Quantifying Animal Farmed Animal Suffering with Neuron Co...

The question of what weight to give to human interests and to nonhuman animal interests is difficult.67 Humans are literally outweighed by farmed animals: land-based farmed animals have 70 percent more biomass than all humans.68 Land-based farmed animals also outnumber humans greatly, by a factor of three to one, with 25 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cattle, 1 billion sheep, and 1 billion pigs alive at any one time; farmed fish outnumber us, at a very rough estimate, ten to one, with around 1...

 How the Human's Short Lifespan Influences Their Behavior

Humans are the most adaptable and ambitious people among the common races. They have widely varying tastes, morals, and customs in the many different lands where they have settled. When they settle, though, they stay: they build cities to last for the ages, and great kingdoms that can persist for long centuries. An individual human might have a relatively short life span, but a human nation or culture preserves traditions with origins far beyond the reach o f any single human’s memory....

 This is Real

This is real. Your eyes reading this text, your hands, your breath, the time of day, the place where you are reading this—these things are real. I’m real too. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force; I’m lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, see, and smell things in a world where others also hear, see, and smell me. And it takes a break to remember that: a break to d...

 Philosophers are "Loafers"

We were not originally made to be learned; we have become so perhaps by a sort of abuse of our organic faculties, and at the expense of the State, which nourishes a host of loafers whom vanity has adorned with the name of “philosophers.” Nature created us all solely to be happy—yes, all, from the crawling worm to the eagle that soars out of sight in the clouds. That is why she has given all animals some share of natural law, a share of greater or less delicacy according to the needs of ...

 Humans Trained Themselves in Symbolic Thought

From animals to man, the transition is not violent, as good philosophers will admit. What was man before the invention of words and the knowledge of tongues? An animal of his species, who, with much less native instinct than the others, whose king he then considered himself to be, could not be distinguished from the ape and from the rest, except as the ape itself differs from the other animals; which means, by a face giving promise of more intelligence. Reduced to the bare “intuitive knowle...

 Evolutionary Origins of Play

There are several kinds of speculation about the origins of play: (a) The first holds that play originates as a mutation and therefore an amelioration of dangerous adaptational conJicts. According to John Allman in Evolving Brains, this play mutation constitutes a pre-existing genetic function. (b) Some scholars claim the most fundamental conJict arises between dangerous and mutually threatening opponents. In studies of such conJicts, 80 percent of the time creatures from ants to mammals ac...

 "Scandals" - Animals Evolved from Cancer Cells

Panchin knows the idea of cancer-derived animals sounds far-fetched — so much so that, in the paper, he and his co-authors refer to them as Scandals (an acronym for “speciated by cancer development animals”). [...] According to Panchin’s three-step scenario, a Scandal would start off as a cancer, but not just any cancer. It would have to be transmissible, so that it wouldn’t die when its host did. Then the cancer would have to spread to other species, and then independently evolve...

 Pattern-Seeking Through Play

Meredith's worldplay was shot through with yet another well-recognized ingigredienlent of creative thinking, the comparison and synthesis of two or more unlike things. As the mathematician and poet Jacob Bronowski famously expressed it, the discoveries of science and of art "are explorations—^more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness The same holds true for the insights generated in worldplay. Documents of play in Lewis, like many a child, combined the animal and the human in Lord Big. Una...

 Humans as Self-Domesticating Animals

at the end of the Pleistocene, certain human groups and their animal associates began progressively to show parallel reductions in size and stature, cranial gracilization, changes in post-cranial robusticity, shortening of the face and jaws, tooth crowding and malocclusion, and tooth-size reduction and simplification. There has been no recent attempt to explain the parallelism, although numerous explanations exist for the changes as they affect one or other of the parties. Some of the explana...