Morning light. You had breakfast, read the
paper and are enjoying the crisp Spring morning with a bounty of bright green
leaves of trees and foliage. – Amorella
0800
hours. It is a joy to see the dogwood and Hawthorns in bright white flowers
contrasting the green. We are not surrounded by trees but are so by at least
half. We have an odd shaped lot in front by nobody can tell because we
neighbors blend our yards rather than make them distinctly individual.
After noon. You did your forty minutes of
exercises after you checked you recent blood tests for Dr. B and found you A1c
is down to 6.6. The rest of the tests appear to be in the normal range. –
Amorella
1242
hours. I suppose we will go to lunch within the hour and Carol will want to hit
the community center for laps. We have errands to do.
Orndorff you keep debating wearing that CIA
hat. Last week you wore it to Smashburgers because you were angry with yourself
for not wearing it to Smashburgers. What does that tell you? – Amorella
1245
hours. I see men with baseball styled caps all the time, most have something on
the front but I don’t pay any attention and I figure no one is going to pay any
attention to any hat I wear so why not wear it. I could wear my old red
Otterbein hat too but it looks old and probably is. To your question, what does
this behavior tell me, it tells me – I don’t know what it tells me.
You are arrogant and stubborn and not fully
civilized. You care and don’t give a damn at the same time. Bud bought you the
hat and you feel entitled to wear it. In fact you were thinking of how you
probably could represent the modern CIA (as an icon) – old, overweight,
balding, arrogant and stubborn and not as bright as you would hope you could be
at one time. Why the brightness? Just to show people you are not as stupid as
your parents once thought you were. How’s that, boy? – Amorella
1259
hours. That’s pretty specific, Amorella.
What else? – Amorella
1301
hours. It is more correct than I would like it to be.
Post. – Amorella
1302
hours. I would like to come up with a rebuttal but I cannot.
Your honesty shields you in glass, my man. –
Amorella
1305
hours. This comment of yours is embarrassing.
You wanted to write, “I am not honest,” but
you cannot bring yourself to do it. – Amorella
1307
hours. Amorella, I just have to accept myself as I am and let it go.
Good. - Amorella
You
had lunch at Chipotle/Panera, stopped at the bank and are waiting for Carol at
Kroger’s for cat food that is on sale. You compromised and wore your black
beret, but forgot to change and are wearing shorts. – Amorella
I509
hours. I am too old to be wearing shorts in public at least out to eat. I
didn’t think about it until Norm, a retired Kroger butcher who works at Panera
part time, said something.
What do you think about butchers, orndorff?
– Amorella
1513
hours. My first experience with butchers was when I was sixteen and worked the
produce department at Albers (food chain) near Linden in 1958. They were tough
union fellows and I kept my distance. I somehow associated them with the
Teamsters, another group I would just as soon have avoided in those days. The
next year I worked at Hamilton’s an independent grocery in Westerville. One
brother ran the store and the other was the butcher. They were both kind and
pleasant people.
You spent the last hour leisurely reading
the June issues of Automobile and Motor Trend. The most
interesting article was in Automobile and was about the eventual iCar by
Apple Motors. The best line was in Motor Trend: ‘If you can afford a
Bentley SUV your boat is too big to tow.’ – Amorella
1711
hours. I have only one more issue of Automobile before the subscription ends. The
whole idea was to bone up on cars before buying one a year and a half ago. It
was a cheap subscription for two years. Motor Trend, on the other hand
was cheap for three years so I have another year to go. No need for further
research. If we do buy another to replace the 2005 Accord one of these days, I
am up to date. If not, then there will be no more new cars for us. I can live
with that. Gas prices are way down compared to what they were and even though
we are only getting 20 mpg in town on the Honda that’s okay. It was a pretty
Sunday afternoon yesterday so we took out the Avalon. Today we are back to old
reliable. The new car bug has gone dormant. We have a new car, well, a newer
car. We love our 2013 Toyota Avalon Limited Hybrid. We have never had a more
comfortable car to drive; and the most fun, the red 1985 VW.GTI. The second
most fun (owner) car to drive was my dark green 1965 VW Beetle.
