Blinded by the Sea: How eye glasses (and eyes) work

The ability to see is something we often take for granted. Every day, those of us with sight experience a range of shapes, sizes, colours, and movements that we only really appreciate when we are asked to – when watching Olympic gymnasts or when we’re confronted by something atypical, like a sunset or a mountain range. Most of us only really begin to appreciate the little things our eyes take in when they can no longer do so in a seamless way. For the average person, this happens as we age and our eyes naturally lose their ability to focus. For the not-so-average person, it can happen very suddenly.

Such an ‘unaverage’ (not a real word) experience befell our illustrator, here at Sketchy Science, just last week. While on a trip to a conference on the southeast coast of the United States, after a night of partaking in the local libations, our sketchist (also not a real word) found himself standing in the Atlantic ocean, when a rogue wave of epic (likely very small) proportions tossed him asunder, claiming his glasses to the surf. I don’t actually know if this is how it happened, but it is how I prefer to imagine it. It is much funnier than him simply dropping his glasses in the water.

Regardless of how it happened, the result was a fumbling Mr. Magoo-esque adventure through the airport, onto a plane, and back home to Canada. It’s amazing how two pieces of glass (or plastic) can play such a major role in a person’s life.

But how do glasses work and why do some of us need them? The answer lies in the three most common problems with respect to how our eyeballs function. The four parts of your eye that impact your ability to see are, from front to back - the cornea, which is the clear window on the front of your eye that lets light in; the pupil (the black part), which widens or narrows to let in more or less light; the lens, which bends and focuses the light; and the retina, which is the back wall of your eyeball onto which images are focused before sending impulses down the optic nerve into your brain for processing.

Most problems occur at the beginning of this whole operation, with the cornea. The tricky thing about eyeballs is that they are spheres, meaning that as light moves through their rounded surfaces, it bends. If your eye is not shaped just right, the light coming in can focus at a point that isn’t exactly on your retina.

If your cornea is exceptionally curvy, the light will bend too much and focus in front of the retina, leading to nearsightedness and trouble seeing distance objects; this is called Myopia.

If your cornea isn’t curvy enough, you have the opposite problem with light focusing behind the retina leading to farsightedness and trouble reading the newspaper; this is called Hyperopia.

If your cornea has a bump, ripple, or scratch on it, the light gets distorted in other ways, and this is called Astigmatism.

Glasses – or “corrective lenses”, if we want to be more accurate and inclusive of people with contact lenses – can correct these problems by bending the light in a way that compensates for misshapen corneas. The physics of light dictates that as light moves through a medium, such as glass, it bends or “refracts” towards the thickest part of that medium. Lenses are described as either “plus” or “minus” lenses depending on whether they are thicker in the middle or towards the edges.

Plus lenses are thick in the middle and so bend light inwards, leading to a focal point behind the lens itself. Pushing the focal point backward corrects for Myopia. Minus lenses refract light towards their edges, leading to a focal point that is actually in front of the lens itself. Moving the focus forward corrects for Hyperopia. To make things even more fun, plus and minus lenses can be combined to correct for more complicated vision problems.

That is really all there is to it. This impressive but simple technology has allowed people to see more clearly since the first pair of spectacles adorned some nobleman’s nose between 1268 and 1289 in Italy, after being invented by someone whose name has been lost to history. So, the person who thought up the way we still correct vision today will forever go as unappreciated as the clear vision he sought to bestow upon the masses, to only be admired when a rogue wave leaves one of us blinded.

Does your Dog Like Hugs? Truly Sketchy Science and the Value of Critical Thinking

As we all learned a few weeks ago, courtesy of John Oliver, sometimes the media misrepresents scientific findings. Things get blown out of proportion and the result can be total confidence in ideas that are totally wrong or frustration leading to mistrust of science in general. Fortunately, humans are equipped with an ability that few other animals demonstrate that allows us to sift through the nonsense. In school you may have learned about it as “critical thinking”, but in practice it is more like a bullshit-o-meter.

The ability to stop and ask ourselves “Wait, does that result actually make sense?” is incredibly powerful. It actually lies at the heart of science itself through the concept of peer-review, whereby other researchers get the opportunity to tear a study apart before it ever sees the light of day. Occasionally though, something slips through the cracks and it is up to the eye of the reader to spot something fishy. Such a case popped up on social media feeds around the world a last month with a study claiming, intentionally evocatively, that dogs don’t like hugs.

