Genuine Puzzles In Biology?

That's an interesting idea. Causing an infected animal to run around biting other potential victims would seem like a good way to spread the virus.

Fascinating, yes. Fantastic, no -- given that this group of fungi have been parasitizing insects for at least 48 million years.

I corrected the url. Thanks for pointing that out, Parasomnium.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge of spiders. I assume you are referring to extant species. While your evidence is suggestive, it doesn’t rule out the possibility that our ancestors encountered more dangerous species that are now extinct. In fact, it is possible that a genetic predisposition to learn to fear spiders and snakes started with mammalian ancestors that predated the first primates.While the facts you mention cast doubt on the evolutionary threat hypothesis, there is a fair amount of empirical evidence on the other side of the issue. In a recent study, Vanessa LoBue of Rutgers University writes: LoBue’s paper provides the first evidence of enhanced visual detection of spiders in young children. She writes: A previous study in preschoolers showed similar results for snakes. Although it is possible that there were cultural influences on the preschoolers, these studies suggest a genetic predisposition because the researchers were measuring visual attention, not fear, and because even people who did not fear spiders or snakes showed greater visual attention to those putative evolutionary threats.

As I understand it, the environmental threat hypothesis doesn't assume that fear is genetically determined. Rather it proposes that we are genetically predisposed to notice and learn to fear some stimuli more than others.I appreciate your skepticism about spiders as an evolutionary threat. But the psychological research seems sound, based as it is on a numerous studies conducted by several different researchers working with several different species. Other than the evolutionary threat hypothesis, I can't think of why humans and monkeys should be more visually attentive to things that look like spiders and more likely to learn to fear spiders than other stimuli.Perhaps the evolutionary threat was scorpions and the visual processing system didn't distinguish between scorpions and spiders. The only problem I have with that idea is I would think scorpions would be easily distinguished from spiders.

I agree that kind of consciousness is probably unique to humans. But there are other kinds of consciousness that may be present in non-human animals:

• At the very least, many animals show a difference between wakefulness and sleep, coma, etc. So on some level they can be said to be "conscious" because there are times when they are not "unconscious."
• Veterinarians, along with the rest of us, routinely assume that animals can experience pain. Many researchers also agree that animals experience certain emotions, such as hunger or rage.
• While many scientists will agree that some animals are "aware," it is much more controversial to say that they are "aware that they are aware," i.e., that they are self-conscious. Some people think that mirror experiments have shown self-awareness in chimps, dolphins, and a few other species.
• I don't know of anyone who proposes that any non-human animal has sufficient self-awareness to be considered a moral agent. In fact, there are some scientists and philosophers who deny that human free will exists, in which case none of us would be moral agents.