Tuesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon lagniappe)

January 12, 2016 • 6:00 am

It’s Tuesday, it’s very cold, and it snowed again last night. Also, I got nothing: it’s one of those days when I go to work having nothing concrete that I want to write about on this site. (There are some mysterious explosions in Istanbul, though, and I learn that Rupert Murdoch just became engaged to Jerry Hall.) That’s the bad news. The good news is this video posted on George Takei’s website. I’m told it resembles Baby Hili’s behavior with Darwin, Cyrus’s d*g predecessor. One month from today, on Feb. 12, I’ll be giving the Darwin Day Lecture for the British Humanists in London with one R. Dawkins as moderator; info and tickets here. I’m looking forward to visiting Old Blighty, and hope to quaff some good pints of Landlord (not easy to find) in London and Oxford. On this day in 1967, psychology professor James Bedford died and his body was immediatly cryogenically frozen—the first person in history so preserved. Now, nearly five decades on, he’s still a human popsicle. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is arguing with Andrzej, just like her predecessor Pia did:

Hili: This stick is thinking that I’m not going to catch it.
A: This stick doesn’t think.
Hili: This stick is only pretending that it doesn’t think.

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In Polish:
Hili: Ten patyk myśli, że go nie złapię.
Ja: Ten patyk nie myśli.
Hili: Ten patyk udaje, że nie myśli.

And, in Wroclawek, poor, sad Leon is already missing the holidays and his favorite cat toy:

Leon: The Christmas Tree moved out…

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7 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon lagniappe)”

    2. Have you got the actual ticket? I ordered one when it was first announced and haven’t received it yet. I assumed that they would be sent out nearer the date but I’m starting to get worried.

  2. Cheer up, I am sure you will have something concrete to write about later!

    [Maybe I am mistaken and it isn’t worth writing about, but there is a paper in PNAS that seem to have found facts that unambiguously [?] test kin selection and give “E.O. Wilson and colleagues” 2010 paper the biological finger.

    “”In 2003, David Queller published a key model using kin selection theory that predicted that under queenless conditions in a honey bee colony, the patrigenes would promote selfish behavior in the workers, while the matrigenes would promote altruistic behavior,” said Galbraith.”

    “”It is very strange to think that your genes might be fighting with each other based on whether they came from your mother or your father,” said Queller. “Yet, this is just what we found. It turns out that when a queen dies, worker bees behave the way their fathers want them to, producing sons when possible.” The results appear today (Jan. 11) the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    According to Queller, this intragenomic conflict supports the theory of kin selection first proposed by William Hamilton in 1964.”

    “In 2010, however, biologist E.O. Wilson and colleagues published a paper that argued kin selection is not needed for altruistic behavior to evolve.

    “While Queller’s model made very specific predictions about the behavior of matrigenes and patrigenes in social insects, it was not possible to test this prediction until modern genomic tools were developed that allowed us to specifically track both matrigenes and patrigenes in the same individual,” said Grozinger.”

    [ http://phys.org/news/2016-01-conflict-honey-bee-genes-theory.html ; my bold]

  3. It must be a Love Match between Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch , why else would she get engaged to the Billionaire. ?

  4. To Hili, any small object might be a mouse, insect, or some other kind of snack, which might suddenly begin a game of “cat and mouse”. Thus, as a survival mechanism, just like teeth and claws, a theory of mind has evolved.

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