Experiment shows that art students prefer abstract art to monkey art in about two-third of the cases. Since the number is above 50%, some argue that abstract art is different and better than animal art. I compare this result with figure skating competitions, where on average 73% of judges prefer gold medalist to silver medalist. This means that the difference between abstract artists and animal artists is less than the difference between gold and silver medalists.

— [1112.1669] Monkeys get a silver in Abstract Art Olympics

They found that 4 hours of exposure to a mixture composed largely of primary pollutants (nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, and 55 hydrocarbons) at environmentally relevant concentrations changed the expression of 19 genes, compared with 709 altered genes following similar exposure to a mixture of primary and secondary pollutants (including ozone, formaldehyde, and peroxyacetyl nitrate).

— Environmental Health Perspectives: Photochemical Finish: Assessing the Genomic Impact of Secondary Air Pollutants

Facial composites made by combining individual faces are judged to be attractive, and more attractive than the majority of individual faces. The composites possess both symmetry and averageness of features. Facial averageness may reflect high individual protein heterozygosity and thus an array of proteins to which parasites must adapt.

— Human facial beauty: Averageness, symmetry, and parasite resistance

A number of reproductive characteristics of termites differ substantially from those of other insects. Polyandry appears to be mostly absent in termites and lifetime pair formation is achieved early in life, after an initial dispersal flight. The consequent absence of postcopulatory sexual selection coincides with the loss of a number of reproductive traits, such as elaborate male and female genitalia, flagellated sperm and seminal fluid-producing male accessory glands. The absence of sexually selected, female-harming male traits suggests that the interests of males and females are well aligned in most termites, fostering the evolution of kings, males with life expectancies comparable to those of queens and the ability to supply sperm continuously. Comparative work on mating system evolution between the diplodiploid termites and the haplodiploid hymenopteran social insects can be used to explain the influence of kin selection.

— Animal Behaviour : The mating biology of termites: a comparative review

And the more I think about it, the more I think utopianist future-hucksters like Ray Kurzweil are part of the problem; the more I feel that Singularitarianism (much like some other emerging cults of the atemporal and altermodern End Times) is a refuge for privileged intellectuals who can’t face the future without believing they get some sort of personal get-out-of-Apocalypse-free card; the more I think that science fiction and other speculative forms of communication (design fiction, essays, mixed media, whatever) have great potential to help us understand where we’re going, but that the potential is wasted by that same desperate search for a personal escape hatch with the phrase “I’m all right, Jack” stencilled on it by some notoriously anonymous marginal celebrity street artist…

— The future of Futurismic | Blog | Futurismic