Rigel Kent

A friend of mine is mycophobic. She is afraid of seeing living mushrooms and couldn't handle them as cooking ingredients, but she can eat them when they are cooked. I am curious about the exact etiology of mycophobia, but it is not well-documented in the literature. I rarely find any scholarly discussion on mycophobia. Many suggests maybe mycophobia has a cultural basis. My guess is that mycophobia should not be memetic. It should have a genetic basis. It should be hardwired in the DNA program and is transferrable to the next generation. Although this function is no longer very useful in the modern world. In the long history of human evolution, some groups of human, possibly living in a region surrounded by many poisonous species of fungi, must have evolved the defense mechanism to avert fungi species, for the fear of consumption of deadly mushroom species. This DNA trait is important for the survival of that particular human groups. I offer two hypotheses on the mechanism of mycop...

Darwin did something very important for us some 150 years ago, when he published his "On the Origin of Species" in 1859. This famous book, as you might already know, is about evolution. However, contrary to popular belief, Darwin is the not the originator of the concept of evolution. Darwin's grandfather, for example, had also a similar idea. The contribution of Darwin is that he conceived a logical notion to explain the mechanism of evolution. Darwin's explanation is quite simple indeed: the evolutionary mechanism is by natural selection. The important thing to highlight here is that evolution is not a theory, it is an observable fact. For example, that human and other lifeforms living on earth is an observable fact. To explain this fact, we may invoke the Jewish notion that we are created by Elohim using only dust of the ground. The Chinese also have a similar notion for the origin of humankind, they postulated that we are created from soil by a goddess named Nǚwā ...

The biological aspect of human gametic cells is very interesting. At birth, a baby girl has only a fixed amount of eggs (maybe around one million) in her body. When she reached a certain age, we will see that her breasts will begin to grow bigger, and a little genie residing in her ovary will say to these one million eggs: "ok, I shall now start to send you to meet your boyfriends". Each month, the genie will pick a few thousands eggs and give them whatever training that is necessary. At the end of the training, the eggs will need to take what is known as the atresia examination. And the egg who score the highest mark will get the chance to embark on a romantic journey. The rest of the eggs are not sent back to the reservoir, but they are destroyed. From that point onwards, about 13 eggs are ovulated each year from the egg reservoir until the woman reached what is known as menopause. So, for her whole lifetime, a human female will only release about 400 eggs. The number of t...