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Wouldn't a single image of an animal greatly improve understanding of animal behavior if previously we were unable to see the animal at all?
by JoshTko 6y ago
Wouldn't a single image of an animal greatly improve understanding of animal behavior if previously we were unable to see the animal at all?
- bglazer 6y agoYes, hopelessly extending this analogy, see the change in the way artists represented galloping horses before and after photography. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/06/the-galloping-horse-problem-and-worlds.html?m=1 https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/06/the-galloping-horse-pr...
- entee 6y agoAnd yet that was a snapshot of a dynamic process. Seeing an image of the horse didn’t actually reveal how it galloped, we had plenty of those and got it wrong. Seeing many images of the dynamics did, that’s a subtle but important difference. Movies are way more helpful than photographs. A crystal (or cryoem) structure is a snapshot of a horse standing still. We rarely care about that, though maybe we can guess that it uses its hind legs intensely because it’s very muscular. We do care about how it gallops, and don’t have a clue how with a single picture. Put another way, we have “pictures” of dinosaurs, but have limited understanding of how they socialized, interacted, moved. We have ideas and guesses, sure, most based on descendants and modern context. Hypotheses, but few answers. Now if we had a movie of a dinosaur...
- wbl 6y agoIf we have its scat and see footprints we can learn a lot: where it lives, what it eats, what's related to. The fluorescence methods+knockout/expression can get you that sort of thing.