dialectics of domestication

An interesting Radiolab piece with evolutionary biologist Brian Hare on Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev's celebrated silver fox domestication experiment. Belyaev's foxes have gotten a fair amount of play in popular media - as a part of the origin story of dogs. (Here's something I'm starting to think about: the canids who make dogs dogs, so that dogs can, as the saying goes, make us human. Another example would be the captive wolves, human-raised or not, who stand in as the foil of dogs in studies of social cognition, for example these by Brian Hare.)

What I found most striking about the RadioLab version of the story: the cartoonish, disturbingly repetitive gun shot sound effects that point up the role of culling in selective breeding (plus, these foxes were raised for fur in the first place...)

Related posts on free-range dogs and undesireable dogs.


Image courtesy of http://www.gmilburn.ca/

Note: I tried posting an earlier version of this on Village Dog, my Tumblr experiment, but had some technical difficulties. It seems to fit better here, anyway.

this week in posthumanism: elfoid v. yaxley

i. humanoid phone

The Elfoid phone is a miniature version of the Telenoid R1 robot developed last year by a research team led by Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro. The current prototype measures 20 centimeters (8 in) long, is covered in a soft fleshy urethane skin, and has the same genderless and ageless appearance as the Telenoid. The control buttons are embedded in the chest, which glows green when the Elfoid is in use...

Equipped with a camera and motion-capture system, the Elfoid phone will be able to watch the user's face and transmit motion data to another Elfoid phone, which can then reproduce the face and head movements in real-time.

(via Pink Tentacle)

ii. cable company "live chat analyst"
(click image for larger version)

eponymous #1

3/1/11, 1:00am: Totally revised because I was half asleep when wrote this the first and second times.

What's the point of this blog if I don't post anything for months on end? So here are some things I bookmarked (or yes, dogeared) the last couple days, in no particular order:

• "When do domestic dogs, Canis familiaris, start to understand human pointing?" (sub. req. - sorry!) There's been a lot of scientific literature - and media attention - on the ability of dogs to comprehend human social gestures, particularly pointing. This study takes a skeptical look at theories that, through the millennia-long process of domestication, dogs have evolved a "human-like" social cognition that's distinct not only from wolves, their closest relatives, but also from chimps, our closest animal kin. To make this point, the authors take a two-pronged approach, questioning the wolf's supposed insensitivity to human social forms on one hand and, on the other, reminding us of dogs who don't quite fit the ideal of the perfectly accommodating Fido, e.g. shelter dogs, ferals, etc. Do we learn more about dogs if we stop assuming they're predisposed, in an evolutionary or even cosmic sense, to be "our" best friends?
     
•  "Activists fight plan to deport Moscow's stray dogs": Speaking of dogs who live on the fringe of human society: I first read about Moscow's famous subway-riding dogs in this widely circulated 2010 article. These dogs are going places, at least virtually: they even have their own wikipedia entry. In the analog world, it looks as though they are facing the grim reality of a cull.

Photo by Vladimir Filonov

• "Man's Best Friend" and "Peacocks": two sculpture series on animal forms by the artist Laurel Roth, whom I randomly discovered this weekend (how did I not know her work before). The artificial selection of dogs has never seemed... so artificial. Neither have avian courtship and sexual selection. 

Laurel Roth, Great Dane, 2008

walnut, gold leaf, swarovski crystal

• Mary Gaitskill, "The Other Place": Short story in the New Yorker about a creepy guy who fantasizes about killing women in an incongruously, unsettlingly philosophical voice. Here's a very Gaitskillian sentence that captivated me: "He is interested in crows because he heard on a nature show that they are one of the only species that are more intelligent than they need to be to survive. He does beautiful, precise drawings of crows."

That's it for now. I hope this gets me back in the habit of writing and posting...

tumblr

Started a tumblr a while ago and didn't really know what to do with it... 

sarah palin & the aesthetics of violence

A startling 2009 portrait of Sarah Palin by painter Daisy Rockwell (aka Lapata), based on this photograph.  Rockwell's statement about the work is eerily prescient in light of recent events:

The rasa of violence, featuring Sarah Palin

Himsa means ‘violence’ in Hindi/Sanskrit. These paintings depict the disturbing and fascinating former/future politician and television personality Sarah Palin in poses of violence, one of her preferred rasas. Though it is amusing to see an attractive woman posing with guns or dead animals, we must also remember that her iconography is far more powerful than her less than coherent use of language. For those who adore Palin, it is images such as these that speak louder than words, and her self-presentation as a warrior princess that could have disturbing consequences in the era of the War on Terror.

Other images from the series here. Related: the difference between Sarah Palin and pit bulls.

2011

Here's to the continued possibility of newness in this crazy world...

lost

Shuichi Nakano, "Searching for Paradise" - more at my Tumblr outpost and at the always excellent Pink Tentacles