My son will feel vindicated and probably somewhat smug when he watches
this BBC wildlife video, He was arguing in the car on the way to school the other day that a big bird of prey could easily pick up and carry off his little sister (as all eight year old brothers secretly wish); anyway I rejected his argument and assured them both that was not possible, as even an eagle wouldn't be big enough to do that. Lo and behold we have video evidence here of a Golden Eagle hunting and killing a young reindeer, easily as big and heavy as him and his sister put together!
Apparently the technique is to swoop low and jab the little critter in the lungs with its talons, the poor Bambi then slowly suffocates to death and can be devoured later by the raptor. I wonder if this kind of hunting behaviour led our taxonomic (mammal) cousins back in the mists of time to ingrain fear and reverence for magical creatures handing out judgement from the sky?
6 comments:
"I wonder if this kind of hunting behaviour led our taxonomic (mammal) cousins back in the mists of time to ingrain fear and reverence for magical creatures handing out judgement from the sky" ... not if our natural untrained state is atheism as with your previous post, clearly it didn't. One or the other, surely. But perhaps I'm just channelling a rabbit race-myth.
My son still wants a large bird to carry off his sister, and he's 16 and she's 20. So sibling rivalry never stops.
Hi G, maybe this was the trigger that started the whole meme in the first place?
E, you're right, that's something to look forward too then :(
Meme? An unfalsifiable concept I can't experiment on?
Let me think, what does that remind me of?
Meme's are only metaphors for the spread of "infectious" ideas; I don't think they were created to propose anything real, although Sue Blackmore had a crack at it IIRC. I can think of a falsification though, it would be similar to what would falsify evolution, i.e. rabbits in the pre-Cambrian etc.
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