News You Can Bruise

Maggie is always asking "Do horses lay eggs?" or saying "Bears lay eggs!" etc. We finally made a chart to help her remember the different types of animals and which ones lay eggs.

Best activity ever!

I mentioned earlier that every museum in Cambridge had a Darwin exhibit for the bicentennial. Exhibits vary in impressiveness, of course. The Whipple Museum of the History of Science had "Darwin's Microscope", which was... a microscope. The Fitzwilliam Museum had the awesome exhibit I mentioned earlier, but photography was prohibited. The Zoology Museum had a few specimens collected by Darwin, including a jar of octopods and a beetle collection. Fun fact: on the Beagle voyage, Darwin was really excited because he thought he'd discovered the octopus's color-changing ability, and he was pissed off when he got a letter back from England saying that they knew about it already.

I haven't posted for a couple days because each of the things I was going to post required putting up a picture gallery from my Cambridge trip, and I didn't want to make a bunch of galleries. So I've just put up one gallery, and I'll mine it for a while, even though you can see all the pictures now.

But you don't need to go to Cambridge museums to enjoy Darwinmania. It's also occuring on the web. Here are some of the links on Darwin and/or evolution I've encountered in the past few days:

• A video lecture on "The World Before Darwin", seemingly to be joined by further lectures, on The Darwin 150 Project (the "150" is 150 years after publishing On the Origin of Species, which I guess is a more scientifically hardass milestone than the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth).
• Cartooning Evolution includes a lot of the silly 19th-century Punchesque Darwin caricatures that were featured in the Fitzwilliam. (But not the excellent 21st-century watercolors by Quentin Blake, which I couldn't find a good picture of online, though here's a video slideshow.)
• A roundtable discussion moderated by Douglas Adams, featuring Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, and Jared Diamond. Supposedly from 1998.

Rachel came up from London and we walked around town. We spent a lot of time in the Fitzwilliam Museum, especially at the Endless Forms exhibit that's part of the general Darwin-mania here due to the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. There were a number of cool pieces I wrote down to share with you, but tonight I post about Duria Antiquior, a painting I'd seen in a Steven Jay Gould book but never in color or the size of a wall.

Here's the original, a watercolor created soon after the discovery of ichthyosaurs, dimorphodons, and other cool creatures. The best part is that everything is eating something else, sometimes using hilarious I'm-crushing-your-head perspective tricks.

Here's the huge oil painting they had at the exhibit, a copy possibly used as an educational guide. It's got a lot more detail, but there is one thing missing. In the original, the plesiosaur in the middle is literally shitting itself in fear as the huge icthyosaur crushes its neck, forming what will eventually become coprolites. In the oil painting, this informative detail is omitted.

The original artist was Henry De la Beche, and his other drawings (1 2 3) may shed some light on exactly how funny Duria Antiquior was supposed to be.

I went to the Natural History Museum last week and was shocked to find that, despite the name, Basilosaurus was not a lizard. It was a cetacean! Curse you, misleading precedence rules for species names!

When I was younger I read a Stephen Jay Gould essay about how textbook authors copy from each other instead of coming up with original ways of expressing ideas. The textbook (or, metatextbook, I guess) example is that Eohippus has been consistently described as "the size of a fox terrier" for over a hundred years, as the fox terrier itself has plummeted in popularity, and as the number of people who need to learn about vertebrate evolution despite not being the kind of Nick Charles WASPs who would know what a fox terrier was anyway has climbed.

I reread this essay today and I must have gone through postmodern puberty since my first reading, because this time I saw the subtext. Human culture is supposed to change and propagate quickly, by Lamarckian means. But the blind, semantics-ignorant copying seen in these textbooks shows that culture propagates by slower Darwinian processes too.

Textbooks evolve through sexual selection. Nothing selects against this bizarre and useless (and, Gould claims, wrong) comparison between Eohippus and a fox terrier, because nobody ever reads that sentence and tries to make sense of it. It is junk DNA. The whole text of the textbook only exists to make it larger, so it looks more attractive to school districts. All the resources are going into improving the textbook's plumage.

The reason I read the essay in the first place is that I've seen the fox terrier comparison three times in the past month or so. This is twenty years after big-shot paleontologist Gould publishes an essay totally slamming the comparison, with no one coming forward to explicitly defend it. The first time I saw it was next to an Eohippus in the horse evolution exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. I guess it was about the right size, but I've seen a real Eohippus fossil and I've never seen a real fox terrier, so what do I know? Could we get a more helpful comparison in a real museum exhibit right next to the actual skeleton? (The Gould essay makes a tenuous connection between the AMNH and the original source of the comparison, so maybe they're just being stubborn.)

The second place I don't remember where I saw it. The third place was in a book I just read called The Eternal Frontier, an ecological history of North America. Apart from the fox terrier comparison it was a pretty good book, though it was written by an Australian which means it exhibits the cowboy obsession common to non-North Americans who write about North America. It was also pretty depressing since it portrays the entire history of life as organisms going in and really screwing things up for other organisms (though occasionally an non-organism like an asteroid or an ice cap really screws things up for everybody).

How to Extract DNA from Anything Living. Come back here, you!

Found via lonita's links log, found via you-know-what.

Visit the La Brea Tar Pits. Motto: "The el lugar place for the la brea tar." The museum has (or had, last I was there) an ingenious carnival game type exhibit that lets you be a Smilodon trying to escape the tar. But there is no escape!

These crazy Texans have written software that maps a phylogenic tree onto a circle, the result resembling a cross-section of the trunk of a real tree. For maximum confusion, use this software to diagram the relationships between different types of tree. There's a monster PDF that shows a representative sample of all of life on a big circle. Excellent visualization, though I think it blurs the real distance between two arbitrary species. You think it's correlated to the distance between the two around the circle, when you actually have to go down the tree to find the common ancestor. Obvious application of this fallacy: unroll the circle, and you've got the Great Chain of Being.

