Cognition Switch #3

By Anne Hillborn, Justin Tosi, Brandon Warmke and 15 more

Cognition Switch: An Artefact for the Transmission of New Ideas

Issue #3: February 2019
Featuring Ideas by: Anne Hilborn, Justin Tosi, Brandon Warmke, Daegan Miller, Samuel Levin, Sam Dresser, Kyle Arnold, Marc Lewis, Shaun Shelly, Omnia El Shakry, Richard Stevens, Skye Cleary, Thony Christie, Nancy Kwak, Jason Stahl, Claire Fuller, Nathan Schneider, and Stuart Clark

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cognition Switch
• Release date: Feb 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9788829560714

Book preview

COGNITION SWITCH #3

Featuring Ideas by:

Anne Hilborn, Justin Tosi, Brandon Warmke, Daegan Miller, Samuel Levin, Sam Dresser, Kyle Arnold, Marc Lewis, Shaun Shelly, Omnia El Shakry, Richard Stevens, Skye Cleary, Thony Christie, Nancy Kwak, Jason Stahl, Claire Fuller, Nathan Schneider, and Stuart Clark

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Originally published by Aeon

Published 2019 by Cognition Switch

ISBN: 9788829560714

Thank you for your purchase. If you enjoyed this work, please leave us a comment.

1 2 3 4 10 8 7 6 5 00 000

CONTENTS

I. Bad mothers and why they make a difference to cheetah survival

II. Moral grandstanding: there’s a lot of it about, all of it bad

III. A future just, green and free, under a tree named Karl Marx

IV. Proof of life: how would we recognise an alien if we saw one?

V. How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free

VI. The divine fire of Philip K Dick’s religious visions

VII. We need ecstasy and opioids in place of Prozac and Xanax

VIII. Every Sufi master is, in a sense, a Freudian psychotherapist

IX. How the marvel of electric light became a global blight to health

X. Simone de Beauvoir’s political philosophy resonates today

XI. Galileo’s reputation is more hyperbole than truth

XII. This striking feature of Manila makes it an emblematic global city

XIII. Do conservative think tanks help to balance policy debates?

XIV. In the gap between writer and reader the novel comes to life

XV. How much does it matter whether God exists?

XVI. Cosmologists should be more skeptical of dark matter

I. Bad mothers and why they make a difference to cheetah survival

Anne Hilborn is a PhD student at Virginia Tech. She studies cheetah hunting behaviour in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania in collaboration with the Serengeti Cheetah Project run by the Zoological Society of London and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

https://aeon.co/ideas/bad-mothers-and-why-they-make-a-difference-to-cheetah-survival

I have a sneaking sympathy for female cheetahs who don’t have cubs. Usually, if a female doesn’t produce independent offspring, eyebrows are raised, and judgmental comments about ‘bad mothers’ are bandied about. But whenever I watch a cheetah being used as a jungle gym by her cubs, bitten, patted, stalked and jumped on, having her tail pulled while trying to sleep in peace, or keeping a look-out for predators while her cubs eat, I think of Cambazola.

Cambazola never managed to raise a cub. She started several litters but almost all of them died young. By the time I knew her, Cambazola was middle-aged and utterly cub-free. Distinguished by her pale colour and an unusual tuft of hair coming out of the side of her face, she would spend all day lounging on a termite mound, snoozing when she felt tired. When she was hungry, she would go and calmly catch a gazelle, no cubs bounding out of hiding at an inopportune moment and ruining the hunt. No one used her as playground equipment.

There are certainly perks to being bad at this whole mothering business.

Cambazola was not alone in being terrible at raising cubs. The Serengeti Cheetah Project has kept track of individual cheetahs by their unique spot patterns in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania since 1980. By watching generations of fuzzy cubs grow up and have cubs of their own, we can construct maternal lineages of cheetahs. One of the things we’ve learned is that the majority of female cheetahs in Serengeti never manage to raise a single cub, despite giving birth to multiple litters. This extreme variety in reproductive success means that we can trace many of the cheetahs in Serengeti back to a couple of SuperMoms (my name for the minority of cheetah mothers who manage to raise more than two cubs to independence in their lifetime). Cambazola’s grandmother was a SuperMom with five cubs that made it to adulthood, including Cambazola’s mother Camembert. But the cheese lineage stopped at Cambazola. What makes SuperMoms different from females such as Cambazola, who are unable to raise a single cub?

The answer has to do with the skills it takes to be a good mother, given the complex challenges of raising cubs in Serengeti. These were illustrated in two days in May 2014 that I spent watching Asti and her five young cubs while conducting my research on the hunting behaviour of cheetahs. Asti’s cubs were quintessential cheetah babies: they wrestled with each other, climbed and fell out of trees, and clambered over and chewed on their mother.

For much of that time, Asti was alert, watching out both for the promise of food and the threat of predators. While not much prey was visible, on the second morning, a hyena wandered up and regarded the cheetah family with vague curiosity. Asti stiffened, crouched down and then rushed the hyena, who seemed rather taken aback by Asti’s defence efforts. However, rather than attack Asti or the cubs, the hyena hunkered down until Asti returned to her cubs, and then continued on its unhurried way.

I had never before seen a mother cheetah actively defend her cubs, and was impressed by her willingness to risk her own safety against such a powerful predator. I added this to my mental list of all the things Asti had done right in order to raise her cubs through their first dangerous three months. First, she had found a den that would keep her cubs safe while she was away hunting. Cheetahs usually den in tall vegetation of marshes or in rocky outcroppings called kopjes. Unfortunately, those are also places where lions like to spend time, and if they find cheetah cubs they will kill them. Second, she had managed to find a denning location with