Apparently ‘puppy dog’ eyes really are a thing…
It turns out our pet pooches have evolved human-like eyebrow muscles, which let them make the sad faces that melt our hearts, according to a new study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Full article, HERE from France24.
Interesting note is that apparently wolves don’t have those eyebrow muscles, but then I don’t see a wolf begging for anything… Just sayin’
And in the D’oh category…
China may lose nearly 400 million people by the end of the century, according to a Pew Research Center report based on United Nations population projections.
From Pew Research, HERE.
I find it odd that no one mentions the fact that the Chinese have had effectively 2 generations of ‘male only’ children, which has made Chinese women scarce on the ground and the average Chinese male left out in the cold unless he has significant resources or can go abroad. The ‘requirement’ to maintain replacement level fertility is something like 2.1 children per couple as the population ages for a particular demographic, depending on the death rates and survival rates in small children, HERE.
While the overall population of the USA is still growing, albeit more slowly, that is due to immigration, not birth rate. Part of the ‘blame’ for that probably rests with Erlich and his book ‘The Population Bomb’ published in the 60’s, HERE, and the advent of birth control. That took American birthrates from over 3 children per couple to where we are today, which is less than 2 children per couple. Meanwhile, other countries and religions are still at 5 or more children per couple…
Something to think about for our grandchildren. They will be the minority, if they survive at all…
Demography is destiny. The future belongs to those who show up.
Population bomb – what was the point of declaring we have to down size the planet when you allow immigrants to migrate and cause the population to suddenly grow exponentially. The U.S. population bomb is going nuclear !!
U.S. population in 1969 was 203 million. The projected population now is 328 million. In 50 years. What will the next 50 years bring ?
Maybe ‘Slatewiper’ diseases like Ebola are a fail safe measure ?
What do you do with an excess male population? There some things not always pleasant.
I read last week that some Chinese men are buying ‘wives’ from North Korea. The women have been trafficked in by organized crime elements in China.
Also Pakistan, where apparently girls from Pakistan’s Christian minority are particular targets for this trafficking:
“The New York-based international non-governmental organization, Human Rights Watch, warned on April 26 that “Pakistan’s government should be alarmed by recent reports of trafficking of women and girls to China. These allegations are disturbingly similar to the pattern of trafficking of ‘brides’ to China from at least five other Asian countries.
One week later, Pakistani authorities arrested 12 suspects — eight Chinese nationals and four Pakistanis — in a case involving the sex trafficking of young Pakistani women to China. Many had been sent as so-called ‘brides.’ Most of them, some as young as 13, belong to Pakistan’s Christian minority.”
I hadn’t seen that. Those poor girls.
McC- Good point!
jrg- That is an interesting concept, and I wouldn’t say it’s impossible
Jim- Have a war… That tends to reduce it, or as JMI/Peter say, buy wives
JMI/Peter- Yeah, like that is going to end well… NOT
If you think about the excess number of “males” in China, then factor in the aggressive posturing in the South China sea…some very scary and interesting things pop out of the gray-matter computer. Population pressure and lack of resources are fundmentally at the root of most of history’s wars. I don’t think the computer age will be any different. But now the big wars will be short and very, very costly to both sides.
Wolves don’t beg.
I wonder when the begging gene started? Are dogs just ‘progressive wolves’?
What is interesting amongst the ChiComs is that the middle class level is seeking foreign brides, because the upper class is doing everything they can to secure all the ‘pure’ Han-class women.
Thus, following the weird ‘Han-Only’ bigotry that exists in the ‘everyone is equal because communism’ society, the middle class has, by seeking the foreign brides, married themselves out of any chance of rising up.
So the pool of ‘100% Han only’ is rapidly shrinking, while the ocean of ‘not 100% Han’ (which includes all of the rural agricultural red Chinese, being a variety of non-Han ethnic ChiComs and semi-Han ChiComs, along with this new crop of Han seeking NOT Han wimmens) and even more, ChiCom is descending into the same Royalty-Mandarin-Peasant classification that turned them into a backwards kingdom to begin with. At least this time the Mandarins have balls, and can use them.
Weird times, very weird times. Let’s hope we all survive long enough to see how this plays out.
