Common wisdom might say, the truth is the the truth, facts are facts, and storytelling is storytelling. Yet, when we look again, we see something that we didn’t before, glimmers of new ideas spring from stone, fiction shifts to fact and facts shift to fiction. So much of who we are and how we see the world is on how we look at things. Yet, curiosity, empathy, ambition and countless other emotions drive us through the day, changing the perspective with which we view the world.
The Newest Musings
The Humanity of Animals
While there are many who doubt that humans evolved from the animal kingdom, we do share many physical traits of animals. Or we could look at it from the other way around: animals share human traits. This is only beginning to be appreciated, especially for such abstractions as the ability to think, to imagine, to be curious, and even to collect what interests them, writes Craig Foster, a South African documentary filmmaker and naturalist, in a New York Times Opinion. In his piece, Foster describes how an octopus reached out and stole his camera while he was scuba diving. Even more remarkable—the octopus turned the camera around and started photographing Craig and his diving partner! Foster also mentions how a few years earlier an octopus stole his wife’s wedding ring off her finger. He subsequently found that octopus dens bear witness to their love of shiny objects as he found dens that had earrings, bracelets, spark plugs, sunglasses, and even a revolving cylinder that the octopus spun around with its suckers! It’s not so hard to imagine we may soon see octopus, or another species, playing underwater or terrestial video games! We [...]
