I’m surprised, as a matter of fact stunned, that modern behaviorism isn’t taking notice of the Constructal law as articulated by Adrian Bejan in his book “Design In Nature.”  To me the implications of the Constructal law are overwhelming and yet no behaviorist or biologist is taking note. So about a month ago I had […]

Also on Dog Star Daily is an article by Roger Abrantes on how to resolve the controversies about training methods. http://www.dogstardaily.com/blogs/dog-training—lets-end-fighting Abrantes divides the debate into the moralistic, the naturalistic, and the scientific camps. However what’s missing is an understanding of flow, a serious omission given that flow is the organizing principle of  nature. I suggest we […]

Adrian Bejan has just published an important article in a scholarly journal. He’s resolved the question in biology as to why large animals tend to live longer than small ones. It’s for the same reason that they are able to move more mass farther. http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120821/srep00594/full/srep00594.html Thanks to Russell below is an article that explains the […]

An unknown scientist has a website with an article entitled, “Kevin Behan: A Legend In His Own Mind.” http://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com The Unknown Scientist (US) purports to be a researcher and a competitive dog trainer, and I’ll take them at their word since he/she is indeed very intelligent as he/she is able to take complex research and […]

I think I was very nicely voted off the island and not wanting to persist over time if it doesn’t increase the flow, I will post my follow up remarks here.  My main point is that disagreeing with Operant Conditioning and using a term such as energy is not necessarily unscientific, which is how Eric […]

Impulse Control There’s a lot being said these days about impulse control given the increasing number of dogs being defined as  “reactive.” A dog that over reacts to innocuous events, does so because it feels compressed and it feels this way because it perceives itself to be the object-of-attention. After repeated sensitizations, the threshold of […]

I can understand how the dominance concept seems reasonable because it does seem self-evident. Nature does seem to be a struggle between individuals over scarce resources with dominance seemingly a cost-effective way of keeping friction and violence to a minimum. I started out in dogs believing it myself. As an apprentice trainer and then early […]

“Design In Nature” Zane, J. Peder; Bejan, Adrian (2012-01-24). Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization (Kindle Locations 1560-1564). Random House, Inc.. DIN: “One of the most powerful insights born from the constructal law is that social systems are natural designs that emerge and evolve to […]

Chapter Six   “Why Hierarchy Reigns” I think chapter six will prove to be the most critical chapter as in how the constructal law intersects with animal behavior. Today we find a reinvigoration of the debate over dominance. The last several decades the positive, learning theorists have been arguing there’s no such thing as dominance […]

Design In Nature: “As we have seen time and again, the constructal law was just waiting to be discovered. Its manifestations are so obvious and ubiquitous that we have danced around it for centuries—the hunches of scientists, the metaphors of poets and mystics, and everyday language (for example, “the tree of life,” “go with the […]

Here’s a point of distinction I’d like to make about this exceptional book and the principle of emotional conductivity, by which even human thoughts serve a flow principle (as well they should given the logical extension of the book’s premise of an overarching constructal law). “The constructal law captures the broad tendency of social organizations […]

“The verb “to design” has been monumentally unproductive in our quest to understand design in nature for three main reasons. First, it led to the common view that the things humans design are “artificial,” in contrast to the “natural” designs that surround us. This is wrong, because we are part of nature and our designs […]

Some maintain that science requires numbers, data must be quantified so that experimental results can be firmly established and replicated. Sometimes a small spike in a graph, a mere statistical blip on a graph indicates the presence of a new finding. I read recently that the Fermilab particle accelerator found a statistical anomaly, an unexpected […]

Here’s some interesting research on the function of tears that shows a link between crying and a decrease in sexual arousal and is prompting a flurry of interpretation. I’d like to suggest how this might fit into my emotion-as-energy model. First of all, the animal mind creates a virtual shell of insulation, a buffer zone, […]

I can say that the ability of a dog to feel an earthquake before it happens, often hours, is the same capacity of a dog to feel an impending epileptic seizure or diabetic attack in an owner, hours before it happens. Its sense of continuum is picked up through its balance circuitry and when there […]