[Intro] Last week, I told you about Dreadnaughtus -- a dinosaur that not only wins the prize
for having the awesomest name ever, it’s also the most massive land animal ever measured,
having weighed some 60 metric tons.
But that is nothing … NOTHING … compared to the largest animal that ever lived.
And it’s still living today.
Blue whales are, as far as we know, the biggest creatures the planet has ever seen.
Their hearts are about the size of your car.
Their tongues weigh as much as an elephant.
They can grow to more than 30 meters in length and easily weigh up to 180 metric tons.
That’s THREE TIMES bigger than the Dreadnaughtus!
But, about 50 years ago, blue whales were almost extinct.
For much of the 20th century, they were hunted in huge numbers -- as many as 30,000 of them
were taken in a single year.
By 1966, so few were left that hunting them was banned, and now biologists say, the largest
single population of blues seems to have finally gotten back to its pre-20th century size.
That group, sometimes known as the California blue whales, now numbers 2,200 individuals:
And according to a study of archival whaling records and other data, that’s about how
many there were before blue whale hunting became widespread in the 1890s.
This is big news for the biggest animal in the world, because it seems to show that at
least one population has gotten its numbers back to pre-hunting levels.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the rest of the species.
Back in the early 1900s, there were probably between 200,000 to 300,000 blue whales in
the world.
Today there are somewhere between 8,000 and 20,000 -- considering that they’re the biggest
creatures ever, counting blue whales is surprisingly hard.
So biologists say the new study doesn’t mean the whales are out of danger.
Far from it.
Blue whales lag behind other protected species, like humpbacks, which are recovering faster,
and all whales face new threats like warming oceans and getting hit by ships -- thought
to be a major cause of whale deaths these days.
So let’s hope that their enormous size is the only thing that blue whales and dinosaurs
end up having in common.
Now, it’s not exactly news that we use our phones -- and the social media on them -- to
dish on other people.
The things are basically designed to transmit and receive gossip.
But now a new study has used smartphones to track human morality.
And it’s not as creepy as it sounds -- probably.
It is being billed as the first real-time, real-world study of moral and immoral behavior.
German and American psychologists invented an app that’s basically part alarm clock
and part confession booth, and they gave it to 1,200 adults in the U.S. and Canada.
Five times a day for three days, the app sent an alert to the subjects and asked them to
stop and report what they, and others around them, were up to.
The subjects were asked to describe whether they had committed, saw, or simply heard about
either a moral or immoral act within the last hour.
And they got to decide for themselves what “moral” and “immoral” meant.
The psychologists say that their results corroborate a bunch of theories about how human morality
works -- we’ve just never been able to document them in the wild, as it were.
First of all, based on the subjects’ own reporting, people were twice as likely to
learn about immoral acts from other people than moral ones.
This seems to support the idea that gossip is important, a kind of social glue.
By dishing on other people, we strengthen our ties to the people we’re dishing with,
and in the process, we feel better about ourselves.
Psychologists have actually likened people gossiping to apes grooming each other.
Also interesting: People who said that they performed a moral act earlier in the day were
more likely to admit doing something immoral later that same day.
Now, whether that involved searching for hacked celebrity photos or aggressively cuddling
a noncompliant kitten, we don’t know -- but it confirms the practice of moral self-licensing
-- basically giving yourself permission to be bad after doing something good.
But, maybe the best news of all, people who reported having some act of kindness done
TO them were much more likely to perform a moral deed later that day -- a phenomenon
known as moral contagion, aka paying it forward.
So, the psychologists say their experiment corroborates what we already suspected about
ourselves:
Basically, we’re all just a bunch of apes with cell phones.
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