As a dog owner, I have my own biases that would lead me to question this research in the first place. I’ve hugged every dog I’ve ever owned and feel like my best friends would have hugged back had they possessed the appropriate shoulder joints and bipedal orientation to do so. But, that alone isn’t enough to discount the conclusions. Part of critical thinking is having an open mind and accepting the idea that I may have been wrong all these years… but I am within my rights to doubt it. That is where the critical part comes in.

The first fact worth pointing out is that, despite what the various click-bait style articles claimed, the research findings were not reported in a respected, peer-reviewed science journal. They were part of a blog post by UBC psychologist Stanley Coren, who was reporting on some data he collected from looking at pictures on the internet. The idea for the research came from Dr. Coren bringing his dog to school one day as part of a “Doggy De-stress Day” for overworked undergrads. The well-meaning doctor observed that his dog was not enjoying the hugs it was receiving and felt like he was on to something.

Now, looking at the anecdote and the research objectively, there are a couple of red flags right off the bat. A major one is that “Doggy De-Stress Day” would be better named “Doggy Distress Day” as any animal – dog, human, turtle, gibbon – that suddenly finds itself being attacked by strangers who seem hell-bent on using their arms as restraints is likely to get a little freaked out. As for the data that Dr. Coren collected by analyzing internet photos of dogs being hugged (he found that a whopping 81.6% of the dogs in the photos showed signs of stress), it also presents a couple of problems. Chief among them is that the researcher has no knowledge or control over the context in which the photos were taken. Are these purely candid moments or are the dogs being forced to pose for an overly excited person pointing a weird, flashing plastic thing (camera) at them?

A good way to evaluate the scientific merit of a conclusion is to think about how you would go about researching it under ideal conditions. If we want to test the hypothesis that dogs don’t like hugs, there are simple ways to get closer to an answer than by looking at random pictures online. First, you would want the dogs in an environment that doesn’t stress them out, preferably at home. That would allow us to rule out the surroundings as a source of stress and focus purely on the hugs. Second, you would want to control for the person doing the hugging. In this case, the findings are seeking to scold dog owners for forcing human affection onto dogs, so the dogs should only be hugged by people they know and trust. Finally, we would control the situation. Are the hugs happening out of the blue or is the dog relaxing with its owner on the couch after a long day of hiking? These are things that matter.

The point I’m trying to make is one that compliments John Oliver’s message about media misleading people about science: sometimes the research itself deserves to be questioned. You don’t need to misrepresent flawed research to reach the wrong conclusion; the data will take you there on its own. All the more reason to go back to the primary source of a new and shocking idea and ask yourself a few basic questions about how the findings were reached – well-meaning or not.

Until someone conducts a more controlled study, hug your dog. It makes you feel good and that’s all your dog wants for you anyway.

Fort McMurray and the Roots of Human Kindness

Humans are full of surprises. If you watch the news, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that humans are the worst animals on two legs. We can be petty, selfish, mean, and violent. We wage wars, pollute the environment, and oppress one another for financial gain. But every so often something happens that allows us to glimpse the real nature of what it means to be human, and the results are among the most beautiful things on the planet.

Last week, in Canada, a wildfire ripped through the Northern end of the province of Alberta. Wildfires are a common occurrence in the boreal forest, but this one was unique for a few reasons. First, it was early; the temperatures under which the fire ignited were dry and incredibly warm (32 C compared to the average daily high for early May of about 16 C). Second, wind and very low humidity caused the fire to grow and move very quickly. Sometime on Tuesday, the flames arrived at the city of Fort McMurray, home to over 80,000 people. The fire ripped through neighbourhoods, destroying buildings and possessions along the way. By Wednesday morning, over 1,600 buildings had burned and some neighbourhoods lost 90% of houses. Shockingly, one thing that wasn’t lost was a single human life.

The evacuation of Fort McMurray was nearly as shocking as the fire that necessitated it. Nearly 100,000 people fled the city peacefully and relatively safely. Even still, cars and trucks clogged the only route out of the city as fire engulfed the forest all around. What made this possible was a human trait that has puzzled scientists for years: co-operation.