It was a patio, fringed by a little lawn and with a swimming pool, bricked in by cinder block walls. It could have been the backyard of anyone in any LA suburb. It was quiet, like in the mountains, like when someone turns off a radio.

"Why have you taken me here, spirit?" The hooded figure said nothing, just stared at the blossoms that floated across the pool in a fragrant scum.

There was a grimy barbecue grill off to one side of the patio. A garden hose stretched halfway across the lawn like an exhausted snake. The sky was blue with a couple smears of clouds, looking as though they had been put there to distinguish the sky from other blue things. All these were facts about the area, but which one was the important one?

I played it cool. I turned on the garden hose and watered the lawn for a little bit. There was a white metal gate to an unused side yard with lawn chairs stacked in it. I ran out of lawn and started spraying the cinder blocks with water, my thumb over the mouth of the hose.

The figure turned and pointed a finger at me. The finger, the hand, the arm that held it up were shrouded in a darkness as deep as the void.

"At the age of fifty," it said, "your fingernails stop growing."

Now I knew the game. I dropped the hose and parried.

"If the pancreas fails," I said, "the liver can take over some of its functionality."

"Jellyfish are chordates, like tunicates," said the spirit.

"Some wasps make honey, the way bees do," I said. "But you shouldn't eat it because it'll make you sick."

"That's very interesting," said the spirit. "I never knew--". It shook from the bottom up, like a movie hologram. It fell, or leapt, into the swimming pool, which swallowed it whole. A slick remained on the surface, which I dispersed with the hose.

Wasp honey. I'd have to look that up. I went into the house.

Sometimes when I'm drifting off to sleep or when I actually am asleep, I experience this weird jerk. Harlan Ellison comes into my room and starts berating me. No, what actually happens is a muscle spasm which, if I'm already asleep, might wake me up with a sudden dream-sensation of violently tripping over something. In an inversion of my overbite belief, I always thought this was just some weird quirk of my biology, but today J. Bradford Delong reveals that it is a general feature of humans. It's your brain unplugging your motion and speech centers so that you don't chase rabbits in your sleep. So when you dream, one part of your brain is acting the Cartesian demon to the other parts, intercepting commands to your body and creating the sensation of their fulfillment.

So far this year I've gotten 40 megabytes of spam and 46 megabytes of email viruses. But I've only gotten about 325 email viruses, and I've gotten about 5000 pieces of spam. This makes me think that spam and email viruses represent the two reproductive strategies. Spam is the sturgeon strategy where you send out thousands of tiny, defenseless eggs and hope that one or two of them come to fruition; whereas email viruses are the human strategy, where you create fewer, larger offspring, imbuing each of them with the skills they'll need to survive and reproduce.

I'm starting to worry about RSI, and I've found these yoga exercises useful. #2, in particular, helps a lot (in alleviating my fears of oncoming RSI; possibly not in other respects).

More potential Twilight Zone hosts: the two cops from Law And Order: Oh My God A Body. Disadvantages: they would have to cross networks to host the show. Advantages: the episode would start just after it would have ended had anyone else been the host, and the cops would come on the scene and spend the entire segment cracking wise about the character's misfortune. "Looks like the victim's face was normal, yet everyone else had a hideous face, so the standards of beauty were reversed!" "Yeah, reminds me of my mother-in-law." "He'll be getting his beauty sleep now, that's for sure." "Twenty years on the force and I've never seen irony like this." Etc., etc.

This reminds me that for my entire life until about a year ago, until I got braces, I thought it was normal in humans for the upper and lower teeth to meet, because that was how my teeth were. Now it turns out that (what I thought was) a slight overbite is normal.

Is genetic testing the top of a slippery slope that will lead inevitably to mindless armies of "Frankenclones" controlled by the maniacal whim of the high priests of science? Some, who take their funding from Big Hubris, say no; but other, more thoughtful, voices are telling us that it's already happening.

Sumana has the day off, so we went to the beach, over by Mike's old house. We both got our feet soaked due to larger than average waves that struck while we were looking at something (an interesting rock, a sand dollar). The beach is populated by the snowy plover, who wade in the backwash of a wave and then run like the dickens when a new wave approaches.

PS: I've been looking (but not very hard) for a Web taxonomy, and here is one (it looks complete, but I don't know that it is). Extra cool thing: it gives you a Google image link so that you can search for images of a particular species. It knows not to bother with keeping its own database of organism images! (But for some things there are no images.)

PPS: What is Escherichia metacoli? Something that helps E. coli digest its food?

"TreeMap is an experimental program for comparing host and parasite trees." Unfortunately, it has a couple of bugs.

Because of a programming error the distribution of cospeciation may be slightly biased towards rejecting the null hypothesis of cospeciation if the host and parasite phylogenies are small.

That's one of those technobabble sentences that people quote to point out that something makes no sense to them, but that actually does make sense to me, so I guess I'm quoting it for the novelty of such a thing happening.

What if evolution were such that adaptive traits could only take hold in a population with the help of an advertising campaign? I'm envisioning an ad for sexual reproduction:

"You got your gametes in my gametes!"
"Hey! you got your gametes in my gametes!"
"Wait a minute... it's a genetically different organism!

This is a rather amusing article. Biotech patents are "making a mockery of the world patent system", not because said system deserves to be made a mockery, not because biotech patents are generally evil... because biotech patents are really long and use a lot of paper! Yes, you read it here first. Actually, you probably read it at Sci Tech Daily first.