Great! Except…
I reject “Darwinism”. I didn’t ooze out of a Darwinian slurry. No priest of mine can be a devotee of a 175 year old dogma? He sounds an awful lot like Herbert Spencer.
Never mind. No cults allowed.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Flying a unicycle to Jupiter!?
That seems a very odd if memorable metaphor and trying to work out how long that’s take and how it’d get ito orbit is , well,, yeah.
That said, taking a unicycle into space and trying it there could make for some intresting if probly pointless footage..
“A bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as a chimp with a 400-gram brain,” said Onur Güntürkün, who studies brain structures at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.
The Weinersmiths are adressing the average reader with the webcomic. There is not space enough to explain that the ideas about evolution are constantly evolving themselves, as new facts are absorbed.
“Darwinism” here serves as a buzzword including not just the 19th-century knowledge but everything that has been learned since.
If the webcomic had been aimed at academics working on subjects linked to evolutionary concepts the terminology would have been inacessible for many “outsiders”.
Takes my “humble origins do not invalidate us” line to the next level in spirit.
Reginald Selkirk @2
Thanks for the informative article. Looks like bird brains do their circuitry development differently so there might not be as much homology between similarly functioning regions. I have heard of a memory region in birds called the hippocampus but that seems sus.
Paul MacLean (and Carl Sagan) did quite a bit of damage to how vertebrate brain evolution is envisioned. The DVR which underlies bird cognition could be construed as the reptilian brain as it is alluded to in the article.
Reginald: Maybe 403rd gram is the charm…?
That’s basically the sentiment attributed to Pratchett: “I’d rather be a rising ape than a falling angel”.
I’m going to recommend some musician friends name their band: Darwinian Slime! Awesome title.
Is this “fittest 10%” pseudoscience something new, or has it just escaped my notice until now? Not long ago, a colleague of mine told me about arguing with a MAGA relative who tried to justify large numbers of people potentially suffering under Trump’s policies by claiming that it is a biological “fact” that only 10% of any species thrives in nature. Is this some new libertarian attempt to spin natural selection or some old social Darwinist canard that has been resurrected?