Blog Posts
What Is My Dog Thinking?
There are dog owners who are positive they know exactly what their dogs are thinking, and they are the ones who tend to anthropomorphize and project their own thoughts upon the dog. Say this dog owner is named Betty. My guess is that much of the time Betty is right, but probably not to the…
Psychiatric Holocaust
Eugenics and the Monstrous Objective of “Racial Purity” The Nazi Party embraced an ideology of purifying their population from anyone deemed genetically inferior—to create a master race that would take their “rightful place” as the masters of Europe. It was at the top of Hitler’s agenda and he and his henchmen worked hard to make…
Creativity and Mental Health Challenges
Many people know that Vincent Van Gogh was institutionalized during much of his creative lifetime and that he painted the famous Starry Night at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. He cut off his ear after an argument with Gaugin and eventually committed suicide. Other famous artists have also struggled with mental health issues, which is no…
The Canine-Human Success Story
Dogs ARE human’s best friend Genetic success is defined by numbers and dogs are a huge genetic success story. World-wide population estimates of dogs range from 700 million to 1 billion, usually listed behind the most populous large mammalian species of humans (7.8 billion- 2020), followed by cows, and sheep. For cat lovers, there are…
What Makes a Fox Tame?
Thanks to my friend Nora, another dog lover, for recommending the 2017 book: How to Tame a Fox (And Build a Dog) by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut. The book chronicles an extended experiment done in Siberia started in the 1950s by two amazing geneticists, Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut. They risked their careers…
Being a Scientist and a Novelist … Isn’t That an Oxymoron?
Cultural Division of the Sciences and Humanities We live in a culture where facility with science, facts and numbers are considered left brain activities and creative endeavors like fiction, painting and music are considered right brain activities. Individuals are supposedly trapped into primarily using one half their brain or the other. Further emphasizing this division,…
Donna Barten 