If you don't have enough examples of non-human animals, it's easy to make wrong theories of how cognition, behavior, and biology "necessarily" work.
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When I was a teen I sort of absorbed by osmosis the idea that evolutionary biology was a "soft" science and that smart people studied molecular biology. I mean, it's just stories about animals, right? Kid stuff.
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I now think that's precisely wrong. "Stories about animals" are super important, because what if your lab experiment isn't actually a good model for what happens in living things in nature?!
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The credibility of "will this intervention in mice translate to humans?" depends *heavily* on comparative biology and evolutionary arguments.
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Nature is also our primary template for "weird beauty." Nature is bizarre -- but fun to watch. David Watts' weird science-fiction imaginings are directly inspired by his background as a marine biologist. We imagine aliens because we've seen animals.
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Any docs youd recommend in particular?
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David Attenborough's Life in Cold Blood was awesome. (Reptiles are REALLY different from us -- some determine offspring sex by temperature! -- but behaviorally complex. They have territoriality, fights, elaborate courtship.)
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I only really started appreciating evolutionary theory by watching Blue Planet and Planet Earth, that brought things into sharp relief, followed by reading Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.
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Interesting perspective. I was completely uninterested in animals growing up (and my impression was my culture was also) and it's only as an adult that I've found all the beauty. I guess I was lucky that I got to watch all those documentaries for the first time as an adult.
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