Eighth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

It's one thing if mankind is hunted to extinction by ChatGPT, but I really do object to being executed by Bing.

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/2511.html?thread=3169743#cmt3169743 )

Welcome back! Fandom chat, misc creativity, internet weirdness, books, films, anything! Tell meme about it so we can get to the next post title!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

The next section starts with a hypothetical William Henry Hudson sitting in a hypothetical rowboat in the Cretaceous period, getting hypothetically vaporized by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Not sure why this was necessary, but okay.

In any case, this all serves as a backdrop to talk about natural history - or really, a lack of natural history, because it turns out we don't know shit. Sometimes I forget how much of what we consider basic knowledge today is still new. The mismatch between the flora and fauna of North and South America baffled Darwin, but now we know that's the result of plate tectonics. In elementary school, I learned that a meteor killed the dinosaurs, but that hypothesis was only presented in 1980 and officially accepted in 2010. Only a few years ago, scientists using genetic sequencing discovered that falcons are actually more closely related to parrots than to other birds of prey.

Here we return again to the scene of the crime: the murder of G7 (a caracara) by an unknown assailant (most likely a peregrine falcon). Both are descendants of some shared common ancestor, but while the ancestors of the peregrine falcon left South America and and found a niche as fast hunters with big eyes, the caracara stuck around as cheeky social learners. Maybe they filled the niche that would've otherwise been occupied by crows, which never found a foothold in South America.

> Penguins, for example, are definitely social, but a penguin researcher once told me, not unkindly, that the only thing dumber than a penguin is a rock.

This is extremely uncalled for penguin slander, but also kind of relatable. The only thing dumber than me is a TRA.

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

as a pengwin who learned how to type, this is very insulting! *waddle waddle*
*falls over*

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

> In elementary school, I learned that a meteor killed the dinosaurs, but that hypothesis was only presented in 1980 and officially accepted in 2010.

I'd noticed that shift without noticing it, iyswim. I remember being taught that what killed the dinosaurs was a mystery, but that the meteor was the most popular guess. More recently, I read a pop sci book that treated it as fact, going into detail about the specific crater in Mexico left by the impact. "I guess they decided, then? Or is this book just strident because it's pop sci?" A smarter person than I am would have looked into it; I just left it as an unknown, to join the huge rolling cloud of unknowns.

(Reading this over, "what killed the dinosaurs was a mystery" sounds like they had the unfortunate bad luck of being caught up in a Poirot.)

> the only thing dumber than a penguin is a rock.

What induced this opinion of them?

Re: Books - A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg

[(Anonymous)]

> Penguins perform stunning feats of navigation and endurance but rarely have to solve novel problems: their lives consist of chasing their favorite prey, following other penguins around, avoiding scary aquatic predators, and basking in the sun on the islands where they breed.

It's a bit of a one-off comment - the author brings up a study where chimangos who were allowed to observe another chimango solving a puzzle for food would solve that puzzle far more quickly and easily than those who aren't. But social learning is a very specific generalist trait that doesn't just arise naturally from being a social animal; penguins are given as an example of social animals where their clearly-defined ecological niche simply doesn't require them to adapt on the fly (ha!) like parrots or humans do. They're not really dumb, but they're dumb if you apply human standards to them.