US OLD GUYS WORTH SOMETHING AFTER ALL

According to a Scientific American article in November, 2004, about 30,000 years ago “older adults outnumbered younger ones for the first time. The boost in longevity may have been critical in the development of human culture, as elders passed down knowledge and helped to knit together complex societies.”

These ancient wise elders who passed on practical knowledge like how to barter and where to hunt and how to shape the best stone spear points are not to be confused with current wise elders who bore young people to death with horrendous tales of long walks to school in snowy winters when drifts clear to the top of the Empire State Building were not uncommon.


CONTRADICTION TO LA CERRA’S
ORIGIN OF MINDS?

If you recall how La Cerra explained the “plastic” piece of brain in the bumblebee and it’s ability to store changing information about directions to pollen, pollen yields related to the color and shape of healthy flowers (in short, La Cerra’s explanation of adaptive memory in bees and the “plasticity” of that memory), a fairly current piece of information in the November Scientific American (p.36) about ants seemingly undermines the plastic memory idea. Ants do no seem to be able to adapt as easily as bumblebees.

Research with ants suggests that “a hardwired navigation system computes distance and controls the ants will to fight.” Ants near home fight more than ants far from home. By picking up and moving ants after they have moved sufficient distances from home, researchers found that ants return to a place where home should have been rather than to where home is. Since the ants believe they are home, they will fight to defend home even though home is not nearby. This fight response, unconnected to an actual home, suggests that the ants are hardwired to calculate the distance from home.

The key words to note are the words “hardwired” in ants versus “plastic” in La Cerra’s bees.


ARTSY SMARTSY!

CONSILIENCE, p. 218: “The arts are innately focused toward certain forms and themes but are otherwise freely constructed. The archetypes spawn legions of metaphors that compose not only a large part of the arts but also of ordinary communication. Metaphors, the consequence of spreading activation of the brain during learning, are the building blocks of creative thought. They connect and synergistically strengthen different spheres of memory.”

Wilson reports that “Kurt Vonnegut Jr., master fantasist, once pointed out, the arts place humanity at the center of the universe, whether we belong there or not.”

Hey, Jimbo! Here’s a fantasist we can talk about.
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“It seems th’ less a statesman amounts to th’ more he loves th’ flag.” —Frank McKinney Hubbard [These modern day folk have completely lost the ability to separate themselves from the state as these old-timers can. And these flag waving conservatives have the nerve to accuse liberals of wanting more power for the state!]