When the chips are down, as they were and continue to be for the people of Fort McMurray, few animals come together as comprehensively and effectively as humans do. As people ran out of gas on the highway, others shared jerry-cans they had with them. As fire victims made their way to shelters in Edmonton, Syrian refugees, who had only landed in the country months earlier with no possessions, gave anything they had to help. Even the beer company Labatt’s shut down their brewery to can drinking water for victims. Across Canada, tens of millions of dollars in aid have been collected. How can a species with such a mean streak in one context, be so generous in another?

There are many theories about human altruism but they all boil down to the idea of selection. Most people are familiar with Charles Darwin’s idea of natural selection, but on the face of it, helping someone out seems to be counter-productive. If there are more people around to compete for resources, logic suggests it would be harder for each individual to survive. But, selection also acts on groups, and those who work together stand a better chance of survival in the long run, compared to groups made up of people who can’t stand each other.

Some anthropologists believe that the human tendency to help out strangers, whom we see as being part of our larger social group, is what led to the development of our cultures and languages. As we worked together, it became more and more useful to have ways to connect and communicate with people we had never met before, for the good of the group.

Humans aren’t entirely alone on the altruism front, however. New research comparing us to other primates has shown that some species of monkey are also willing to lend a hand to those in need. Researchers at the University of Zurich in Switzerland compared several species of primate with respect to their willingness to give food to other members of their same species. They looked at 15 species in total, including marmosets and tamarins, lemurs, spider monkeys, capuchin monkeys, macaques, chimps, and human children ranging from 5 to 7 years old. What they found was that the species who were most likely to give food to someone else were also the ones who engage in something called cooperative breeding.

Cooperative breeding is the idea that when a baby is born, many adult members of the social group help to care for it, not just its parents. Animals that evolve the tendency to offer free childcare tend to live in rough situations. When resources become scarce, birds have been known to be cooperative breeders and the same is thought to have happened to our human ancestors as they came out of the trees in Africa and began life on the Savannah, where lions and their ilk made life way more dangerous. The upshot of cooperative breeding is that adults don’t have to wait until their babies are fully independent before having their next brood, resulting in better reproductive success for everyone in the group.

The plains of Africa are a long way from the boreal forest of Canada, but human cooperation appears to be geographically transferable. The people of Fort McMurray have a long way to go to get back on their feet, but at least they can know that their neighbours and millions of years of social evolution have got their backs.

Anyone wishing to help the relief efforts can donate to the Canadian Red Cross. Our hearts are with the people of Fort McMurray during this difficult time.

Death from Below: Supervolcanoes and What Makes Them Tick

A couple weeks ago we learned about how rocks from space can destroy cabins, cities, and even civilizations with little to no warning. Very few things in nature hold as much destructive potential as a wayward hunk of solar system leftovers on an unlucky path, but there is one other event that comes close and you don’t need to look far to find it. Approximately 30 km (18 miles) beneath you right now is a hot, churning mass of semi-liquid rock we call the Earth’s mantle and in a few select places around the planet, it has found a way to say hello in the most terrifying of ways.

Mantle plumes are columns of magma that rise up from deep within the Earth and form reservoirs of molten rock relatively close to the surface. The reservoirs contain the full range of materials that make up the inner-Earth, including solid rock and dissolved gases. The trouble with these reservoirs is that as more material flows into them, pressure builds. Sometimes, it builds to the point where the Earth’s crust cannot contain it and it explodes upward with startling force. This process is similar to what happens with the Earth’s many volcanoes, except it tends to be much, much bigger, and for that reason, we call these reservoirs supervolanoes.

The name is a little misleading because the processes behind (or more accurately, beneath) supervolcanoes occur on such a scale that they only vaguely resemble their smaller cousins. When these babies go off, there isn’t much you can do except head for your doomsday bunker. The generally accepted lower-bound size limit for a supervolcano is a reservoir with the potential to erupt 1000 km² of material. By comparison, the 1991 eruption of the regular volcano Mount Pinatubo  released 5 km² of material; just enough to circle the Earth a couple times and reduce average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere by half a degree C for a year or two afterwards.

Supervolcanoes erupt fairly frequently in geologic time and when they do, the effect goes a little beyond needing a sweater for a few extra days a year. Supervolcanoes release enough ash to block out the sun and usher in the ice ages. The most recent eruption from one of these beasts was 26,000 years ago in New Zealand. Another event at Lake Toba in Sumatra occurred 74,000 years ago and nearly wiped out the human race – geneticists have pointed at the Toba eruption as an explanation for the lack of diversity in the human genome. Apparently, our species was reduced to a few thousand people in the wake of the blast and the subsequent volcanic winter. The biggest eruption we know of took place 28 million years ago in Colorado and left behind over 5,000 km² of deposits, roughly the size of the island of Trinidad.

