In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: You are standing be...
Laos is saddled with the distinction of one superlative: it is the most heavily bombed country on earth. During the nine-year secret war against the Communists, during the Vietnam War, the U. S. dropp...
Hospice. If she is going to take it, she must move today. The doctors still don’t understand what is wrong with her, only that her self and her strength are ebbing away, and there seems no stopping it...
Teachers are all around to help you: with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear thei...
Watching a pig eat is the ultimate vicarious thrill. Seldom can you take such pleasure in another’s joy. Here is someone following his bliss. Pigs are quite literally made for eating—they were bred to...
Species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to anothe...
Just about every animal, Scott says—not just mammals and birds—can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.
There was a tank of special flounder about fifteen feet away from the octopus tank, he said. The fish were part of a study. But to the researchers’ dismay, the flounder started disappearing, one by on...
There is another important difference as well. Human eyes have three visual pigments, allowing us to see color. Octopuses have only one—which would make these masters of camouflage, commanding a glitt...
The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit with a 13-foot-long, predatory reptile snuggling in her lap, the tip of a tail coiled lovingly around one leg, provided dramatic evid...
The self, Blackmore writes, is just a fleeting impression that arises with each experience and fades away again. . . . There is no inner self, she argues, only multiple parallel processes that give ri...
The idea of universal consciousness suffuses both Western and Eastern thought and philosophy, from the collective unconscious of psychologist Carl Jung, to unified field theory, to the investigations...
The ability to ascribe thoughts to others, thoughts that might differ from our own, is a sophisticated cognitive skill, known as theory of mind.
The Buddha denied the existence of persisting selves. At the end of life, the self may dissolve into eternity like salt in the ocean. To some, this might seem distressing. But to lose the lonely self...
Octopuses and their relatives have what Woods Hole researcher Roger Hanlon calls electric skin. For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin’s s...
Most animals on this planet live in the ocean. And most of them are invertebrates.
I was warmly amused at the way each one tried to outdo the others in showing how her ape was the most human—trying to win the audience over to favor her animal. Orangutans, Biruté said, seemed the mos...
Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body...
A far worse mistake than misreading an animal's emotions is to assume the animal hasn't any emotions at all.
But Wilson was ahead of the curve. Long before the first octopus-enrichment handbook was published, many octopuses ago, he set out to create a safe toy worthy of an octopus’s intellect. Working at his...
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