Missouri Fossils from the Ordovician Period

I'm so glad I joined a Missouri fossil hunting group! A few weeks ago, we took a field trip to a highway crosscut near House Springs, Missouri, where we found lots of fossils from the Ordovician Period (400-450 million years ago). Finding real fossils really brings home our humble place in the much much larger scheme of things. On these photos, you'll see lots of brachiopods (they look like sea shells), crinoids (they look like plant stalks, but they were animals), bryozoans & coral.

These animals existed twice as long ago as the earliest dinosaurs. Back then, Missouri was almost entirely covered by ocean. These fossil creatures lived LONG before the existence of Pangea, the time (200-300 MYA) when the continent we now know as North America was contiguous with Africa, South America, and Europe all existed as a single continent. During the Ordivician, most of the world's land was collected in the southern hemisphere as a supercontinent scientists now refer to as Gondwana. Most creatures from this era were not fossilized, but occasionally they were suddenly covered by a mud slide under the ocean, preserving the fossils. In selected highway crosscuts, these fossils can be found.

Hint: click on the photos and then enlarge them to see a lot more detail.

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The Affect of Overall Wealth and Egalitarianism on Sex Based Differences

Where would you expect to find sex based differences in career choice most diminished? If you guessed in countries with more wealth and egalitarian culture, you would be wrong. David Geary discusses and interprets the data in his article, "The Nurture of Evolved Sex Differences: Why favorable conditions produce larger sex differences." In wealthy countries like Norway, increased numbers of women pour into fields that are "people oriented" rather than "thing oriented." Consider, first, this data:

As reviewed by Schmitt and colleagues [33], sex differences in many aspects of personality, self-esteem, and cognitive and psychological functioning are larger in WEIRD, gender equal countries. For instance, women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men and men are more Machiavellian than women, on average. These differences are larger in more egalitarian countries. One potential reason is that religious prohibitions and proscriptions increase social cooperation and decrease self-serving behaviors in men and this in turn reduces the sex differences in these areas. The release of these prohibitions enables fuller expression of underlying differences; in this case, a decrease in men’s agreeableness and an increase in their use of Machiavellian social strategies [34].

Occupational segregation also increases in WEIRD, gender equal countries, presumably due to underlying differences in preferences for working with and helping people as contrasted with working with things [35]. Girls’ and women’s greater interest in other people and relationships follows from their greater investment in children and their need to develop BFF (best friends forever) relationships that serve as a source of social and emotional support. Boys’ and men’s greater interest in things likely follows from an evolutionary history of tool making, most of which is done by men.

[More . . . ]

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The Dangers of Living in an Impoverished Ever-Malleable Present

My dog lives in the eternal present. It's OK for dogs to do so, but not OK for people. People need a sense of history to avoid the mistakes of the past.  People need a foundation of hard-earned knowledge on which to make sense of the future or else they will not ever accomplish great things.  Without a solid foundation of knowledge based on history, people will live like dogs.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

George Orwell - 1984

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Another Science Website Falls Over the Cliff by Rejecting “the Sex Binary”

This time it's a website called The Scientist.

The thesis of this article is the equivalent of saying that "because clownfish," a human animal can change its biological sex from male to female (or female to male) and to any of many unspecified "sexes" between. The article ends by saying "If you don't publicly proclaim that [the sun revolves around the earth] or [water boils at 150 degrees F] or [tectonic plates are made of cheese], you are a bigot.

I keep thinking back to the religious fundamentalists who developed numerous unhinged theological theories ("tennis without a net") because they were not willing to face the fact that  we are human animals (and see here). The false idea that we are "blank slates" has dominated large swaths of academia for years, especially in departments of education and social work. I believe this false belief has now enabled modern gender ideology.

A much more fruitful approach to understanding human complexity would be to admit that one's body is what it is. In a biological male, for instance, every one of the trillions of cells contains an XY (in the female sex, an XX). Here is a straight-forward explanation for why there are two (and only two) sexes.  An entirely separate issue from the biology is how a human animal expresses himself (or herself).

I have no problem with any human adult choosing how to express themself, choosing how to use their body, who to spend time with, how to use or change one's physical appearance or how to involve anyone else in these activities, assuming everyone consents. What I'm against is the increasingly popular notion, reinforced by formerly respectable "science" publications, that we can pretend that our underlying biology is other than what it is. Nature doesn't care about what we think. It is what it is. What anyone chooses to do with their primate body is totally up to them. But let's not conflate what kind of biological body one has with how one chooses to change its appearance or use it.

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