So where will the next world-shaking eruption happen? Basically, we have no idea. Despite being enormous and built into the planet we live on, supervolcanoes are hard to study. Actually, they are pretty hard to even find. The problem is that the destruction occurs on such an unimaginable scale that we tend to overlook it. The most telltale sign of a sleeping supervolcano is often a gigantic lake (flooded crater) or an absence of mountains where you would expect some to be. The latter is what allowed scientists to identify the caldera (aka magma reservoir) below Yellowstone National Park in the American west. Yellowstone’s last eruption blew up 50 km of mountains and left a caldera 50 by 70 km (30 by 50 miles) in size.

If you really want to figure out the odds of a supervolcano erupting, Yellowstone is the example to look at. On average, the hotspot beneath the park has produced an eruption once every 730,000 years. That puts the odds at around 0.00014% for any given year. The last eruption at Yellowstone was around 640,000 years ago, so you’ve probably got at least a few more years to go see Old Faithful and herds of bison. That could change though; scientists continually monitor Yellowstone for disturbances. The park experiences between 1,000 and 3,000 earthquakes per year as the caldera churns beneath it, so an increase in activity could mean an increased risk of eruption … or, it could mean pressure is being released and everything is safe.

Much like with death from the sky, supervolcanoes are unnerving in their ability to surprise.

Asteroid Rage: Big Impacts and Why They Are Scary

One of the more interesting things science can do for us is help us to imagine the end of the world. Whether it is born out of fear or just a sick fascination with our own demise, the number of disaster movies that hit theatres around the world every couple of years speaks to the fact that people like to imagine something big and bad going down. Among the most popular doomsday fantasies is the notion of a space rock smashing into the Earth.

This is only a fantasy however because of the brief span of human life and anecdotal memory. Stuff from space hits the Earth all the time. Over the 4.5 billion year history of our planet, we have probably been struck by tens of billions of meteors. That is to say, many find their way to Earth every year - even every day. Thankfully, most of these objects are small and don’t bare noticing beyond making a wish on a shooting star. Larger objects (the size of a house, for example) hit the Earth once every hundred or two-hundred years on average. Objects big enough to cause mass extinctions (like the dinosaur’s nightmare rock) show up every 50 to 100 million years or so.

But it isn’t just the size of a meteor that determines the damage it will cause. A number of factors go into calculating what happens when we welcome space rocks to the neighbourhood. Among the most important factors are the object’s speed, the angle at which it hits the atmosphere, what it is made of, and where it hits (water or land). Fortunately, there is an online tool called Impact Earth that is hosted by Purdue University and allows you to model any death-from-above scenario you want to dream up. With that in mind, let’s do some imagining:

Scenario 1: 30m object made of porous rock travelling at 30 km/s hits at 45 degrees over land 20 km from where you are standing.

In terms of large asteroid impact scenarios, this is one of the ones to hope for. According to Impact Earth, this object would begin to break up at an altitude of 81,600 meters. No crater is formed, although chunks do hit the Earth. Mostly what happens is the object explodes 21,700 meters above the ground with a force approximately equal the to bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of WWII. About a minute and a half after the explosion an air blast as loud as heavy traffic blows by, but you survive the event despite being relatively close by. The interesting thing about this scenario is that it played out in reality only a few years ago over Russia in February of 2013. A number of buildings close to the explosion had their windows broken and people were knocked off their feet, but no one was killed.

Scenario 2: 500m wide object made of dense rock travelling at 20 km/s hits at 70 degrees in the ocean 200 km from your beach house.

This is a bad day to be at the beach. This object hits the Earth with a force ten times for powerful than the largest atomic bomb ever exploded - the Zhar Bomb. The first effect you feel is a 7.1 magnitude earthquake that begins 40 seconds after impact – imagine a truck crashing into your house. The walls crack, dishes break, but that’s the least of your worries. Even before the shaking begins you would see a fireball that appears 4 times larger than the sun (in reality it is 3.6 km across). For a minute and a half after the blast the heat of the fireball is double the heat you feel from the sun. Three and a half minutes after touchdown you are hit by a dusting of super-heated particles that used to be the seafloor and ten minutes after impact a blast of air shatters any windows left standing. If you survive all that, you have about an hour to get as far away from the coast as you can before a wave between 9 and 17 meters (30 to 60 feet) high arrives to finish you off.