Is that it? You are still in a car mode. –
Amorella
1729
hours. No, I’ have no more specific thoughts on cars.
What if your fictional brother, Robert, was
thinking on a new car? What would he be thinking about? – Amorella
1733
hours. I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.
Post. - Amorella
1831 hours. I was wondering on evolution and found a good
article on BBC.
** **
BBC - Earth: “Why Would an Animal Lose its Brain”
Some extremely
simple animals may have got rid of their brains because they simply had no need
for one. And this could have been key to their success
•
Presented by
•
Melissa Hogenboom
Sponges don't ponder about the meaning or origin of life. But in
some ways they are better at the whole life thing than we are. They have lived
for millions more years, surviving on the sea floor by taking in nutrients
through their porous bodies.
To our eyes, they look almost laughably simple. They have no
brain, and indeed no nerve cells. But they get along just fine without either.
Sponges'
brainlessness might even be a positive thing, something that evolution has
favoured. Some scientists now believe that they once had a brain, or at least
something much like it, but then got rid of it. And they are not the only ones.
To us the brain seems like a necessity, but it may be that some animals
actually do better without them.
A brain is what you get when many nerve cells, known as neurons,
cluster together into one big lump. Many organisms do not have true brains, but
rather a "nerve net" of neurons scattered through their bodies.
However, sponges
do not even have that.
The origin of our
brain starts almost four
billion years ago, when life first sprang into being. Our
earliest ancestors were single-celled organisms, and it would be another few
billion years later before more complex organisms appeared. It's not clear
whether they had any nerve cells.
The oldest known fossil with a complex brain is about 520 million years old.
This was a time when life became much more abundant and diverse, often referred
to as the Cambrian explosion.
Discovered in China, the animal looked like a woodlouse with
claws. It seems to have had an elaborate brain-like structure consisting of a
fore-, mid- and hind-brain, all of which had specialised neural circuits.
This suggests that
complex brains were in place as early as 520 million years ago. But they may
not have stayed.
In their ancient evolutionary past, sea sponges did have
neurons, according to Frank Hirth
of Kings College London in the UK. He says the sponges have experienced
"evolved loss" of these structures, an argument he laid out in a paper in the journal Brain,
Behaviour and Evolution in 2010.
There is plenty of precedent for this. Many species have lost
seemingly vital organs. For instance, crustaceans
living in dark caves are losing their eyes.
The key piece of
evidence that sponges have lost their brains comes from phylogenetics: the
attempt to figure out how all the different animal groups are related to each
other. Researchers have drawn up a "tree of life", just like a family
tree, showing the relationships.
Sponges were long thought to be the sister group to all other
living animals, having branched off early on. This would imply that, of all the
living animals, sponges are the most similar to the ancestral animals.
This was thrown into disarray by research published in the journal Nature
in 2008.
Researchers analysed snippets of genes from many organisms,
including a second group of marine animals called comb jellies or sea
gooseberries. These have now taken the sponges' place as the sister group to
all other animals, and our best representation of the ancestral animals.
The strange thing
is that comb jellies have an intricate nervous system. This means that their
ancestors, which must also have been the ancestor of sponges, probably did too.
If that's true, somewhere along the way sponges lost their nerves.
There is some genetic evidence to support that. Sponges have
many of the genes needed to build a nervous system, says Joseph Ryan
of the University of Florida in St. Augustine. But they do not do so.
Getting rid of your brain sounds like a bad idea. So why would
sponges ditch theirs?
First of all, the brain eats up an enormous amount of energy. In
humans, up to 20% of our
energy is spent feeding our brain.
Meanwhile sponges are clearly masters at what they do: filtering
water and picking out only the useful, nutritious particles. Adding a nervous
system might not help with that.
"If you are
sitting on the sea bed and just filtering food that comes along, you don't need
a brain," says Hirth. "It would be a waste of energy and you wouldn't
be able to maintain this energy demand."
"For a long time we thought that sponges are primitively
simple, that they never had a nervous system at all," says Ryan. "It
may take a while to see that [idea] shifting."
