i have a few questions that often randomly resurface, and i find myself for a time pondering them and why i don't know the answer, but i'm never at my computer when i think of them and by the time i am i've forgotten them. eternally, they remain mysteries to me. important, vital questions, yet...even now they elude me. i'll remember them of the morn when i put my seedlings outside to harden.
so instead i'll offer (my memory and/or speculation of) answers, because i find trying to dredge up what knowledge i can remember stimulating (and then i can look up the real answers afterwards to satisfy my own curiosity).
Mine is "where do birds go at night?"
ah, an easy one. arboreal birds usually
do sleep in trees. you don't see them because they're not going to be sleeping in a place with human activity, and they're not going to be sleeping in the open. birds (especially of the kind that do sleep in trees) are incredibly flighty, and are more easily startled when they're asleep than awake. the slightest noise, and they're no longer asleep and ten trees south. finding a wild perching bird asleep by pure chance is nearly impossible unless that bird is ill or injured.
perching birds (which is not a vague term but refers to passerines) have a tendon in their legs which, at rest, clamps closed to grip a branch. they usually roost as high up as they safely can, and some species feel so insecure without a branch between their toes that they will never sleep in knotholes or nestboxes.
terrestrial birds (which includes all fowl, water and otherwise) sleep on the ground, usually inside bushes or dens or whatever other cover they can find. a few species of bird sleep underground, like the burrowing owl (which is also the only diurnal owl).
source: many years of studying and working with birds. speaking of which...
The twilight "crow commute" is impressive - just *rivers* of crows all flying towards their rookery for the night.
i also live in crow country! pigeons are pretty unusual around here (usually wood pigeons or collared doves) but crows are everywhere. they're very easy to befriend. i've somewhat humanised the local population by feeding them nuts every morning. they gather around the house and make a row when it's time for breakfast, usually about an hour after dawn chorus (i guess crows are late risers).
One question I’d love to know the answer to is how we discovered that metal coils can carry electricity through it, where exactly said electricity comes from, and how that invention exactly lead up to computers capable of making videos and songs without much if any human input?
oooh i've often wondered about this too! there's this popular refrain that humanity "tricked rocks into thinking" and that's what computers are but that's such a meaningless oversimplification as to be less than helpful. at least the circular "think of a computer as a brain" explanations make some sense and provide some insight into how things work (but all discussions about brains tend to revert to "think of the brain as a squishy computer" which is why i call them circular comparisons.)
as evidenced by above, my scientific knowledge largely ends at biology (and more to the point the behaviour shaped by and shaping that biology) and i don't really know the answer. i'm vaguely aware that electric eels (which aren't actually eels despite being called that) were a significant instigator in the early part of the process. or is that just a story? "humanity learned electricity from eels" has the feeling of a myth.
that said, i can speculate as to the discovery that metal carries electricity: it's sort of inevitable. once people started experimenting with electricity on a basic level, some of their tools would inevitably be made of metal, and it doesn't take much to work out that the metal tools transfer electricity much better than most others.
Here's my question though: Why do humans experience dreams at all? What purpose do they serve at all?
And similarly, what was the evolutionary purpose for the uncanny valley? I'm actually kinda afraid to find out why we'd ever need to have an impulsive fear towards something resembling a human, but not quite being one.
i'll answer the second question first: it's less an evolutionary purpose and more an accident of human pattern recognition (and more specifically facial recognition).
human facial recognition exists on two levels at once: the ability to recognise whether something is or isn't human (on the basis, broadly, of "how similar is it to my parents?"), and the ability to recognise
specific humans as distinct from one another. these are forms of facial recognition that most species probably have, though i think it's only been proven in mammals and corvids.
in any situation where you draw a line between two distinct groups, you're going to find something that has qualities that would put it on either side.
human facial recognition seems to fail on the human side of the line. meaning, if something could go either way, the default is human. this is the cause for "periodelia" which i may have mis-spelled, the effect of humans seeing faces in things that literally do not have them.
