Sep 20, 2019 05:17 AM
(This post was last modified: Sep 20, 2019 05:20 AM by C C.)
https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet...180973169/
EXCERPT (Dirk Schulze Makuch): Two scientific papers published this week got me thinking about the end of the world as we know it. The first, published in Science Advances, involves an asteroid impact half a billion years ago. The second paper, published in the journal Life, has to do with naked mole-rats and their latent potential for increased intelligence. At first glance these subjects seem to have nothing in common, but they do.
The Life paper resulted from a collaboration between Rochelle Buffenstein and myself after we met at a conference in Brazil last year. The article describes the astonishing abilities of naked mole-rats, mammals who live in underground burrows and engage in what amounts to sustainable farming practices. These intriguing creatures are long-lived and highly sanitary, and they show signs of intelligence, including playfulness and sociability. They live in burrows of about 100-150 individuals—similar to the size of early human villages in the Neolithic age. Their sociability is advanced; they are “eusocial,” meaning they have a social structure similar to bees, ants, and termites, and are ruled by a queen.
[...] If a biosphere-changing impact occurs again—one that eradicates most of our planet’s surface life—naked mole-rats might have the ability to take over from humans as the most advanced species on Earth, just as rat-size rodents took over from the dinosaurs after the Yucatan impact 65 million years ago. Of course, it’s challenging to say exactly what would happen to our planet after such a catastrophe, and even more speculative to predict the future course of evolution. But naked mole-rats have characteristics that would make them suitable to cope with such a calamity. Today they are strictly herbivorous, but if they became less picky and developed a taste for meat, dead or alive, then perhaps… (MORE - details)
EXCERPT (Dirk Schulze Makuch): Two scientific papers published this week got me thinking about the end of the world as we know it. The first, published in Science Advances, involves an asteroid impact half a billion years ago. The second paper, published in the journal Life, has to do with naked mole-rats and their latent potential for increased intelligence. At first glance these subjects seem to have nothing in common, but they do.
The Life paper resulted from a collaboration between Rochelle Buffenstein and myself after we met at a conference in Brazil last year. The article describes the astonishing abilities of naked mole-rats, mammals who live in underground burrows and engage in what amounts to sustainable farming practices. These intriguing creatures are long-lived and highly sanitary, and they show signs of intelligence, including playfulness and sociability. They live in burrows of about 100-150 individuals—similar to the size of early human villages in the Neolithic age. Their sociability is advanced; they are “eusocial,” meaning they have a social structure similar to bees, ants, and termites, and are ruled by a queen.
[...] If a biosphere-changing impact occurs again—one that eradicates most of our planet’s surface life—naked mole-rats might have the ability to take over from humans as the most advanced species on Earth, just as rat-size rodents took over from the dinosaurs after the Yucatan impact 65 million years ago. Of course, it’s challenging to say exactly what would happen to our planet after such a catastrophe, and even more speculative to predict the future course of evolution. But naked mole-rats have characteristics that would make them suitable to cope with such a calamity. Today they are strictly herbivorous, but if they became less picky and developed a taste for meat, dead or alive, then perhaps… (MORE - details)
