Pico Boating: Reader Comments

 

Mac McJunkin on May 13, 2012 at 3:17 pm

I came up on an analogy the other day, in the book “The First 20 Minutes” you may enjoy.

The Sea-Squirt is not one of nature’s more charismatic creatures, but it’s life story is instructive to modern humans. Tubular,opaque and squelchy, it resembles a worm-fish from Mars.But the Sea Squirt is in reality more closely related to humans than other fish.It”s a member of the chordate family, just as we were a long time ago, in another evolutionary form. When scientist sequenced the entire genome of the Sea-Squirt a few years ago, they found long sections of DNA identical to our own.
At birth, infant Sea-Squirt larvae have a brain, not much of one; it consist of a few hundred brain cells and some nerve endings. But it does allow the squirt to think in a rudimentary fashion.Young squirts need to find a home. They can’t just float aimlessly for the rest of their lives. So directed by these few neurons they begin swimming.The movement seems to strengthen the brain and the nervous system connections.The squirt may even add a few dozen brain cells while wandering. But then it finds a underwater rock, a ship hull, or perhaps a lazing walrus and attaches itself. Adult squirts are sissile; they pass they rest of their lives clamped to a single surface, waving with the tides but otherwise never moving from that spot.
So their brains die. The neuron and nervous connections shrivel and are absorbed into the squirt’s soggy tissues. There is a strong connection between activity and brain function in animals,”according to Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, PHD, a professor of physiological science at the University of California, Los Angeles. When squirts stop moving it has no further use for a brain.”
Also in the movie “Running the Sahara” the runners came across a tribe of nomads, that were constantly moving with their possessions. They considered a house a coffin.
Men don’t set still or your dead meat.

 

Roselt Croeser on May 15, 2012 at 12:03 am

I love it. If we live life, use our brains, fall in love, sail in very small boats we always risk something going wrong and maybe learning something from it. If you are happy to spend your days as a vegetable in front of a television then go ahead. Otherwise we have to do something. There is no more complete way to take responsibility for yourself than to build your own small boat and sail it on the ocean.

Originally posted 2013-06-25 23:46:02.

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Author: Bryan Lowe

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