Tag: Biology

Conspiracy and More

“Is there by chance an agenda?”

Rewards and penalties have guided individuals and society throughout human history. As generalizations of pleasure and pain, rewards and penalties can be very strong motivators. In fact, rewards alone are enough to help teach dogs some sophisticated tricks. Rewards and penalties together are of course useful for raising children as well as shaping commerce and other dealings in human society. After all, most people like rewards such as ice cream or money, and few people like punishment such as being grounded or spending time in jail.

But there can be too much of a good thing. Continue reading “Conspiracy and More”

Coming Back From the Dead

“Nature can of course surprise us.”

We find stories of people coming back from the dead in fiction as well as legends, myths, and religions. Coming back from the dead tends to mean becoming alive again, after being dead long enough to remove doubt about being dead. At the more real end of the spectrum, common sense suggests it’s not a safe bet if we’re talking about being dead for a long time, at least outside of religious contexts. Fiction, on the other hand, has no problem with having people walking and talking again after being dead for years or even decades or centuries. How possible is it for someone to come back from being dead for years, without preparation like cryogenics? Continue reading “Coming Back From the Dead”

Could Unicorns Exist in Nature?

“My question is not whether they do exist today, but whether unicorns have had enough time to evolve as such and breed that way consistently….”

With the help of fairy tales and entertainment companies like Disney, many people have some idea what a unicorn is. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary says that a unicorn generally looks like a horse with a single horn on its forehead.[1] This agrees with popular fictional media, except this popular fiction tends to depict unicorns only as horses with single horns, instead of also allowing (e.g.) cloven hooves. In my definition, I’m siding with popular fiction and including only members of the genus Equus, whose only known living members are horses, zebras, and donkey relatives. None of these happen to have cloven hooves. (A genus is a level of taxonomy, a means of classifying living things. The traditional taxonomy levels – taxons – from top to bottom are: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.) Let nature genetically put a single horn on the head of any species of the genus Equus, and I would call it a unicorn. Continue reading “Could Unicorns Exist in Nature?”