Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a woodcut. Germany, AD 1498.

For those not waiting for the world to end in a storm of fire and light it is easy to write off the believers as deluded, but Festinger was not so wide of the mark when he suggested that we adapt to even the most unlikely of contradictions using nothing more than our methods of everyday rationalization. The faithful could just as easily be those who stubbornly stand by disgraced politicians, failed ideologies, dishonest friends, or cheating spouses, even when reality highlights the clearest of inconsistencies. Armageddon is unlikely to arrive this weekend, but most of us have lived through it many times before.

Via Mind Hacks. Also interesting to see, via Kevin Drum, that the crackpot behind this particular rapture theory spent upwards of $100 million publicizing it, with the result that we’ve all had a good time making fun of it.

That said, in time the sun and stars will all burn out, and human life will be extinguished forever.

When our ancestors were covered in fur, muscles in their skin called “arrector pili” contracted when they were upset or cold, making their fur stand on end. When an angry or frightened dog barks at you, these are the muscles that raise its bristling hair. The same muscles puff up the feathers of birds and the fur of mammals on cold days to help keep them warm. Although we no longer have fur, we still have fur muscles just beneath our skin. They flex each time we are scared by a bristling dog or chilled by a wind, and in doing so give us goose bumps that make our thin hair stand uselessly on end.

Interestingly, it’s these kind of traits—ones that don’t really make sense or contribute to an organism’s current adaptive fitness—that make the most compelling arguments for the theory of natural selection. More examples in Dunn’s piece at the Smithsonian.

1. To avoid procrastinating on a task, focus on its details and use self-imposed deadlines.
2. To stick to a task, while actually carrying it out, now it is beneficial to keep the ultimate, abstract goal in mind.
3. When evaluating progress on a hard task, when the chance of failure is high, stay focused on the details of the task.
4. Once tasks are easier or the end is in sight, a more abstract, goal focus is once again the psychological approach to choose.

From PsyBlog.

The first air-breathing fish and amphibians extracted oxygen using gills when in the water and primitive lungs when on land—and to do so, they had to be able to close the glottis, or entryway to the lungs, when underwater. Importantly, the entryway (or glottis) to the lungs could be closed. When underwater, the animals pushed water past their gills while simultaneously pushing the glottis down. We descendants of these animals were left with vestiges of their history, including the hiccup. In hiccupping, we use ancient muscles to quickly close the glottis while sucking in (albeit air, not water). Hiccups no longer serve a function, but they persist without causing us harm—aside from frustration and occasional embarrassment. One of the reasons it is so difficult to stop hiccupping is that the entire process is controlled by a part of our brain that evolved long before consciousness, and so try as you might, you cannot think hiccups away.

In other words, hiccups are a QWERTY phenomenon, a reminder of the path dependence of evolution. See the full piece for more of evolution’s legacy in our daily lives.

Tangentially, I am still dumbfounded by the fact that law reviews are generally not edited by legal scholars, but by students without experience in law or scholarship—or editing, for that matter. Richard Posner articulated an authoritative takedown of the law review system here.

Natural selection in our world operates through inheritance but inheritance is not necessary for this this to hold. If creatures were simply randomly popping into existence and some [were] devoured by others and some not, then we would still observe a set of creatures that looked as if was designed not to be devoured.

Why?

Because all the others would have been devoured and thus rendered unobservable.

Now that’s just not quite right. There are three components to the theory of natural selection: replication, variation, and differential survival. These three elements don’t boil down any further; you have to have them all. The key to natural selection is that differential selectors act upon diverse populations so as to change the prevalence of certain traits in successive generations of those populations. It’s not simply that the survivors are observed and the devoured are not—the evolutionary analogue of the-victors-write-the-history—but that the population’s gene pool has actually adapted to a selection environment. And as this process plays out in complex ecosystems, the result is inevitably that populations bear so many minute and intricately adapted traits that they appear to have been purposely designed to do what they do.

One of the insights of Universal Darwinism is that, in a sense, they have been designed that way, but not purposely.

Apparently this will also make you unappetizing to spiders. Via Ed Yong.

Via Ed Yong, who writes:

In a lab at Yale University, a rat inhales. Every breath this rodent takes is a sign of important medical advances looming on the horizon, for only one of its lungs comes from the pair it was born with. The other was built in a laboratory.

This transplanted lung is the work of Thomas Petersen and a large team of US scientists. Their technique isn’t a way of growing a lung from scratch. Instead it takes an existing lung, strips away all the cells and blood vessels to leave behind a scaffold of connective tissues, and re-grows the missing cells in a vat. It’s the medical equivalent of stripping a house down to a frame of beams and struts and rebuilding the rest from scratch. The whole process only took a few days and when the reconstituted lung was transplanted into a rat, it worked.