Love in nature? Why is this video of two otters holding paws twice, like long loves, so easy to anthropomorphize? (These otters are actually in captivity, but they appear to be 'wild' otters - otters may be born and raised in captivity, but their engagement with humans is relatively brief historically, so perhaps they remain quite wild. We don't know, for example, if there was a couple near the camera modeling 'hand holding' here). Do otters in the wild hold paws regularly? What might be its evolutionary significance? If some kind of pairbonding (vis-a-vis John Money's "Concepts of Determinism," why this kind?). After looking on the internet, it seems to me that a more fruitful hypothesis might be that it has to do with a kind of troopbonding (again vis-a-vis Money). For example, "Sea otters often rest in groups called “rafts”. Rafting sea otters sometimes hold paws to stay together" (http://www.vanaqua.org/education/aquafacts/seaotters.html).
youtube.com/watch?v=epUk3T2Kfno
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Humans think about such fascinating things, and then do (or write about) them, especially relative to other life forms on earth ...
Ecstasy - MDMA? Koellisch (Anton Köllisch) synthesized it around 1912, and someone thought to ingest it in the 1930s ... what a delight? Hmmmm ... (MDMA and LSD profoundly influenced the 1960s and early 70s).
Circuses?
Opera?
Music?
Thinking in India ...
The origins of life (Darwin, Crick and Watson)
The nature of the universe, the solar system and the cosmos (Hawkings and astrophysics)
An open, virtual World University and School - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/World_University - which is editable, and potentially in all languages, nation states, subjects and at all levels.
These are pretty unique expressions of symbolic reality relative to all 160 species of higher primates, closest to us genetically. Is this all due originally to the development of the larynx (see Deacon's "The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of the Brain and Language"), and our ability to eventually talk, exchange ideas and symbolize?
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Back to the Harbin pools ...
Is Harbin an ongoing Rainbow Gathering?
(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/10/otters-holding-paws-love-in-nature.html - October 11, 2009)
Sunday, October 11, 2009
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