A Close Stellar Encounter

Posted on January 3, 2015 by James Cross

Just when we thought we were safe after the 2012 Doomsday comes word that our solar system may be visited by a star. The good news is that it will not be anytime soon.

Coryn Bailer-Jones, a German astrophysicist, calculated possible paths for 50,000 stars in the Milky Way. The star HIP 85605, now  16 light years away in the constellation of Hercules. is heading towards our solar system and may pass through the Oort Cloud sometime between 240 and 470 thousand years from now. The Oort Cloud is a spherical band of what is to believed to be small icy objects that surrounds our solar system. Small is a relative term here. Even a small object perturbed from its orbit could plunge into the inner solar system to cause havoc on Earth. The passing of even a small star through the Oort Cloud could generate a storm of comets.

The paper can be read here.

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The Raw and the Cooked

Posted on December 2, 2014 by James Cross

In a 1964 book, The Raw and the Cooked, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss charts a winding course through the myths of the Bororo people of South America. Beginning with a story of the rape of a mother and subsequent attempts at revenge by the father culminating in the eventual murder of the father’s wives by the youth, Levi-Strauss weaves myth upon myth with the larger objective of showing how empirical opposites – such as raw and cooked, moistened and burned, fresh and decayed – constitute the conceptual foundation of culture. Levi-Strauss claims that concealed in the myth of rape and revenge is the story of the origin of cooked food and what distinguishes us from animals. We cook our food. We transform nature just as cooking transforms food. That is what sets us apart from the animal and makes us human.

While Levi-Strauss’s exercise was about myth, a new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham argues the Bororo myths may be scientifically true. It is all about energy.

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Consciousness: Much Ado About (Almost) Nothing?

Posted on June 1, 2014 by James Cross
mapgie

Eurasian Magpie – image from from Wikimedia Commons

Consciousness is like the weather. Since everybody experiences it everybody has an idea about it.

Philosophers take it as their unique prerogative since without it they would have no field. Neuroscientists want to make pictures of it and reduce it to chemical and charge. Physicists, who mostly think they are the rightful ones to explain almost anything (especially if it seems mysterious), try to explain it with information theory. New Agers talk about expanding it and political activists about raising it.

What if consciousness isn’t such a big deal after all? What if consciousness is like eyes or ears – just another part of what we are as  human but otherwise not so special after all?

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Posted in Brain size, Consciousness, Human Evolution | 15 Comments