Tag: society

Beeeeees

“One theory was that the queen was trapped in my car and the swarm were following,. But they couldn’t find the queen anywhere so I’ve no idea if that was right. Apparently bees can swarm at this time of the year and it is a very strong instinct for them to follow the queen. I still don’t really understand why because they couldn’t see the queen anywhere. Perhaps they just like the heat of my car. It is possible the queen had been attracted to something in the car – perhaps a sweet or food in the car. ” The swarm of around 20K had followed her and were sat around on the boot of the car.


The level of eusociality required for this is breathtaking.
2022-12-02: How eusociality may have evolved

Ant pupae—which are equivalent to the chrysalis stage of the butterfly—produce a milklike substance derived from molting fluid that is eaten by both adult ants and larvae. Typically, when insects molt, they secrete a fluid that’s simply resorbed by the animal when the molt is complete. But in ants, this nutrition-rich substance serves as a kind of “metabolic currency” within the colony and may have played a role in the ants’ evolutionary transition from a group of loosely cooperating individuals into a truly integrated superorganism

What is an adult, anyway?

“Adults lead anxious lives of quiet desperation. The classic post-World War II novels of adulthood by Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Philip Roth, and John Updike, among others, are tales of shattered dreams, unfulfilled ambitions, broken marriages, workplace alienation, and family estrangement.” He compares those to 19th-century bildungsromans, coming-of-age novels, in which people wanted to become adults. Maybe an ambivalence over whether someone feels like an adult is partially an ambivalence over whether they even want to be an adult.

Ultrasociety

another must read, Peter Turchin’s Ultrasociety, How 10 ka of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. This seems like an excellent complement to Ian Morris’ War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots, which I have not managed to get to read, in part because I want to hit Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve. Yet I’ve read a fair number of Peter’s books (see my 10 questions for him), so I’ll probably be moving this up the stack.

Peter is a serious thinker, and human social complexity and cooperation is an important, and unresolved topic (I am not as sanguine or flip on this David Sloan Wilson).

US Child Marriage

3499 children were married in New Jersey between 1995 and 2012. Most were age 16 or 17 and married with parental consent, but 178 were between ages 10 and 15, meaning a judge approved their marriages. 91% of the children were married to adults, often at ages or with age differences that could have triggered statutory-rape charges, not a marriage license. A judge in 2006 approved the marriage of a 10-year-old boy to an 18-year-old woman. A judge in 1996 allowed a 12-year-old girl to marry a 25-year-old man.

The sperminator

a very strange, but interesting account.

Ed Houben is Europe’s most virile man. And after years of donating sperm the “normal” way (sterile room, cup, cash), he and some women looking to get pregnant for free began cutting out the middlemen and getting it done as nature prefers it (sex!). Today, Houben has over 100 children—and Ed the Babymaker is in greater demand than ever. We imagine you have some questions

Planet scale collective action

1/7 of world population now uses fb daily, but are there more powerful collective actions? The largest-scope collective action currently clocks in at perhaps a couple of 100M today (we could probably get that many people to Like a specific kitten picture on Facebook by roping in the top 100 global music and sports celebrities). Beyond that, we really have no capabilities. We have c=0 beyond the x=200M point. The most complex (delivering an app-based button to an iPhone user) involves about 1.5M.

Egg board corruption

The American Egg Board’s members are appointed by the FDA, and it was they who funded a secret, deceptive smear campaign against startup Hampton Creek’s vegan egg replacement.

From paying food bloggers to post egg-heavy recipes to buying Google ads that returned results for eggs to people searching for Hampton Creek, to lobbying food experts, animal-rights activists and others to speak out in favor of the poultry industry, the AEB pulled out all the stops to undermine their competition.