Scenario 3: 5 km wide object made of iron travelling at 35 km/s hits the Rocky Mountains at 90 degree angle to the ground while you watch from Vancouver.

You’ve pretty much had it with this one. You won’t have to worry about the air-blast that will knock down every building and tree  for hundreds of kilometers, 35 minutes after impact. You won’t have to worry about the fiery particles that used to be a mountain range reaching you 7 minutes after the blast. You don’t even have to worry about the magnitude 9.9 earthquake that begins 2.3 minutes after touchdown. What will finish you off in short order is the blast itself, which will go off with 76,600,000 MT of force (766,000 more powerful than that puny Zhar Bomb). The heat given off by the 100 km wide fireball will give you third degree burns over most of your body, ignite your clothing and even set any glass around you on fire. This impact would throw enough material into the atmosphere to block out the sun for about a year and leave a crater 136 km across and 1.3 km deep. Fortunately, even this is not a world-ender. The rock that marked the end for the dinosaurs was roughly twice this size.

We’ve only just scratched - okay, maybe severely dented - the surface of what meteor impacts can be like, but as you can see it is rarely a pretty picture. Worse still is that something Scenario 3 sized could surprise us, giving little to no warning before impact. Keep that in mind next time you’re trying to decide whether to splurge on your next vacation.

The Butterfly Effect: Grow Weed to Protect Monarchs

If you grew up during the 90's in Southern Canada, Northern Mexico, or anywhere in between, you probably have some fond memories involving Monarch butterflies. While the best that most insects can hope for is humans not noticing them, Monarchs have attained a special place in many people’s hearts mostly because they don’t bite and are strikingly beautiful. The orange, black and white wings of these creatures are so well known that they are probably the default image many of you think of when you hear the word “butterfly.”

Nothing gets to be as popular as Monarchs are, without either a really clever or unbelievably pervasive marketing campaign, and butterflies have opted for the latter. During the 90's, Monarchs were everywhere. I remember days in the schoolyard as a kid when, if the custodian had been particularly neglectful in mowing the lawn, you would have to walk through clouds of fluttering wings to get to the baseball diamond or the sand pit. I used to catch caterpillars and raise them into adults. It was a scene out of a damn fairy tale, but like most fantastic moments in life I didn’t appreciate it until it was over.

It has been a long time since I got to walk through a swarm of Monarchs and that isn’t just because I don’t spend my afternoons attempting to move enough sand to reach China; it’s because the butterflies that defined much of my childhood are disappearing.

It’s not that some evil person or corporation has set out on a mission to wipe out the Monarchs. It actually is the fault of a company many people would argue is evil (Monsanto – another story altogether), but even they aren’t doing it on purpose. See, much of the trouble for Monarchs can be traced back to the fact that they depend on a plant we consider a weed for their survival. They lay their eggs on, spend their caterpillar-hood living on, and exclusively eat Milkweed. Our prejudice for the plant is right in the name.

Milkweed used to be everywhere, mostly because it is incredibly hearty. Give Milkweed half a chance and it will spread like wildfire across farm fields, backyards, playgrounds, railroad tracks, and wherever else there is sunlight and soil. Unfortunately, thanks to genetically modified crops and advances in pesticides, Milkweed has had significantly less than half a chance to grow for the past two decades. On top of this, the forests in Mexico, where Monarchs spend the winters, have been decimated by illegal logging and climate change is making their migration tougher every year.

One of the most incredible things about Monarchs is the distances they travel. It isn’t that a single, massive population constantly exists all across North America; every spring, Monarchs in Mexico take to the sky and fly north. It is this migratory population that exists at different times of the year all over the map. That is part of the challenge; when you rely on so many different places to be environmentally intact, you are very vulnerable to one of them dropping the ball.

In the mid-90s, the total population of Monarchs was estimated at around one billion insects. Since then, thanks to the death of Milkweed and the other factors mentioned above, the population has fallen by over 84%. During the winter of 1996-1997, trees that were literally weighed down by blankets of butterflies covered over 18 hectares of land in Northern Mexico. By 2013-14 the area was less than one hectare. Things are bad in butterfly land.

