I've been really into nature documentaries lately. Learning about animals is how a lot of kids first fell in love with science -- including me. Animals are intrinsically interesting to humans (they're alive like us!) but they open the door to exploring a world outside ourselves.
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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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Replying to @s_r_constantin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Watts_(author) … ? Peter Watts (born 1958) is a Canadian science fiction author and former marine-mammal biologist.
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Yes, whoops! thanks, I meant Peter Watts.
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