Ch 1.4 Life is Complicated

Now that all that crap is out of the way, let’s kind of talk biology. This stuff is the dumbed down, introduction stuff that really doesn’t say much at all but just outlines all the other shit we’re going to talk about for the next bunch of pages. So what the hell makes something alive? A heartbeat? Cells? DNA? Who the hell knows? Science, that’s who. So we’re going to run through the basic fundamentals of life and in order to be considered alive, you (or whatever we’re looking at) has to have all of them. You don’t have one or more of them, tough shit, not alive (sorry viruses). So let’s do this is the least painful way possible: a list.

• Made of cells

Cells are the basic building blocks of life. You have to be at least one cell but can be trillions. When an organism consists of a shit ton of cells, typically they combine a bunch of them into a tissue, a bunch of tissues into an organ, and a bunch of organs into an organ system. All the organ systems make the final organism. 

• Use Material and Energy 

This is metabolism. Materials are the things that build life (Spoiler: you’re made of dinosaur shit) and energy is what powers it. That’s it for this one…

• Respond to the environment

By environment, we mean anything that isn’t the organism. This could be heat, light, sound, chemicals, a knife, whatever. You shiver when you’re cold to warm up, your pee changes colors when your body is low on water, pupils change size depending on how bright the light is, etc. I could go on but if you don’t get it by now, sorry. Those are all responses

• Grow and develop

Growing and developing are two different, albeit (BOOM! Got to use that word) similar, things. Growing simply means getting larger or increased in numbers. No real changes are happening, it's really just an increase in volume. Developing is the process of becoming more complex over time. A lot of times, development happens at the same time that growth is occurring but they don’t have to overlap. They just tend to do so.

• Reproduce

THE SEX! Or the NO SEX! Either way, life has to make more life. We like to talk about sexual reproduction when you have two parental cells combining to form the new individual but asexual reproduction is also a thing. In asexual reproduction you don’t bump uglies and you just have one parent making a genetically identical copy of itself. (NOTE: this is going to come up a bunch but when we throw “a” or “an” in front of a word in biology, it means without. So asexual literally means without sex.)

• Evolve

For right now, we can define evolution as “the change in a population over time” but that is a very simplified definition and we are definitely going to dive into it a hell of a lot more in a later chapter. 

• Ecological Impact

Another obvious-once-you-think-of-it characteristic is that life is going to affect the environment. Earlier it was said that life has to be able to respond to changes in the environment but in its response, life is going to change the environment. It could be by adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by exhaling, more moisture to the air when you sweat, whatever, but every life form will affect its environment. It’s impossible for life to exist entirely by itself.  

So there you go, all the requirements of life. With that, we’ve covered the basics of science, how we measure shit, the way we do what we do in science and lastly, why life is so fucking complicated. But this is the introduction to the show. Shit is about to get REAL. So in the words of Samuel L. Jackson, hold onto your butts.

Why Dogs are Scientifically Adorable as Hell

As I was perusing the internet recently, I came across all these articles talking about "puppy dog eyes" and why your dog can make that face that makes your heart melt and you end up sharing your pizza with your four-legged friend. I was curious so I hunted down the actual paper (authored by Juliane Kaminski, Bridget M. Waller, Rui Diogo, Adam Hartstone-Rose, and Anne M. Burrows) to read because you can never trust blogs (except for this one). Let's dive into it.

We all know dogs are awesome and better than cats (sorry cat people). Part of it is that dogs are so damn expressive and just love you no matter what. Cats on the other hand have resting bitch face and couldn't give two fucks about you (or so it seems). But why do dogs make people feel all warm and fuzzy and the feline fuckers don't? No clue, this post isn't about cat, its about dogs. More importantly, its about doggy eyebrows.  

Now, dogs and humans have had a solid 33,000 years to really solidify any relationship between the two species. As a result of this time, dogs have gotten really good at reading cues that humans give them, whether its pointing at something (I do this all the time with my foot when I drop food on the floor, the dog just goes to it) or even just looking in a direction. Furthermore, have you ever noticed that when your doggo can't figure something out, they look at you with that face and you have to go help them? Yea, wolves don't do that. So something magical has happened in that 33,000 years to really form a link between dogs and humans.

Enter oxytocin. Oxytocin is nicknamed the love hormone because it makes you feel really good and smushy when you see something cute. Its the same hormone that gets released when moms look at babies. Interestingly (weird word to type), the exact same process happens when humans look into the eyes of dogs AND when dogs lock gazes with humans. So when a human looks at a dog, they get happy and when a dog looks at a human, the dog gets happy. Then a loop starts where dog looks at human, human at dog, dog back at human, human back at dog, and all the while both are just falling deeper in love with each other. Additionally, humans love puppy-looking dogs. Floppy ears, big eyes, big ol noggins, those are all puppy traits and some of the most popular dogs (think Golden Retrievers) just look like over-sized puppies.

FANCY SCIENCE TIME: When an organism retains juvenile traits into adulthood, that organism is known as a paedomorph. Paedo- from the Greek meaning boy or child and -morph meaning shape or form. No one knows where morph came from..

Image from TAP

This is where the actual paper goes into a lot of detail about dog face anatomy and data collecting procedures, all of which I find to be pretty interesting but you may not so if you think that would be cool, I highly recommend checking out the actual paper (I think from now on, I'm going to abbreviate "the actual paper" as TAP). The results of some dog and wolf face dissections, as well as video recordings, led to the following conclusion: dogs have this magic muscle that wolves don't called the levator anguli oculi medialis, abbreviated LAOM. This magic muscle allows doggos to raise their inner eyebrows, resulting in an eyebrow shape that resembles that look you get right before you cry. But it gets better.

Humans get a lot of information from each other from eyebrow movements, even when you don't realize it. That's one of the hypotheses for why we still have eyebrows even though we've lost most of the rest of our body hair (at least some people...there are some hairy mother fuckers out there). Dogs, having this extra muscle that wolves don't, are able to have much more expressive faces than other critters, with eyebrows moving as much as Nathan Lane (for the older crowd) or Emilia Clarke (for the Millennials). 

Not only have we bred dogs together that led to the formation of a muscle that lets dogs make sad faces, when they lift their little eyebrows, it makes them look even more puppy-like (which we've already talked about the oxytocin cycle). Even better, it shows more of the whites of their eyes (FANCY SCIENCE TIME: whites of the eyes are known as sclera) and its been shown that the more sclera an organism has, the more humans like it. That's why googly eyes are so cute. 

Basically, to sum things up, dogs have a muscle that wolves and some other animals don't that let them make sad faces, which makes them look like puppies, and make their eyes more trusting. Even shorter of a summary: