To take the apple as a forbidden fruit is the most unlikely story the Christians ever cooked up. For them, the forbidden fruit from Eden is evil(邪恶的). So when Columbus brought the tomato back from South America, a land mistakenly considered to be Eden, everyone jumped to the obvious conclusion. Wrongly taken as the apple of Eden, the tomato was shut out of the door of Europeans.

What made it particularly terrifying was its similarity to the mandrake, a plant that was thought to have come from Hell(地狱 ) What earned the plant its awful reputation was its roots which looked like a dried-up human body occupied by evil spirits. Though the tomato and the mandrake were quite different except that both had bright red or yellow fruit, the general population considered them one and the same, too terrible to touch.

Cautious Europeans long ignored the tomato, and until the early 1700s most of the Western people continued to drag their feet. In the 1880s, the daughter of a well-known farmer wrote that the most interesting part of an afternoon tea at her father's house had been the "introduction of this wonderful new fruit--or is it a vegetable? ""As late as the twentieth century some writers still classed tomatoes with mandrakes as an "evil fruit".

But in the end tomatoes carried the day. The hero of the tomato was an American named Robert Johnson, and when he was publicly going to eat the tomato in 1820, people journeyed for hundreds of miles to watch him drop dead. "What are you afraid of? "he shouted. "T"ll show you fools that these things - are good to eat! Then he bit into the tomato, Some people fainted. But he survived and, according to a local story, set up a tomato-canning factory.

If you have a dog, you’ve probably tried to train it. There are some basics, such as sitting, staving not going to the bathroom on your rugs. And if your dog learns things quickly, you might start to think it’s really smart. But if you really want to know about dog intelligence, you have to look at non-dogs as well to understand what’s special to dogs and what is just typical of groups they belong to.

Stephen Lea. a retired professor of psychology from the University of Exeter, and his team looked at hundreds of published studies to compare dog cognition (认知) with that of other animals. They found that dogs are good at picking up on social commands.

Lea explained, “They are good, for example, at using human pointing or following human gaze, looking at what you’re looking at. We’re not saying dogs aren’t good at those tasks, they are. What we were saying is that there are some other animals that are just as good at them, like bottle-nose dolphins and gray seals.”

Lea also said, “It’s not something that’s unique to dogs or indeed very unexpected in dogs, given the sorts of animals dogs are. In other words, they’re domesticated (驯化的). They’re original from social hunters. And importantly, they’re carnivores (食肉动物). They belong to a big group of mammals that also includes cats, hyenas, otters, bears, and also the seals and sea lions, which we sometimes forget about, but which, of course, are also very easy to train despite not being domesticated.”

And while dog cognition may not actually be exceptional, their noses definitely are. Their sense of smell—they can tell the extraordinary things, like which of two identical twins they’re looking at or sniffing (嗅) at. Lea also points out there are some tasks that dogs apparently cannot do, such as using tools or exhibiting self-awareness. However, he said, “There’s always the possibility that someone, somewhere is at this moment trying to prove that a dog can do something that we said it couldn’t. But if you can find it, we will happily change our minds.”