in meatspace, there's nothing that has qualities of both a human face AND a non-human face at the same time, so there's little cause to experience this line-staggering.
but...artwork can have both qualities at once. and that artwork can be uncomfortable to look at, because the automatic failsafe of "if in doubt, human" triggers at the same time a more intellectual examination asks "but is it?"
to oversimplify, it's instinct and intellect disagreeing. it doesn't have a purpose, it's the result of separate systems struggling to make sense of conflicting information.
fun fact! i'm a lifelong furry; and i'm really bad at recognising human faces. these are unrelated, but coincidental facts. i'm not faceblind. i can recognise human faces that i look at regularly and for protracted periods of time (meaning, basically, actors i watch a lot of). some humans can look at a photo of a child and a photo of a grey-haired adult and know they're the same human; or a fat human and a skinny one; or tell at a glance that two humans share a genetic link. i cannot do these things. even a few years is too much for me if i haven't seen the intervening stages and learned to recognise the new shape, the new lines. a haircut can completely throw me off, as can weight gain or loss. some humans can see through all of those.
i am really, really bad at recognising human faces. for a long time, i didn't think i'd ever understand what the uncanny valley is or what it looks like. it seems to require a more granular understanding of humanity than i possess.
until! the cgi lion king movie. i watched it, and i talked to a friend of mine about it. about how weird the lions' faces were. the wrong shapes, too long, their eyes the wrong shapes and in the wrong places. their whole heads moved in a way that didn't make sense, wasn't how lion heads moved. it all felt artifical. that was the overall feeling: the entire movie felt artificial, and it was because the faces were so badly-modelled. like the movie had been made by a team who had thousands of references videos of lions from every possible angle, yet somehow there was something obscuring the head of every reference lion they had, so they sort of just had to guess based on the vague details they could see beyond those obstructions.
and my friend was delighted. "aha!" he said. "so there is a furry equivalent of the uncanny valley! i'd always wondered."
"oh," i said, "so that's what the uncanny valley is. off-model. so blatantly fake that no amount of surrounding realism matters: you're loudly and constantly telling the audience that this is fake and you can't take any of it seriously."
...that got away from me.
i think the most basic answer to the question of "why do humans dream?" is "it's not deadly".
dreaming is largely accepted* to be the result of the brain transferring short-term memory to long-term, which is why the phenomenon of forgetting things after sleep is so common. those memories weren't transferred.
*which doesn't necessarily make it correct. a lot of things have been "largely accepted" only to be later proven utter shite.
but, that's still only answering the question of what causes dreams on a mechanical level. there may not be a "purpose" in the way you're asking. something being consistent within a species, or a certain sub-group within that species, doesn't mean that thing has a purpose. some things are just random. some things just
happen, and they aren't a net detriment to the group's ability to reproduce, so that's it. they continue to happen.
evolution isn't controlled. evolution has no purpose. evolution does not guide anything, not even reproduction; it is the coincidental
result of reproduction.
so maybe a more coherent answer is "it might be an accident of the process of memory, and it's not killing anyone so the gene for having dreams* isn't removed from the breeding population".
*some humans can't dream at all, almost always as a result of a head injury. their memory continues to function normally, and they seem to retain normal biological and psychological functioning, so...arguably dreams aren't doing anythign important, and really are just an accident.
that doesn't mean that's the only reason dreaming happens. sleep is a complete mystery that even the best biologists only
barely understand. actually, here's one of my Big Questions:
why do animals need to sleep?it's known that their basic functionality declines rapidly if they don't, and then eventually they die. WHY does failure to sleep cause this decline in function? why is this so universal?
no fucking clue. complete mystery. animals can literally die of not sleeping. nothing vital happens during sleep that doesn't also happen while awake. all the vital organs function the same way (actually, it's fairly common for animals to cease breathing entirely for brief periods during sleep, even humans, so if anything they function less).
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