Language, Sentience

There's a very fascinating (to me) species of monkey called the gelada. These Ethiopian monkeys (a relative of the baboon) first came to my attention because they have a key difference from other primate species. In most apes and monkeys a female's estrus state is indicated by a swelling and reddening of the buttocks.

For the gelada this is a problem. Geladas eat mostly grass, and they graze sitting down...meaning the female's buttocks are hidden in the grass all the time. So, instead, they changed signals to one the males could still see - a swelling and reddening of the breasts. Human females are either lying down, sitting, or standing - the buttocks don't make a great signal for us either...and this is probably why us girls have such splendid teats. As we evolved silent estrus the swelling of the breasts would have become a permanent sexual characteristic. So, the gelada drew my attention as, well, why we evolved the need for bras.

But now the gelada is in the news again. A researcher named Thore Bergman (University of Michigan) was studying geladas and noticed something creepy about their vocalizations. He kept thinking they were talking. It turns out that geladas use a pattern of vocalization and lip-smacking - that is very similar in frequency to human speech.

Could we have been missing something big here? Could it be that this relative of the baboon has, well, language? If so it would be a big discovery just for that - but it would also prove something else. It's long been the theory that language evolved from hunting signals.

Geladas don't hunt. Geladas are not only herbivores, but grazers. This clearly indicates that a sentient species could evolve from a grazing animal, something science fiction writers have played with (including me, with the ape-like, herbivorous tyrar - I swear, I wasn't consciously thinking of geladas).

Either way, I'm going to add the gelada to the list of potentially sentient or borderline sentient species on this planet - and very close to the top.

Good and Bad

For the good - please go check out the Musa blog where I'm talking about Transpecial and why I write speculative fiction. Oh, and there's a link to an excerpt there too.

Unfortunately, I'm somewhat distracted from it all right now. As any regular reader knows, I'm a dual citizen - United States and United Kingdom.

Today, my birth country lost one of the most important political figures of the 20th century - former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. She was Ronald Reagan's "comrade-in-arms" and close friend, and represents the sane conservatives so hard to find this day. (Until, that is, she tried to implement a poll tax, which is the British political equivalent of invading Russia).

I don't agree with everything she did. I certainly didn't like her - not many people did. Her "Iron Lady" nickname was given to her by Soviet journalists. My dad once called her "The Iron Fist...in the Iron Glove" - and he, a solid Tory, did like her.

She was not a feminist...and, in fact, has also been known as the female political leader who did the least for other women. At the same time, there is an entire generation of young Brits to whom her face was in the dictionary next to "person in charge" - and I suspect even in silence she did a lot for women's rights simply by being who she was. Including being notorious for hitting people with her handbag. The IRA gave her the great honor of trying to kill her (always a compliment, if you think about it) in the Brighton bombing.

After her fall from grace (poll tax!) she moved to a different political arena, spending some years working in Brussels with the EU. She was granted a barony by the crown, but vanished from the public eye a decade or so ago amidst rumors of ill health.

Today she suffered a massive stroke and passed. I like to think she's somewhere in the afterlife sipping tea with her good friend Reagan...and complaining about what the theocrazies have done to the conservative movement.

Updates!

Did a fair bit of work on the still not formally titled RPG book today. Also got some short stories out there over the last couple of weeks.

I'm going to be hanging out at Awesome Con DC the weekend of April 20 and 21, not as an official guest, but I will be there.

More Progress...

...no, not on my writing, although you'll see what I've been working on ahead of time soon enough and I did start another short story today.

Progress on 3D printing and medicine. Somebody has managed to 3D print a network of small droplets that can flex like muscle or respond to neurons. It's not artificial tissue per se - but it can theoretically do the same thing.

This could be used, for example, to add muscle to prosthetics that responds much more like the real thing. They might be able to come up with a version that could replace a damaged liver. It also has properties potentially useful for drug delivery.

At the rate things are going we should seriously consider giving the Nobel Prize for Medicine to the inventors of the original 3D printer. Seriously.

Genetics, Extinction, Evolution

There's been a lot of talk about de-extinction lately. There's one guy in Russia who wants a herd of mammoths. Some people would like to bring back the passenger pigeon.

The obvious question is - should we?

Elephants are rare enough to make one question how ethical it would be to use a band of female elephants to produce mammoth calves...and really, would you get a mammoth or a furry elephant? We can restore the genes, but not the culture, and pachyderms are intelligent enough to have culture.

And for everyone who wants the passenger pigeons back... (There's a great short story on precisely this subject in the July 1993 Analog - "Johnny Birdseed" by the awesome Stanley Schmidt).

And, of course, what's next?

If we can recreate mammoths, passenger pigeons, the dodo...then the next step is to make entirely new species. In science fiction, we sometimes predict the creation of entirely new human species. Lois McMaster Bujold's Quaddies - humans adapted to free fall and with hands instead of feet - come immediately to mind (she also created genetically engineered hermaphrodites and a society that practices both genetic engineering and selective breeding to "improve" humanity). So do Alastair Reynolds' even more extreme Denizens - from human stock, but anaerobic and capable of surviving in the oceans of Europa. The list goes on.

Could we create a new humanity? Should we? Is it playing god, or is it the ultimate destiny of any truly intelligent, technological race to take charge of and steer our own evolution? Can our wisdom catch up to our technology?

Do we, even, have a responsibility to restore those species we ourselves have destroyed?

The beat?

This adorable sea lion has a really good sense of rhythm.

What amuses me is that they somehow think only animals with "vocal mimicry" can have a sense of rhythm.

Anyone who's ever tried their hand at riding to music knows horses have a keen sense of beat, some better than others. Dogs will often join in if their human packmates start singing. I think all "higher" animals appreciate music.

It's just that birds and humans are the best at making it.

Gates to Hell...

Sometimes stories get exaggerated.

Sometimes, they turn out to be true. A team of archaeologists has found an ancient pilgrimage site...a cave with vapors so foul that it was said if you tossed a sparrow in it would drop dead instantly.

They had to be careful - the cave, site of a hot spring, still produces enough carbon dioxide to kill birds. The stories were apparently true.

A lot of the time we dismiss myths as not possible, but a surprising number of them carry within them a strong kernel of truth.