Aphrodisiacs
gregladen | February 13, 2008Can you believe this guy? Check it out:
The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once proposed that humanity began with cooking. [a Twin Cities anthropologist] says love may have begun with cooking, as well.
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The earliest human ancestors, some kind of chimp-like apes, were living off raw plant foods and probably doing a bit of hunting like chimpanzees do now.
And then, somebody discovers the ability to control fire. Everybody argues about when this happened. We're saying it happened about 2 million years ago. Suddenly, all this food that was previously poisonous or indigestible…
gregladen | January 25, 2008The Hagfish, or Slime Eel, is said to be an aphrodisiac. Hard evidence that hagfish can enhance sexual prowess is lacking, but this fish can get evolutionary biologists very hot.
A recently published paper, reviewed here, on Pharyngula, addresses the interesting evolutionary question. In general terms, it is this: Hagfish possess traits that appear to be ancestral to vertebrates, but that in fact might be derived. Therefore, they are either a sister group to the living vertebrates, or are correctly placed within the vertebrates (i.e., with the lampreys). If the latter, it is correct (…