(And it is interesting to watch President Trump and his cabinet break ChiCom via economic means. With the latest tariffs, we are watching a panicky rush of companies away from ChiCom to elsewhere. Vietnam is making out like gangbusters (which is good, bad feelings for that whole war and 1975 but then again, they poked the ChiComs hard when ChiCom tried to invade them, actually stopping the ChiComs butt-cold, so much for that vaunted military power (ChiCom hasn’t won a war/fight since they took over Tibet. Think about it. Even the wars with the Soviets were a standstill, with the Sovs vastly outnumbered but still holding. The ChiComs have no tradition of victory over anyone except… themselves.)
Other than that, Peter Grant and Aesop have been stirring the winds of truth about Ebola so, well, we’ll see in a year or so whether we’re all alive.
And that pig-ebola in ChiCom… Well, just re-read John Ringo’s “The Last Centurion.” Which is all about us fighting in Iran, a devastating plague coming out of China, extreme leftist politics out of the Democratic party and global cooling. So far he’s got pretty much everything right…
And people think us Americans are weird.
“‘not 100% Han’ (which includes all of the rural agricultural red Chinese, being a variety of non-Han ethnic ChiComs and semi-Han ChiComs”
Huh? This confuses me. The majority of Chinese (over 90%) are Han, regardless of whether they are rural or citified or Party members. Non-Han belong to the “ethnic minorities” such as Miao, Hui, Manchu, etc.
“weird ‘Han-Only’ bigotry that exists in the ‘everyone is equal because communism’ society”
Not weird at all. Communism is a thin veneer over the millenia-deep conviction that China is the only source of civilization that matters. Zhong Guo does NOT translate to “Middle Kingdom”. The actual meaning is “Central Nation” much as Boston calls itself (unironically) “The Hub of the Universe”. No proper Han Chinese really believes that “everyone is equal” because deep down he believes that anyone not Han is some sort of barbarian at best. Whites are hairy, smelly, and uncouth but dangerous barbarians; and it gets worse from there regarding browns and blacks. Even other East Asians are in for it: the Japanese are “the dwarf rapists” and the Koreans are “garlic-eating hicks fit only to be beaten” [as in physically pummeled]. It’s hard to think of an existant ethnic group that is as arrogant and closed regarding outsiders. The only current (and highly successful) group that comes to mind is not merely ethnic but ethnoreligious.
“our pet pooches have evolved human-like eyebrow muscles”
Maybe it’s just me, but that sentence has a bit of the Lysenko taste to it; the idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited.
On the other hand, evidently it DOES work if you only allow the tamest red foxes to breed. My google-fu found the links searching “Russians breed foxes.” It was interesting that the tails of the TAME foxes were different than those of the foxes in the wild.
I first was alerted to the Chinese Population Implosion Bomb (PIB) in comments that S. M. Stirling made about the 2012 film “Ghosts With Shit Jobs.” He used the CIA World Factbook, and looked at the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of China and other East Asian countries, and saw they had essentially destroyed their futures. The government-mandated low birth rate in China, combined with the vast over-selection of males, and concluded they had invented a new crime against humanity: auto-genocide. Bless their hearts! He said : “What you get is a society burdened with an enormous overhang of old people, and struggling to support them with an economy still (in per-capita terms) much smaller than ours, or Japan’s.”
Meanwhile, I have Done My Part, as has my gift-from-God, happily-ever-after trophy wife Vanessa, the elegant, foxy, praying black grandmother of Woodstock, GA. Our blended family consists of 10 children (5 males, 5 females), 14 grand-children (9 males, 5 females) and in late August/Early September, our first GREAT-grandson will breathe atmosphere for the first time. We aren’t done accumulating grand-children, either.
The inheritance of acquired traits should be credited to Lamarck, not Lysenko, even if Lysenko did take off running with it even as the Modern Synthesis was being formulated. One of the wildcards in all this is epigenetics. If the capability to possess a trait is heritable, but its actual expression is controlled by external factors, then there can be some resemblance to Lamarckian evolution.
No wonder the Chinese Army is feared. Who wants to face a couple million of horny men knowing if they win the get the women? We can only counter with hungry wolves.
I keep waiting for Commie Quality Control on the Three Gorges Dam to “solve” a lot of our problems with China.
Strange to see a culture, our own, committing demographic suicide. Maybe Hungary points the way forward?
In the meanwhile, the Great Replacement continues.
All- Thanks for the comments, can’t disagree with anyone.
Posted from my iPhone.
Beans: Thank you for that explanation.
Re dogs: Read an article somewhere (sorry, can’t cite it) that said humans and dogs are kinda co-species. We evolved together and share a bunch of biological stuff like hormonal responses to pregnancy. Bottom line: cool!
Robert- Interesting point…