Tastes like Chicken

We Sapiens, if we are special, it is because we can look ahead.  If you're still tiptoeing around the word "death," perhaps it is time you confront the fact that while you may or may not be more than a biological being, you are at least that much and one day you will die.  Learning to die is the key to virtue.  Dying well is a legacy (and frankly a favor done) for your loved ones.

The Economist took a shot at explaining the issue and it deserves a recommendation,

Roughly every half a second, someone, somewhere in the world, dies – and nearly a person a minute in the United Kingdom. Yet ours is an age in which death has become taboo. “For all but our most recent history death was an ever present possibility,” writes Atul Gawande, an American surgeon and author of the bestseller “Being Mortal”, which has established him as a leading authority on the end of life. “It didn’t matter if you were 5 or 50. Every day was a roll of the dice.” But things have changed. Fifty years ago, most of us would have died at home. Now, though 70% of us would like to, only 12% do, leaving the vast majority to die in hospitals, hospices or care homes. So many – perhaps most – of us no longer know what death looks like. “A hundred years ago, everyone knew how people died,” says Min Stacpoole, a clinical nurse specialising in palliative care and based at St Christopher’s Hospice in south London. “Now many people are frightened of having a dead body in their house.” 

Read more at the link.

What does it mean to be human?  It means being willing to eat what no one has eaten before.  Apparently, chickens were domesticated long before anyone ever thought to ask, "What do we mean when we say it 'tastes like chicken'."

As he noted recently, the staggering number of chickens in the world — 20 billion or so — is reason enough to study them. And although it may be hard to believe, it seems that neither potpie nor chicken Parmesan was the reason humans domesticated them.

“It looks like from all the evidence that chickens existed for a very long time in association with people and they were not food,” he said. Today, chickens are just behind pigs and poised to overtake them as the most common source of animal protein in the world. But before the raising of chickens became industrial, they were far less important to human diets, and for thousands of years, their primary role seems to have been in cockfighting or various rituals. Estimates of the time of their domestication are from 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, but a recent report from an archaeological dig in Israel concluded that they were first eaten in significant numbers about 2,200 years ago.  

The chicken project will investigate, among other things, just exactly what we were doing with chickens for all that time.

What does it mean to be human? It means we've all got a little bit of Cain within us, and it has been there since the get go

When it comes to the origins of warfare, there are two main schools of thought. One school believes the propensity for violence is embedded deep in human nature; the other believes that it arose in response to the need to protect property, a symptom of humans’ move from nomadic hunting and gathering towards a more settled lifestyle. Those who support the latter idea argue that the Paleolithic era was generally a peaceful time, with little evidence of organized violence between hunter-gatherer groups. 

But new research complicates that second argument: In a study published today in the journal Nature, a team of anthropologists describe a prehistoric mass grave whose inhabitants died a violent death, evidence that small-scale warfare was alive and well even among hunter-gatherer communities.   

Adam and Eve mourn Abel

The site, discovered in Nataruk, Kenya, in 2012, housed the remains of 27 people, including 12 intact skeletons. Based on carbon dating of the bones and surrounding sediment, the researchers estimate that the deaths took place somewhere between 9,500 and 10,500 years ago..

Not that this makes us special, other animals go to war as well.

What does it mean to be human?  It means you do not need to just work against attempts to abrogate your liberty from the left.  It does not mean you just need to resist attempts to abrogate your liberty from the right.

It means you need to resist all attempts to abrogate your liberty.

Sen. Ben Sasse is heading to Iowa to campaign against Donald Trump over the next two days, with plans to appear at events for Senate colleagues Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and "possibly other constitutional candidates," according to a statement from the Nebraska Republican's office."We are in a moment of constitutional crisis. America already has one post-constitutional party; we don't need another," Sasse said in the statement, two days after he unleashed a rapid-fire series of questions for Trump on Twitter.
...
"We have a President who does not believe in executive restraint; we do not need another," Sasse continued in his statement on Tuesday. "I am not endorsing any candidate-- I am urging conservatives to hold every candidate accountable to keeping their word so that we uphold the Constitution's system of checks and balances. I'm pro-Constitution and if that makes me anti-Trump, that's Mr. Trump's problem."

What are People For?

If you take it down with spears, you're allowed to think of it as a trophy.

What does it mean to be human?  To boldly go where no Sapien has gone before.

Russian scientists said the male mammoth excavated from a bluff on Yenisei Bay on the Arctic Ocean was killed by hunters 45,000 years ago, providing the earliest indication of the presence of humans in the Arctic. 

Until now, the oldest evidence of humans in Arctic regions dated to "more or less 30,000 years ago," according to Dr Vladimir Pitulko, senior research scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for the History of Material Culture in St. Petersburg. 

