When Occupy Wall Street and similar protests played out over the past year, the phenomenon looked familiar to Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal: He's seen similar moral outrage over economic inequity expressed by monkeys and chimps. And he thinks we could learn a lesson or two from our fellow primates.

New research shows there is a biological basis for co-operative and empathetic behaviour.

'Regularly spaced structures, from vertebrae and hair follicles to the stripes on a tiger or zebrafish, are a fundamental motif in biology. There are several theories about how patterns in nature are formed, but until now there was only circumstantial evidence for Turing's mechanism. Our study provides the first experimental identification of an activator-inhibitor system at work

According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of disability and the fourth leading contributor to the global burden of disease, projected to reach second place by 2020. There is also strong evidence that it is an independent risk factor for heart disease, and several studies show that prolonged depression is associated with selective and possibly permanent damage to the hippocampus, a region of the brain critical to memory and learning.
Add the fact that 2 percent to 12 percent of depressed people eventually commit suicide, and the [supposed evolutionary] “advantages” of depression suddenly don’t look so good....
What is natural, the thinking goes, is best. If we are designed to suffer depression in response to life’s ills, there must be a good reason for it, and we should allow it to take its painful and natural course.
But unlike ordinary sadness, the natural course of depression can be devastating and lethal. And while sadness is useful, clinical depression signals a failure to adapt to stress or loss, because it impairs a person’s ability to solve the very dilemmas that triggered it.
Even if depression is “natural” and evolved from an emotional state that might once have given us some advantage, that doesn’t make it any more desirable than other maladies. Nature offers us cancer, infections and heart disease, which we happily avoid and do our best to treat. Depression is no different.

book rec #1 from bakker's blog

book rec #2 from bakker's blog

Wieland believed that egg-eating must have been rampant during the age of the dinosaurs. In fact, he thought that a diet of eggs may have even led to the evolution of some of the largest of all predatory dinosaurs. Considering the giant Tyrannosaurus, Wieland wrote, “What more likely than the immediate ancestors of this dinosaur got their first impulse toward gigantism on a diet of sauropod eggs, and that, aside from the varanids, the theropod dinosaurs were the great egg-eaters of all time?” The cruel irony of this idea was that the immense predatory dinosaurs also reproduced by laying eggs, and Wieland considered it “quite inferable” that their nests, in turn, would have been raided by smaller monitor lizards and snakes.

"Researchers from King's College London have provided the first experimental evidence confirming a great British mathematician's theory of how biological patterns such as tiger stripes or leopard spots are formed."