On Science and Religion

Study finds beliefs about all-knowing gods fosters co-operation

Feb 2016, phys.org

The research, an international collaboration among anthropologists and psychologists, looked at how religion affects humans' willingness to co-operate with those outside their social circle.

I'm a strong believer that religion serves the purpose of large-scale human population cooperation, and that despite how much people (like myself even) think it instead today acts as a thought-smothering default state in response to difficult decision-making tasks, it has been, in the early development of human civilization, totally necessary for that development to take place, and that science (a kind of anti-religion) would not exist today had it not been for religion, and that the two are part of the same continuum of cultural evolution. This piece here is a good start for a more well-articulated discussion on the matter.

Animals Are People Too

Everytime I see articles like this, I think to myself, not that maybe animals are just like people, but instead that the things we consider so special, and the things that 'make us human', are not so.

Social insights from whale chatter
BBC News, Sep 2015

[modified from article]
These great beasts live in very tight social networks, chatting amongst each other using a system of clicks like Morse code - patterns of three to 12 or 15 clicks that vary in rhythm and tempo

The researchers have shown how separate clans - perhaps numbering thousands of animals - will use their own particular subtle sequence of noises.

These vocalisations are not innate - they must be learned, and may indicate the whales are behaving in ways that at some level mirror the operation of human cultures.

"In one clan we call the 'regular clan', we heard regularly spaced clicks, but in another vocal clan that we call the 'plus-ones', the coda types they make have an extended pause at the end before the last click."
-PhD student Maurício Cantor