December 18, 2018 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
Number Sense and Evolution
The trap leaves of Venus flytrap does not
shut close until the same hair is triggered in rapid succession (which “suggests”
a struggling insect).
Or it waits for roughly 20 seconds for any
adjacent hair to be triggered (which “suggests” a moving insect) before closing
the lobes of its traps shut.
The closure effects in one-tenth of a
second.
For its effectiveness (and it sure is
effective as the plant’s existence today is literally a living proof) it has to
rely on this number sense.
Since the approximate number system is
found in such a wide range of species it suggests that at least in animals it
may have evolved very early so that the species that followed its early origins
got a template from which to evolve further.
The number sense system finally reached its
pinnacle with men like Carl Friedrich Gauss, Ramanujan, Bernhard Riemann, John
von Neumann and many such all times giants of mathematics.
I cannot be certain of the fine aspects of
the evolutionary development of the number sense in various species of the
animal kingdom since I am not an evolutionary biologist.
I would even argue that even evolutionary biologists
though far more knowledgeable than me too would be in dark about the
specificities of the evolutionary nature of the number sense in the animal
kingdom.
Why is this so?
This is because of the scarcity of
biological data available to us.
Though biology is all around us in their
book “The Biology of Rarity: Causes and consequences of rare-common
differences” (1996 edition), Kunin, Gaston and Kevin state that more than 99%
of all species (this amounts to 5 billion different species) that have ever lived
on earth have died out.
The rough estimate of the number of species
that currently exist on our planet is anywhere between 10 million to 14
million.
What is more surprising is that we who
consider ourselves as superior and most knowledgeable of the species are not
only ignorant about the dead ones but even about the living ones.
Of the estimated 10 to 14million species
that exist today in our planet only 1.2 million have been documented.
An astonishing 86% remain undescribed and
thus unclassified!
Even this figure may be a gross
understatement.
A paper as recent as in 2016 from the
National Science Foundation makes an astonishing claim that the biodiversity of
life on this planet may be remarkably huge and the planet may be home to 1
trillion species most of whom are obviously microbes that are too small to be
seen with a naked eye.
Yet these microbes are as living and alive
as you and I are.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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