Three articles for this month, mainly focusing on biology. The first two articles are about animals, one being about how some birds in North America are shrinking due to warmer temperatures and the other one is about the only true immortal animal on Earth. The last article is about an attempt by a French reality tv show to replicate the controversial Stanley Milgram experiment of 1961.
I’ve read about shrinking animals that may be caused by climate change before but I believe this is the first time I’ve chosen to highlight this issue. This particular article from the BBC covers a study involving almost half a million birds from over a hundred different species that passed through the Carnegie Museum’s Powdermill ringing station in Pennsylvania, US between 1967 and 2007. By studying the records of weight and wingspan measurements, the researchers found that most of the species have grown slightly smaller over time. The average loss is small but it appears that birds that winter in the tropics have shrunk the most.
This finding falls in line with an established general rule in biology known as Bergmann’s rule: that animals tend to become smaller in warmer climes. The question was whether or not the same rule also applies as the climate overall becomes warmer and so far it seems that it is true at least for birds. The good news at least while many of the birds seem to be getting smaller, population sizes have not fallen. But the long term consequences of such changes are still unpredictable.
The next article is about the magazine Environmental Graffiti calls the only immortal animal on Earth, a tiny species called Turritopsis nutricula that resembles a jellyfish. I don’t think this is strictly true. Many plant species are functionally immortal but of course they aren’t animals. Some types of fungi can be effectively immortal as well and it’s a borderline case to argue whether or not they count as animals. In the case of these jellyfish things, at least one can argue that they’re clearly individual animals and their pathway to immortality is pretty unique.
Like most types of jellyfish, this species has two distinct stages in its life cycle. In its first stage, it resembles a small stalk with feeding tentacles. In its second stage, called the Medusa stage, it turns into a bell-shape and can asexually reproduce. Other jellyfish die after transitioning to the second stage but this species is able to revert back to its immature stage to avoid death. It appears to be able to repeat this indefinitely, making each individual potentially immortal. The article does note that in its immature stage, the species is vulnerable to many diseases and predators, so it’s not actually likely to live very long but studying how it is able to revert back to its immature stage would be interesting indeed for scientists.
The final article is from SkyNews but was widely linked around the net and covers an attempt by a French reality tv show to replicate the infamous Stanley Milgram experiment. This refers to an experiment in 1961 by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram to determine the moral culpability of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust. In this set up, the participant was told that he was acting under the supervision of an experimenter to apply electric shocks on a test subject. In reality, both the experimenter and the test subjects are accomplices and no real electric shocks were applied.
The experimenter would instruct the participant to press a button that he was told would shock the test subject and that the voltage applied would increase every time the button was pushed. The test subject would then scream and pretend to be shocked, and later beg for the shocks to stop but the participant would be told by the supervisor that he must continue. In most cases, although the participants became distressed when they thought they were inflicting real harm on the test subjects, they still continued to press button after being told that they would not be held responsible for the consequences. This result is taken to prove that most humans are strongly inclined to obey authority figures, even when given instructions that violate their moral codes.
The French television producers replicated this experiment by telling participants that they contestants in the pilot episode of a new reality television show in which they had to pose questions to a test subject and shock him if his answers were incorrect. Again, the test subject was in fact an actor and no actual shock was applied but the actor used his skills to pretend to feel pain and beg to be released from his ordeal. At one point, he even pretended to die from the shocks. In this recreation of the experiment, 80 percent of the participants were willing to shock the test subject all to way to the maximum 460 volts and out of the total of 80 people involved, only 16 refused to apply the shock and walked away.
What these results mean is a matter subject to a great deal of dispute, but I think it’s safe to say that it confirms Milgram’s original thesis that humans are less noble than they like to pretend to be and that it would be wise not to underestimate how readily humans obey authority figures. All the more reason to encourage people to be able to think independently and form their own conclusions even in the face of pressure from peers and higher authorities.