Love Blindness, Three Interesting Word Facts, and Everyday Delusions of Grandeur
The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Linkfest for October 2024
Welcome to the latest N3 Newsletter Linkfest: a collection of links to papers and articles that grabbed my attention during the last few weeks. On the menu this time...
Love blindness in fruit flies
The nature and nurture of depression, intelligence, and belief in free will
The dangers of psychiatric labels
Two new findings on mate preferences
Four new findings on sex differences
…plus regular features like Healthy Living and Woke Watch
You can access the complete collection of Linkfests here. Hope you enjoy the post!
Animal Behavior
When male fruit flies are courting females and close to mating, they become so fixated on the task at hand that they often fail to spot approaching predators. The phenomenon is known as love blindness. As J. Daniel Sawyer noted on Twitter/X, the statement is still true if you remove the term “fruit flies”… [Link.]
If you want to give yourself nightmares, check out this recent paper in Current Biology. The paper explores how a parasitic worm evolved to find its way into a praying mantis, take control of it, then force it to drown itself. Why would it do such a dastardly thing? The reason is that the worm can only reproduce in water, and it needs the mantis to take it to some. The mantis’s suicidal behavior is a good example of what Richard Dawkins calls an extended phenotype: a trait that evolved to help spread the genes giving rise to it, but which is found outside the body that carries those genes. The suicidal behavior is found in the mantis, but is an adaptation - an extended phenotype - of the parasite. [Link.]
Three Interesting Facts About Words
Here’s an interesting observation I spotted on Reddit: “There’s a word in English to indicate people who lost parents (orphan), and those who lost a spouse (widow), but none for those who’ve lost children.” [Link.]
According to the Meriam Webster dictionary’s Twitter/X account, an eye rhyme is a pair of words that look like they should rhyme based on their spelling, but don’t. Examples include laughter and daughter, wind and bind, cove and dove, come and home, and gone and alone. [Link.]
Also according to the Meriam Webster dictionary’s Twitter/X account, “Your lips only touch for four letters of the alphabet.” [Link.]
Effectively Altruistic
Imagine how you’d feel if you were walking by a river, spotted a kid drowning, and jumped in and saved the kid’s life. You’d feel amazing - and rightfully so; you’d be a hero. Well, the good news is that, in effect, you can do this every few years, simply by donating to the most effective charities. It really matters, though, which charities you donate to! [Link.]
Random Graph of the Month
The graph below shows how vastly more dangerous motorbikes are than all other travel options. As Christopher Ingraham noted in the Washington Post, “A motorcyclist who traveled 15 miles every day for a year had an astonishing 1 in 860 chance of dying. A person who took a 500 mile flight every day for a year would have a fatality risk of 1 in 85,000.” [Link.]
Everyday Delusions of Grandeur: Three Fascinating Findings
People in the lowest IQ quartile overestimate their IQ; people in the highest IQ quartile underestimate theirs. (SEI = self-estimated intelligence.) [Link.]
