this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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That's the one silver lining. My biggest fear is that things won't get worse fast enough. Humans, being dumber than frogs, won't jump out of a pot of boiling water if you raise the heat slowly enough. I can only hope that the next four years are so terrible that we learn our lesson and have it actually stick this time.
Fun fact: in the boiling frog experiment, the frogs were 'pithed.' Jam a stick in their skull and scramble their brain.
Frog spinal cords have a lot of reflexes. They'll use one leg to wipe a painful stimulus off the other. They'll jump. But they accommodate pretty quickly and won't get excited enough to jump out of slowly warming water. Gotta have a brain for that.
Recounted here: https://archive.org/details/studiesfrombiol00martgoog/page/398/mode/2up
Original ref: Goltz, F. 1869. Beiträge zur Lehre von den Functionen der Nervencentren des Frosches. Berlin, 1869, p. 127, etc Which is actually online: https://ia801200.us.archive.org/15/items/b22344937/b22344937.pdf
arent we 'pithed' too? distractions and brainwashing galore to turn us away from ourselves and the problems around us...