The top result is already out. Obviously the John Oliver fans got their wish and Pūteketeke won. Thousands of them had to be disqualified for cheating, though.

We are all waiting now to see who is in second. Fingers crossed for the Fairy Tern, New Zealand’s most endangered bird!

Another way of looking at it is bottle openers look remarkably similar to beetle genitalia.

I think the beetles were here first.

That would make sense. The cats in my life have always seemed super expressive to me but I was infatuated with our family cat pretty much from birth.

I knew it!! When I was a kid I was told cats don’t have facial expressions but they so do!

Thanks so much, I understand the hypothesis now!!

And that article does show how it could map onto humans. For some reason I had been under the impression that early hominids did not necessarily have the females-as-strangers setup.

It’s interesting to compare with elephants, who are matriarchal. The “Alice” of an asian elephant herd will often stop having kids (though, she biologically still can) so her daughters can have some, even though unlike Charlotte, her daughters are related to her so theoreticly it’s more of a Bob/Daniel situation.

I feel like the stupidest person in the world because I still don’t see the difference between Bob and Alice and now I also don’t understand this part

If Daniel has a child, Bob won’t have a new child, to avoid starving his grandchild.

How does Bob do this? Why doesn’t he just menopause too? If menopause ensures more descendant survival wouldn’t they both do it?

Why doesn’t Alice just die?

The troupe still have to find enough food for her, how is that an evolutionary advantage to keep a non breeding member around?

If something happens to Charlotte now the troupe cannot reproduce unless they go out and find a new female, but if something happens to Daniel then Bob can still reproduce with Charlotte. What is the advantage in that asymetry?

Edit: I was puzzling over the Charlotte factor. Is it more that somewhere along the line the Charlottes of this world were killing the non-menopausal Alices? Because that kind of would make sense.

Thank you so much for taking the time to try to explain it by the way. If you don’t feel like answering my latest round of questions that’s okay!

I’m old enough that a lot of things that were going to take a long time have come to pass, so I feel confident this will come.

AI and genetics are both moving fairly fast, and insurance is about numbers and probabilities.

But isn’t old male and old female POV the same?

For both of them the new babies are biological grandchildren. So why would only one of them want to stop producing more? Why is there not a male menopause?

What am I missing here?

I’m waiting for the part where the US insurance companies are discovered using that data en mass to increase premiums and deny coverage.

That’s going to be my “I told you so”.

And elephants.

Kind of weird though that the males don’t feel the same grandchild pressures.

We are “social animals” though. It’s normal for the social animals to attempt to regulate what each other does and how they treat others in the group.

You see this in apes, elephants, whales, etc.

I think Medecines Sans Frontiers is good?

Never has the “Just a moment…” snippet view been more apropos.

Yes, it’s a massive level of cringe.

Gmail is convenient, but if it’s about to be filled with 😊 and 👍 then I’ve got to stop using it for any serious communication.

I agree, it is technically true. Sorry if I sounded too nitpicking, I’ve just come back from a week with no internet access /news so for a moment I thought you were talking about all of them doing it during the events of the last few days!

Germany, France and Spain also have killed and kidnapped citizens.

You may wish to rephrase that…

3-year-old children don’t work in organisations. This research is on babies and very small children, who are still undergoing brain development.

Poverty is far from the only stressful thing in the world, I agree.

Sorry, the title I gave that link is misleading. It’s not about nutrition, it’s about how stressors associated with low socioeconomic status affect brain chemistry.

We assessed parent-reported family income, parent education, occupational prestige, neighborhood risk, food insecurity, and household chaos for 12-month-old infants (N=90) and 3.5-year-old children (N=91).

It’s not the only finding like this, I’ve seen several over the years about the effects the stress of poverty has on brain chemistry.

Further to your suggestion about food banks, I’d suggest making cash donations so that the food bank staff can buy what’s needed and most practical. No one thinks of pads and tampons for example.

And they may sleep better because they are healthier. It’s most likely part of a cascade of effects.

Things like food insecurity affect cortisol levels in young children, for example. Poverty takes a physical toll.