In Europe (and other parts of the world), when it comes to poultry meat, there’s a disproportionate demand for chicken breast. So chicken is bred to develop giant breasts in minimal time. The rest of the animal isn’t so popular on the dinner table so it needs to disappear. Poof. One magic spell is called ‘chicken dumping‘: send it to …
That message you shouldn’t have sent
Have you ever gotten an email that insulted you and prompted you to react immediately? Then, maybe the next hour or day, you realized your interpretation was incorrect, your answer wasn’t appropriate and you ended up making matters worse? We’re again at the center for emotions of the brain, the amygdala. However, this is not a situation threatening your life. …
When your rational self doesn’t get a say
Do you think you can foretell how you would behave in most situations? We like to believe we know ourselves and answer ‘Yes, I know exactly what I would do!’ But sometimes we can be surprised by how wrong our predictions are. The moments we’re most likely to mispredict our actions involve stress, so let’s review what happens in that …
The Trojan throne
There are other inventions that defy the way our human body has evolved. One of them is the toilet used in most western countries. Instead of sitting on a throne, we’ve evolved to squat when emptying our bowels. One of the advantages of squatting is that the angle between anus and rectum is straightened, which makes defecation easier. That’s because …
An ancient system
Our brains have evolved over millions of years and over that time, developed mechanisms that helped us survive different challenges. However, the changes we make in the world aren’t accompanied by evolutions in our brains – our technological development happens too quickly for our bodies to catch up! Here I want to mention one example of that. Until not so …
Envying gnus
As mentioned previously, the traits that animals gained through evolution can be messy. Sometimes, they work against each other. Don’t you sometimes envy a gnu? When the gnu cow has her calf, it will be standing and ready to walk within an hour! But our human babies need months until they even attempt to get up. So we applaud when …
Comparing ourselves to roses
Take a look at the tree of life below. It illustrates our connection to the other living beings on this planet from one common ancestor, that would be in the ‘Earth Birth’ circle of the image below. If you click on the image to see it full size, you’ll find us humans on the left side, at the bottom. I …
Evolution?
I find evolution a fascinating subject and it will come up quite a few times. Maybe you aren’t interested or don’t believe it happened. Especially for these readers, I’ll borrow this quotation from Jane Goodall’s “Reason for Hope”: “You may not believe in evolution and that is all right. How we humans came to be the way we are is …