Sponges may not be the only creatures that have lost, or at
least simplified, their nervous systems. Some parasites, such as fluke worms
that have only very basic neural cells, also seem to have lost complexity
compared to close relatives, says Hirth. "One would assume that their
parasitic lifestyle does not require a complex brain."
Another group called the placozoa, simple
animals that are close relatives of sponges, have also lost their nervous
systems according to Ryan and Hirth.
Meanwhile, sea squirts
simplify their brains during their lifetimes. The larvae have well-developed
brains, but once they settle on the sea ground and metamorphose into adults,
these structures are reduced.
Still, not everyone
believes that these animals have lost their neurons and brains.
Neuroscientist Leonid Moroz,
who is also at the University of Florida in St. Augustine, believes that
sponges never had neurons to start with.
They simply do not need any, he says, and nor did their ancestors.
"We have 500 million years of the same ecology, the same filtering
behaviour, with limited types of movement."
Neither the sponges nor the placozoa have any genes that Moroz
would categorise as neuronal. And there are no fossils to indicate they ever
had neurons, he points out.
The question then
becomes how the comb jelly could have evolved such an intricate nervous system
when their ancestors, and the ancestors of sponges, did not have one.
The answer, Moroz believes, is that the brain evolved more than
once.
When the
comb jelly genome was fully sequenced in 2013, researchers found
that genetically they are unique. Moroz calls them "aliens".
"They have a completely different molecular make-up from any other animal
on our planet," he says.
Yet somehow, they
had also created a nervous system. "Nature shows us that there is more
than one way to make neurons," says Moroz. "We can design neurons
using completely different principles. Nature is much more innovative than we
think."
There is precedent for organs evolving more than once. Some
organs, such as eyes, are known to have evolved many times over in different
species. For instance, the eyes of octopuses are quite different from ours.
This shows, says Moroz, that it's clearly possible to make a complex structure
more than once.
This argument came to a head at a meeting at the Royal Society in London, UK in March 2015.
Moroz and Hirth presented their differing viewpoints, each backed up by
published research. Each remains adamant that they are correct.
Right now we don't
know either way, says Angelika Stollewerk of Queen Mary University of London in the
UK. With the evidence we have, either story is possible: maybe the nervous
system has evolved twice, or maybe it was reduced in sponges.
It won't be easy to settle this disagreement. Quite possibly it
will take high-quality fossils of early sponges and comb jellies to settle
whether or not their ancestors had brains.
Either way, the tale of the sponges' brains is a reminder that
one of the standard myths about evolution is wrong.
Sponges are a case
in point. They have survived, without a thought or even a brain to think with,
for hundreds of millions of years. They have never needed to get any more
complicated, and intelligence wouldn't have helped them.*
Selected and edited
from http://www.bbcDOTcom/earth/story/20150424-animals-that-lost-their-brains
** **
2120
hours. * I underlined for a reminder that evolution does not always go forward.
This is something I had not realized. Not only could humans theoretically (if
this is correct) stay as they are, they could possibly regress though I find
this quite improbable. If I were to work ‘evolution’ into the story [GMG] then I
would have to bring up the other side of the argument. Maybe I should just
leave well enough alone.
Who is the ‘well enough’ you are speaking
of, boy. – Amorella
2120
hours. Your story concepts, Amorella. Why do I think to change or to add to or to delete
when I don’t know consciously what I am doing in terms of 'creating' the story. This is still an experiment in writing after all and always has been since its original inception.
You are researching. You are the editor-in-chief.
You are the human being. Your concepts of me range from your pure imagination to
angelic-like and possibly even angelic since you have no idea what an angel
really is. – Amorella
2128
hours. You are so blunt, and it seems even more so because I cannot honestly
deny what you ‘say’.
You one time hoped and wished you could
finish your life here as an honest man. Imaginary or not, I am here to help you
do that where it counts most in heartansoulanmind. Post. – Amorella
2131
hours. I accept and respect this, Amorella. Thank you. I can stand up and see and
accept who and what I am. – rho
Imaginary or not, what else would you expect
a real Angel to do in your circumstance, actually in any human’s circumstance? –
Amorella
2135
hours. I would expect no less and wish for no more.
Here we are then, young man. Post. -
Amorella
