2. Read a few pages of The Selfish Gene. He mentioned an interesting example of selfishness on page 5:
More well known is the macabre cannibalism of female praying mantises. Mantises are large carnivorous insects. They normally eat smaller insects such as flies, but they will attack almost anything that moves. When they mate, the male cautiously creeps up on the female, mounts her, and copulates. If the female gets the chance, she will eat him, beginning by biting his head off, either as the male is approaching, or immediately after he mounts, or after they separate. It might seem most sensible for her to wait until copulation is over before she starts to eat him. But the loss of the head does not seem to throw the rest of the male's body off its sexual stride. Indeed, since the insect head is the seat of some inhibitory nerve centres, it is possible that the female improves the male's sexual performance by eating his head. If so, this is an added benefit. The primary one is that she obtains a good meal.3. I find biology very interesting these days. Look forward to Jörgen's course on evolutionary game theory.
4. Talked with a Chinese girl in our corridor who is a master student of biology. Her program is related to breast cancer and her daily work is to record the processing of RNA in a certain cell before the translation to DNA. It sounds quite labor intensive. She told me that they do not need to think while working. Then I think it is more interesting to study social sciences. As Lars once joked, 'you will get old more slowly, if you do one or two 'thinking' exercises like this every week.'
While it's a bit irritating that I know nothing about them, I find this cross-disciplinary trend very fascinating, the invasion of evolutionary theory and cognitive studies into other disciplinary in particular. Although sometimes they tend to reduce the fun of arbitrariness or what is aestheticized as the mystic / the sublime.
ReplyDeleteI envy the lab people who have tangible things to test. For them the sense of satisfaction seems easier to obtain, given that there'd be a result in an estimated period of time regardless of its quality. I can only sit and formulate stuffs in my head and there's no guarantee that they would come up, regardless of its (lack of) quality if they did at the end.
and my verification word for the last comment is "sup(p)res(s)" -_-0
ReplyDeletewe do not need to know many things for the sake of research...
ReplyDelete