The people who endured the harsh Arctic conditions likely lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, Dr Pitulko said. 

Mammoths, the close elephant relatives that were the largest land creatures in the region, represented an important resource for them."Indeed, these animals provide an endless source of different goods: food with meat, fat and marrow; fuel with dung, fat and bones; and raw material with long bones and ivory," Dr Pitulko said

Does your dog understand and accept you?  Maybe, but we still think you need to get out more.

In the study, published Wednesday in Biology Letters, the researchers showed 17 domesticated dogs of various breeds a screen showing two faces: one happy and one angry. At the same time, the dogs heard a human speaking in an unfamiliar language and voicing either a positive or negative emotion. The experiment was then repeated with dog expressions and happy and angry barks. In both cases, the dogs looked significantly longer at the facial expressions that matched the emotional content of the sound they heard. 

That dogs paid more attention to an image corresponding to an emotional sound from both humans and dogs suggests that dogs have an intuitive understanding of our emotions and what they mean. Furthermore, when the dogs were presented with the same emotion expressed two different ways, they understood the connection between them. This means that the dogs were able to pull relevant information from two different sources and recognize that they were similar.

This, however, would be filed under "trying too hard."

While you're heading out, take the dog.  He can be a great wingman.

So why are women more likely to swoon over a partner with a dog? "Put in terms of evolutionary and life history theory, females allocate a higher proportion of their reproductive effort to parenting while males expend more energy on mating," the researchers said. Basically: Women are more likely to want a guy who seems like he would be a responsible, caring parent; guys are more likely to want a girl who seems like she would look good in a bikini. 

The study (which has some notable limitations — the survey sample comes exclusively from the online dating pool, and includes only heterosexual, gender-normative people — pointed out that because pets are increasingly treated like members of the family, their role as a stand-in for potential future kids is all the more significant. 

Hence the "Hot Dudes with Dogs" account on Instagram, and those Purina Puppy Chow "Puppyhood" video ads featuring that floppy-haired guy and his floppy-eared puppy: All just a shameless ploy to win over the ladies by using our evolutionary instincts against us. (That guy and that puppy, though ...)

What does it mean to be human?  It means you're prone to mis-under-estimate the world around you and then blame the world for not meeting your expectations.

There’s a fun game I like to play in a group of trusted friends called “Controversial Opinion.” The rules are simple: Don’t talk about what was shared during Controversial Opinion afterward and you aren’t allowed to “argue” — only to ask questions about why that person feels that way. Opinions can range from “I think James Bond movies are overrated” to “I think Donald Trump would make a excellent president.” 

Usually, someone responds to an opinion with, “Oh my god! I had no idea you were one of those people!” Which is really another way of saying “I thought you were on my team!”In psychology, the idea that everyone is like us is called the “false-consensus bias.” This bias often manifests itself when we see TV ratings (“Who the hell are all these people that watch NCIS?”) or in politics (“Everyone I know is for stricter gun control! Who are these backwards rubes that disagree?!”) or polls (“Who are these people voting for Ben Carson?”). 

Online it means we can be blindsided by the opinions of our friends or, more broadly, America. Over time, this morphs into a subconscious belief that we and our friends are the sane ones and that there’s a crazy “Other Side” that must be laughed at — an Other Side that just doesn’t “get it,” and is clearly not as intelligent as “us.” But this holier-than-thou social media behavior is counterproductive, it’s self-aggrandizement at the cost of actual nuanced discourse and if we want to consider online discourse productive, we need to move past this.

What does it mean to be human?  It means we are surprised when we a force we empower for good begins to waste our time.  It was true the first time a chief was allowed to pass off his authority to his son.  It is true when the US Department of Agriculture which seems to have nothing better to do than worry about Groundhog Day celebrations.

SUN PRAIRIE, Wis. -While a business group has offered to pay up to $1,000 to get a “stand-in” Jimmy the Groundhog for Sun Prairie's annual celebration from an animal breeder, an agreement to do so has not been reached.The Business Improvement District is still in negotiations with an animal breeder and is hopeful a live groundhog will be present for this year’s event, which is scheduled for Feb. 2.The Jimmy the Groundhog used for last year’s event garnered international attention when it bit then-mayor Jon Freund’s ear.“It was the bite heard around the world,” said Freund, who issued a mayor’s pardon of Jimmy the day after last year’s event. “We went as far as Australia. We were on the BBC, the Weather Channel and several talk shows.”Problems arose when Jimmy also got the attention of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. A license is required to exhibit an animal, like a groundhog.Because Sun Prairie did not have a license, Jimmy was released into a field near Sun Prairie last June.

I mean, who can blame Jimmy for that nip.  If you shove that ear in my face, I'm gonna get irritable too.