.

Having fathered a child, a human male can only ensure the perpetuation of his genes (reproductive success) by staying close enough to ensure survival of his offspring and/or by fathering children with many women. Men might, by their emotional/sexual nature, opt for both strategies, but society has long imposed a cost on fathering. So, official polygamy has traditionally been the exclusive reserve of the wealthy.

Human females could similarly ensure reproductive success (survival of their children) by nuturing each child and by mating with several fathers (ensuring a variety of genetic possibilities for her offspring). However, human males, like the males of many species, are typically less invested in the survival of the offspring of other males, so human females can best secure the survival of their children by maintaining the support of one male.

Mint Ripple

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“Logical errors are, I think, of greater practical importance than many people believe; they enable their perpetrators to hold the comfortable position on every subject in turn. Any logically coherent body of doctrine is sure to be in part painful and contrary to current prejudices.”

___ Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 1945

All Roads Lead to Home

Wild Fire

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Our personalities are the outward manifestation of our general belief systems, our Weltschauen. What we choose to believe, when we diverge from evidence-logic-based beliefs, will be greatly influenced by our temperament and general attitudes to the world and others.

Joseph's Mosaic

Abyssal Plain

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The Declaration against Ignorance

When in the Course of human thought it becomes necessary for one group to deny any facts which could connect them to truth and to assume among the fantasies of religiosity, the separate and lesser cognition to which Religious Dogma and Claims of a God drive them, disrespect for the knowledge attained by mankind requires that they should deny the evidence which impels them to prevaricate.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans make errors, that they are endowed by evolution with certain unalienable propensities, that among these are Lies, Taking Liberties with Facts, and the creation of Mythologies.

...... with apologies to the Founding Fathers and to that sensible Englishman whose political philosophy they appropriated.

Psychodelic

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I believe that those who make a mission of targetting the rights of others or of denying facts in order to promote a rigid, hateful agenda are suffering from either: a personality disorder, a characterological defect, some degree of psychological damage, the aftermath of religious indoctrination unopposed by reason, or a combination of these.

Red Bock of Courage

Tectonic Plates

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The Earth's brittle crustal rocks are fragmented into huge tectonic plates that move in relation to one another at about the rate that fingernails grow. Over the immensity of geological time, this gradual, radioactivity-driven motion has crashed continents together and then ripped them apart again.

Upwelling

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Molten rock may collect and solidify in magma chambers deep in the Earth. Alternatively magma may rise, only to cool at a shallower depth within the Earth, or it may reach the surface, where it may be extruded as lava or erupt explosively.

Within magma chambers, crystals of denser minerals that solidify early can sink to the base of the melt, while lighter minerals may float to the top of the melt. These processes of fractional crystallization can produce layered igneous rocks called cumulates [i]. As minerals crystallize out of the melt, the composition of the liquid phase of the melt is altered in a process called magmatic differentiation. Similarly, as a rising magma melts minerals out of the walls of the chamber, the melt's composition may change.

Magmatic mixing involves adjacent magma bodies that have developed transient subsurface communications before they solidify at depth or erupt at the surface. (I created the image before being put in mind of this phenomenon.)

Gaudi

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"I have just been through the annual pilgrimage of torture and humiliation known as buying a bathing suit. When I was a child in the 1940s, the bathing suit for a woman with a mature figure was designed for a woman with a mature figure: boned, trussed, and reinforced, not so much sewn as engineered." . . . continued

Second Schist

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Schist is a medium-grade metamorphic rock that often takes on a shiny appearance due to the presence of flaky clay minerals called micas.

Wadi Wadi

The image is not really of a wadi, but it is reminiscent of one.

Wadi is the Arabic term for a dry riverbed that runs with water only during heavy rains – also called an arroyo, wash, or draw. Canyons also display water-cut features and are typically located in arid environments. However, canyons can also be submarine features offshore from the mouths of rivers. Turbidites are layers of sediment deposited underwater by rivers dumping their suspended load offshore. (Video of imaging of offshore canyon in Nova Scotia : 33.6 - 56K Dial-Up : Cable/DSL : High-Speed / T1)

Venusian Wadi

The image is not really of a wadi, and definately not a wadi on Venus, but it put me in mind of one.

Wadi is the Arabic term for a dry riverbed that runs with water only during heavy rains – also called an arroyo, wash, or draw. Canyons also display water-cut features and are typically located in arid environments. However, canyons can also be submarine features offshore from the mouths of rivers. Turbidites are layers of sediment deposited underwater by rivers dumping their suspended load offshore. (Video of imaging of offshore canyon in Nova Scotia : 33.6 - 56K Dial-Up : Cable/DSL : High-Speed / T1)

Purple Rain

Acid Trip

Fluorosed

Goblet

Graph Ite

Pulmonary

Roots

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Biological evolution generated us from a common ancestor that also gave rise to chimpanzees and bonobos. (This hominid timeline implies a linear evolution for hominids, whereas a pruned bush would be more accurate.)

We share more than 98% of our DNA sequences with chimpanzees, indicating that our evolutionary lines diverged 7 to 5 million years ago. In general, the later the analysis, the more recent the esimated split. The ancestor of chimpanzees and bonobos are estimated to have split again between 0.89 and 0.86 million years ago, and the two common chimpanzee subspecies are estimated to have diverged about 0.46 million years ago.

Even though our advantages over our cousins result from a regulatory-gene-mutation that permitted development of a greater brain/body size ratio, biological mutation/reproductive selection did not care whether or not we were otherwise inherently vastly superior in rationality/morality.

We seem to have inherited from this common ancestor a nature that lies somewhere between aggressive chimpanzies and sex-obsessed, peaceful bonobos. Possibly chimpanzees and bonobos diverged from a midway-natured common ancestor. The environments in which chimps and bonobos now live are comparatively more challenging in the case of chimps, no doubt necessitating – and so selecting for – their aggressive behaviour.

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Osteons

Foliage

Distended Bowel

Banded Gneiss

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The image is considerably more colorful than gneiss, which is a high-grade metamorphic rock that is formed when large volumes of deeply buried rock are subjected to high temperatures and pressures. This pressure-cooker alteration of rocks in geological areas like tectonic subduction zones is called regional metamorphism.

Gneiss, which is pronounced like 'niece', often displays banding of light and dark layers. The bands may be linear and parallel, but they may be quite distorted as a result of the pressures to which they were subjected. The layers are often gray-black and white, though they may be colored, often pinkish. Lesser grades of metamorphic change can produce shiny schists.

Bajada

Pleasant Under Glass

Beer Rim

On Spec

Metamorphic Schist

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Schist is a medium-grade metamorphic rock that often takes on a shiny appearance due to the presence of flaky clay minerals called micas.

Quadrippled

Textural

Trefoil

Porcine

Heart Swirl

Lightning Strikes

Asteroid

Arterial

Acinar

Fuzzy Wuzzy

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear.
Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair.
Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy,
Wuzzy?

The image clearly is not that of a bear, fuzzy or hairless. The round blobs are nuclei and the fuzzy structures are protein manufacturing centers – the endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi apparatus (these images of organelles are transmission electron micrographs).

Blind

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Hyperthyroid

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Enamel

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Double Blind

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Furled Quilt

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Squiggles

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Sea Floor

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Cartography

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Acetabulated

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Cat Nipped

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