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> substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose Doesn’t that apply to every single thing that exists?
The old toxicology proverb is: "The dose makes the poison"
ODE TO THE WOMBAT
As you pound along the track
Eyes wide open and ears pinned back
You may have noticed those queer square turds
And thought, if not expressed in words,
The pain of such defecation
Baffles the imagination.
But it ain't done to entertain us—
The wombat has an oblong anus.
So if at night you hear pained cries
Outside your tent, feel no surprise.
With eyes shut tight, teeth clenched with pain,
A wombat's gone and crapped again!
I climb a lot around the forests where I live in Switzerland. In one area there are a lot of yew trees - deadly to mammals. Just 30 grams of the needles will stop your heart. The bright red berry tastes very nice and isn't poisonous but the seed, if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes. German kings have used it to kill themselves after being defeated by R…
I don’t care if it is poison. Never gonna give yew up.
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It takes longer than people tend to think before kids learn to infer things well at all, and so being explicit about causal chains tends to make kids more likely to take advice. E.g "put your coat on" might not lead the child to think it is cold, and even a "put your coat on, it's cold outside" might still not lead the child to realise that means they'll freeze without the coat. A lot of tantrums would be avoided if…
Depends on the kid and their age. Me to my 3.5-year-old boy after evening bath (winter here right now): Your feet are going to get cold, don't you want to put on your slippers to keep them warm? Him: No! And if I put them on he'll take them off as soon as I'm not stopping him from doing so. For putting on warm enough jacket for school I try similar reasoning which has yet to work with any kind of consistency, still m…
Sometimes the old-world spook stories work.
>That just leaves one mystery: why wombats evolved cubic poop in the first place. Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches. Whenever I read such snippets from biology, I wonder how natural selection pressure can lead to such specific outcomes. Wombats that mark their territory better over centur…
As far as evolution in general, the big picture is more about "punctuated equilibrium" than incremental change. Individual genetic changes from parents to child are typically just benign and so accumulate in any inter-breeding population without much effect. Once in a while the environment may shift in some fairly major way (easier for environment to change quickly than genetics) and then an accumulation of previously benign changes may suddenly become collectively impactful in a positive or negative way.
I don't see any reason to assume that square poop was ever selected for - maybe it's just a harmless consequence of some genetic change that was impactful in another way. Speculating that square Wombat poop evolved to not fall off rocks is a "just so story" that raises more questions than it answers.
>That just leaves one mystery: why wombats evolved cubic poop in the first place. Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches. Whenever I read such snippets from biology, I wonder how natural selection pressure can lead to such specific outcomes. Wombats that mark their territory better over centur…
Many observations are unexplained, and not just in biology. The difference between believers and atheists is that atheists stop there: it is unexplained, at least for now, that's how things are. Believers will instead attribute it to god, or some other form of higher power. In the end, it just shifts the problem, at some point you will have to admit that some things just are and there is no explanation, for atheists, these are the things themselves, for believers, it is god who made the things.
That's why being a believer or being an atheist doesn't have much to do with being a biologist. It is just a philosophical view of how you deal with the unknown and the unknowable. The only thing is that the religious dogma should not get in the way of proper science. That life is so beautiful that god must be behind it (are we still talking about poop cubes?) shouldn't prevent biologists from searching for an evolutionary explanation.
Also, evolution is mostly random, not everything needs natural selection, sometimes, things happen for no good reason. Maybe a particularly prolific male in a particularly successful colony happened to have a square poop mutation or something.
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I hear Yew is uniquely poisonous to horses (I mean, they are especially susceptible to it)
The more I learn about horses the more they seem like a creature that’s continually trying to die - and humans get to try and stop them succeeding.
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Depends on the kid and their age. Me to my 3.5-year-old boy after evening bath (winter here right now): Your feet are going to get cold, don't you want to put on your slippers to keep them warm? Him: No! And if I put them on he'll take them off as soon as I'm not stopping him from doing so. For putting on warm enough jacket for school I try similar reasoning which has yet to work with any kind of consistency, still m…
"If you don't put on your slippers, your toes will fall off and then you won't be able to walk like everybody else!" Sometimes the old-world spook stories work.
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even cyanide isn't cartoonish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6hOVhQQ9hI substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose
> substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose Doesn’t that apply to every single thing that exists?