2 This is consistent with our "neural crest/domestication syndrome" hypothesis that the shorter snouts of domesticated animals is developmentally linked to the ultimate selective force underlying domestication: increased tameness: academic.oup.com/genetics/art...
3 The causal linkage is due to the joint origins of many tissues implicated in domestication syndrome - in this case the adrenal glands and HPA axis (reduced for tameness), and the bones and muscles of the face (reduced as a side effect) - from the embryonic neural crest.
1 New paper from my former PhD student Raffaela Lesch's lab used a citizen science database to show that urban racoons, who are rapidly becoming less afraid of humans, also have shorter snouts than wild-type rural racoons.
Link: rdcu.be/eRcpT
Scary data from the long-term study of wild chimpanzees at Ngogo: lethal attacks on neighboring groups (almost exclusively by males) increased female fertility and offspring survival in their own group. “Demonic males” indeed…
Tired of posting about my much-derided brain painting for the Phil Trans cover... here's a watercolor painting I did last year of my father in law. Paint on paper: No ChatGPT was used, just an old black-and-white photo:
Tecumseh Fitch
New paper from my former PhD student Raffaela Lesch's lab used a citizen science database to show that urban racoons, who arerapidly becoming less afraid of humans, also have shorter snouts than wild-type rural racoons.
Link: rdcu.be/eRcpT
My art is not "AI slop"
I am very proud of the artwork on the cover of our recent Phil Trans issue on consciousness. It was the product of 10+ hours of hard artistic work on my part, drawing, painting, and interacting with ChatGPT to try to get something in the style of an old Victorian engraving.
Snow has come to Lower Austria!
#art #painting
Our first snow of the season. This is a watercolor I did of our local castle, Burg Kreuzenstein.
Very simple palette: ultramarine and indanthrene blue with burnt sienna. The key trick was spraying the still-wet paint to get that sweeping snow look...
2. Nice writeups in the BBC:
bbc.com/news/article...
and Scientific American:
www.scientificamerican.com/article/racc...
Tecumseh Fitch
Tecumseh Fitch
Tecumseh Fitch
Tecumseh Fitch
Tecumseh Fitch
Tecumseh Fitch
Interested in the evolution of human language? Check out our new paper in @science.org where we synthesize latest findings and outline a multifaceted, bio-cultural approach for studying how language evolved. Super proud of this work, and hoping it leads to exciting new research! tinyurl.com/ykacvanp
Tecumseh Fitch
Tecumseh Fitch
Abstract. Charles Darwin, while trying to devise a general theory of heredity from the observations of animal and plant breeders, discovered that domestica
