This comic is incorrect, because no evolutionary biologist thinks like that. Change “biologist” to “psychologist”, though, and that’s all it takes to make it accurate.
Congratulations to the Best Picture! At least it wasn’t Crash.
I didn’t watch the Oscars. Instead, I watched Roma on Netflix during the ceremony. It was a tough sell — the movie I’d seen before this one was Alita: Battle Angel, so the contrast was shocking. Cleo doesn’t battle a single cyborg even once in the whole show. It was also a long slow build, with the interminable beginning just being the floor getting washed and other mundane tasks by a young housekeeper in a Mexican home.
Also, in this one I wouldn’t have minded the dog getting shot. No one ever played with Borras, but he was always pooping on the floor, and anytime the door was opened they had to yell at the help to hold the dog. He was just another chore for Cleo.
But the movie may be a slow build, but it becomes increasingly affecting, and it deals with how the working poor have to cope with emotional trauma that is far more common and damaging than robots on roller blades. Roma isn’t a popcorn movie, and it’s the kind of movie where every frame is supposed to be art, but I think I spent my evening well.
Mikey Neumann is probably my favorite movie reviewer, but I’m only saying this because I agree with all 5 of his top movies for 2018.
A single piece of paper, handcut to create shading, produces…
That has got to be terrifyingly fragile. Just sweating on it, or handling it roughly, has got to risk damaging the delicate strands of paper holding it together. Put it in a frame under glass, because just looking at it is giving me the heebie-jeebies!
Wouldn’t most specialty shop delivery trucks have a phone number painted on the side? So you could see what the service offers and immediately pick up the phone and say “Yes, please”?
Frustrating.
Wow. Tom Björklund has been making these amazing paintings to humanize Neandertals. Here are a few examples:
It doesn’t take much — a father teaching his child, a flower in the hair — to wrench one away from the usual distanced view we have of dead bones and stone tools. These were people.
I’d like to see a similar approach to australopithecines. We can see emotions in a chimpanzee — you know that Lucy had just as rich a repertoire of feelings as they do. We can only imagine how they expressed them.
Urglegurgle. I’m trying to prep a lecture on synapse formation, and just discovered that Herzog’s amazing film about Chauvet cave is available…so I’m trying to scribble up technical notes on molecular biology while getting constantly distracted by 32,000 year old cave paintings. It’s good to live in the 21st century, but I think my brain is getting full.
(Also on FtB)
OK, this is no fair. This is an illustration for an alternative history novel, a book about World War I as fought between biotechnology (Darwinists) vs. industrialists (Clankers).
Now I really want to read Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. I’m unfamiliar with the author, I have only the vaguest notions about the content of the book, but I just put it on my Amazon wish list for that picture alone.
It looks like I missed my chance — I think this place was only a few blocks from the hotel where I stayed in Brighton a few weeks ago. An artist has put together a montage of 400 casts of women’s personal bits, called The Great Wall of Vagina. It’s impressive and rather pretty.
You know, I’ve been planning some research on natural variation in populations, and I’ve been looking into variation in limb morphology as an easy assay…but man, I’m looking at that and thinking there’s an even bigger reservoir of natural varieties right here in the human population. Somebody ought to do a study on that — preferably with a multigenerational sample and sibling comparisons to to see how much of it is heritable. We’d need to develop some standardized metrics, though, and it would probably be a much bigger project than I could handle at this point in my career, not to mention the strain it would put on the eyebrows of the human research review committee.
I did take a quick scan of the research literature, but only came up with this one source that mentions the paucity of research in this field.
Howarth H, Sommer V, Jordan FM (2010) Visual depictions of female genitalia differ depending on source. Med Humanit 36(2):75-9.
Very little research has attempted to describe normal human variation in female genitalia, and no studies have compared the visual images that women might use in constructing their ideas of average and acceptable genital morphology to see if there are any systematic differences. The objective of the present work was to determine if visual depictions of the vulva differed according to their source so as to alert medical professionals and their patients to how these depictions might capture variation and thus influence perceptions of ‘normality’. A comparative analysis was conducted by measuring (a) published visual materials from human anatomy textbooks in a university library, (b) feminist publications (print and online) depicting vulval morphology and (c) online pornography, focusing on the most visited and freely accessible sites in the UK. Post hoc tests showed that labial protuberance was significantly less (p<0.001, equivalent to approximately 7-14 mm) in images from online pornography compared to feminist publications. All five measures taken of vulval features were significantly correlated (p<0.001) in the online pornography sample, indicating a less varied range of differences in organ proportions than the other sources where not all measures were correlated. Women and health professionals should be aware that specific sources of imagery may depict different types of genital morphology and may not accurately reflect true variation in the population, and consultations for genital surgeries should include discussion about the actual and perceived range of variation in female genital morphology.
Somebody get to work on this! The artists are beating the scientists to the data!
The focus so far has been on the perception of the female genitalia, but it seems to me the really interesting question is in the source of these amazing variants.