Fortunately, there is hope. Citizens and environmental groups across the three countries where Monarchs range have taken action. This year, the group Monarch Watch in the US plans to distribute between 200,000 and 300,000 Milkweed plants for people to plant. In Canada, groups like the David Suzuki Foundation are doing the same. Along with these efforts, groups are working with farmers to rent land on which Milkweed can regrow, in what is called an “exchange.” The idea is that farmers rotate spraying pesticides on different areas of their land, setting aside a little each year for Monarch habitat.

Even still, the bugs are in trouble. This past winter saw a pretty impressive recovery in Monarch numbers, before a freak spell of frigid weather in Mexico wiped out as many as 100 million butterflies.

Fortunately, this is a problem you can easily help correct. Go online and find a group near you that is selling Milkweed and get to greening your thumb. If you’ve wanted to get into gardening but don’t think you have the skills, what better way to build confidence than to actively try to grow a weed? With any luck, the butterfly population will grow with your horticultural ego and generations of schoolchildren will be all the better for it.

Dabbling in Domestication: Why Can’t I Ride a Polar Bear to Work?

Civilization is a pretty astounding thing. The idea that one species can rise up from the struggle of nature to separate itself into an organized, globally-connected network of distinct but related cultures is pretty impressive; but it is also wrong. The connectedness bit is fair enough, but the idea that humans built civilization without help from any other species just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. To say nothing of the immensely cooperative plant species we have manipulated to make our way of life possible, there are a handful of animals that have contributed substantially to our comfort and well-being.

Domesticated animals are ingrained in every society in the world to the point where their names and sounds of their names are among the first things that children learn. But the curious thing about these creatures is why there aren’t more of them. Given that animals have proven so useful to people (and vice versa), why, out of the millions of species that exist, are there only eight real cornerstone species of human society? What is so special about cows, sheep, pigs, goats, chickens, horses, cats, and dogs?

In his enormously popular book Guns, Germs and Steel, biologist Jared Diamond lays out six criteria that determine if a species is eligible for domestication. Many animals demonstrate a few of these traits, but all six are required to turn beast into buddy. The rarity of finding all of them in the same animal goes a long way to beginning to solve the mystery of domestication. They are:

1. Easygoing eating habits – domesticated animals have to be able to live off food they can forage and scavenge in and around human settlements.
2. Fast growth (relative to humans) – an animal isn’t much use if it takes a decade of care to become big enough to pull a plow.
3. Willingness to breed in captivity – you can’t be shy if you live and love in a barn.
4. Docility – cows are a lot calmer by nature than water buffalo.
5. They don’t panic and flee when startled – or they have a stronger instinct to stay in a herd than run off on their own.
6. They conform to social hierarchy – they follow a leader like… well, sheep.

As awesome as it would be to have a grizzly bear bounce at your night club, they are severely lacking in trait number 4. A lack of docility also explains why horses have provided transportation for millennia, while the more aggressive zebra is left to graze the savannah in peace. Elephants have been tamed here and there, but have never achieved true domestication because they take 15 years to reach their adult size. These criteria matter.

When humans have identified and latched onto these six characteristics, we have been able to form some amazing partnerships, but as interesting as what we have been able to achieve is, there are the unintended consequences of selectively breeding for desired traits; what evolutionary biologists have dubbed “domestication syndrome.”

As it turns out, when you take a wild animal and domesticate it, there are a set of physical changes that occur that have little to do with any of the six criteria, but seem to go along with them anyway. Domesticated animals – when compared to their wild cousins – general have smaller brains, shorter faces, smaller teeth, weaker muscles, floppy ears, and blotchy coats.

The reason for these changes has long been a mystery, but recent research into the genes responsible for some of them has provided some clues as to why domestication syndrome is a thing. Apparently, selective breeding has tapped into a set of cells called the neural crest which, during the development of a fetus, shapes many of the features that change when animals are domesticated. Interestingly, changes to the genes that control the growth of these cells have also been connected to calmer, friendlier dispositions. There is even a human condition called Williams Syndrome, which manifests as a mild variation in facial development and unusual levels of friendliness. In other words, friendliness and floppy ears are genetically linked.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the features of domestication syndrome is that a lot of them can also be found in people. We may have big brains but our teeth, muscles, faces, and general physical presence pale in comparison to a below average chimpanzee. As we have domesticated animals, society has domesticated us. Something to remember next time you start to suffer from human superiority syndrome.