Last spring, the All England Squid Fishing Championships took place, in which hundreds of fishermen strove to catch the largest squid. Unfortunately, the weather was not conducive to good fishing, and they caught nothing. Well, except for one person who discovered this cute little guy cling to his jig.
The winner!
This gives me hope. I’m going to sign up for a beauty contest right away.
[We are fortunate to have this transcript, taken by a company stenographer, from one of the early efforts of the resistance to instruct an army company in tactics. Although we now have more sophisticated technologies to hold these invaders in check, it is instructive too see how the American military in the 1950s struggled to cope with an unusual enemy, a struggle that was described in an excellent documentary produced by Warner Bros.]
Men — and ladies — the purpose of this briefing is to instruct you in the basic anatomy of the enemy. We have lost many soldiers to the assumption that these are just elephant sized beasts and that this is an exercise in big-game hunting; post-mortem analysis has found that many wounds that appear as if they should be instantly lethal actually miss major organs and allow the monsters to rampage on relatively unimpaired. I am here to shake up your assumptions and give you better targeting instruction so that you will more effectively kill the enemy.
Get this out of your heads right now. These are not overgrown familiar animals. These are giant ants.
Someone is appropriating my cunning strategems — everyone knows the way to get more hits on a blog is to talk about cephalopods.
It’s OK, though. I’m going to steal it.
Is this the time of year for metaphors about the old’uns fading away and new ones beginning?
(via Australian Geographic)
Biologist Carl Woese has died of pancreatic cancer at age 84:
Carl and his colleagues wrote two papers published in 1977 that overturned a universally held assumption about the basic structure of the tree of life. They reported that the microbes now known as Archaea were as distinct from bacteria as plants and animals are. Prior to this finding, scientists had grouped Archaea together with bacteria, and asserted that the tree of life had two main branches – the bacteria (which they called prokarya), and everything else (the eukarya). The new discovery added Archaea as a third main branch of the evolutionary family tree.
Woese was one of those guys who overturned a paradigm and became a founder of the succeeding paradigm. And he lived long enough to see the “dogma” he helped establish start to be undermined by new information, like recent suggestions that the common ancestor of all eukaryotes was likely Archaean, thus suggesting that having two main branches of life really does work as a model.
If there’s a better definition of success in a scientific career, I don’t know it.
…was, mostly, having houseguests. And falling behind on my writing, but in a good way. One of the perks of living next door to a National Park is that there’s an easy default option for entertaining friends who come to visit. It’s especially good if that National Park has climbable rocks to allow visiting kids to burn off a little energy.
It took some doing to get out of the house, though, because my guests were birders, and we’ve got some here.
Always make sure your houseguests have better camera equipment than you do.
I am actually staying home for several weeks, and it feels so good and relaxing. So this is kind of a self-portrait, I think.
(via)
You know, many species of turtles are in trouble; they’re just slowly dying off. So one Clemson student, Nathan Weaver, did a very simple experiment: he watched what happens when a turtle crosses the road.
Weaver put a realistic rubber turtle in the middle of a lane on a busy road near campus. Then he got out of the way and watched over the next hour as seven drivers swerved and deliberately ran over the animal. Several more apparently tried to hit it but missed.
What? People intentionally run over small animals on the road? I’ve been doing it wrong: I hit the brakes or swerve to avoid them, and there have been a couple of times I’ve stopped and carried a turtle across the road.
I’m rather appalled that anyone would think it entertaining to squash turtles just for the hell of it.
I’ve constricted my anus 100 times
Scientists intend to sequence Adam Lanza’s DNA. They’re looking for genetic markers for mass murder. Why? Because some scientists are stupid.
Some researchers, like Dr. Arthur Beaudet, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and the chairman of its department of molecular and human genetics, applaud the effort. He believes that the acts committed by men like Mr. Lanza and the gunmen in other rampages in recent years — at Columbine High School and in Aurora, Colo., in Norway, in Tucson and at Virginia Tech — are so far off the charts of normal behavior that there must be genetic changes driving them.
“We can’t afford not to do this research,” Dr. Beaudet said.
There must be genetic changes underlying this specific behavior? There is no reason at all to assume that. Furthermore, this isn’t “off the charts of normal behavior” — there have been 62 mass murder events in the US in the last 30 years. There are witch-burnings going on in Africa right now. European Americans casually exterminated the native population of the Americas, and now pens the remnant population in reservations where they are kept in poverty. We had entire nations worth of people involved in the mass murder of 6 million Jews in the last century. Hey, shall we round up a bunch of Germans and take DNA swabs so we can figure out what there is that’s unique to their genes that allows them to commit genocide? (I better be clear here: I’m being sarcastic. I really don’t think Germans have a biological predilection for racism or murder, any more than any other people.)
I would ask whether there is any reason to assume that this behavior is a heritable trait. Is there a familial history of mass murder? Are we really going to assume that the diverse individuals who have committed these horrific crimes are all related, or all carry some common marker that isn’t found in people who don’t commit murder?
I can predict exactly what will be found when they look at Adam Lanza’s DNA. It will be human. There will be tens of thousands of little nucleotide variations from reference standards scattered throughout the genome, because all of us carry these kinds of differences. The scientists will have no idea what 99% of the differences do. They will make dubious associations — for example, they might find a novel nucleotide in a gene that has other variants correlated with schizophrenia — and in the absence of any causal link at all, they’ll publish garbage papers that try to impute a signal to common genetic noise. Some idiot will make noise about screening for an obscure mutation that Lanza carried, just because it’s something different.
I wonder if there are neurologists poking around in his brain, looking for differences, too. It’s the same issue; we don’t understand the majority of the functional consequences of individual variations in connectivity in the brain, and we have a population with large amounts of random variation. So how are you going to recognize what’s special and unique and causal about Lanza’s brain (or Einstein’s brain, or my brain, or yours)?
Fortunately, there are some sensible people out there.
“It is almost inconceivable that there is a common genetic factor” to be found in mass murders, said Dr. Robert C. Green, a geneticist and neurologist at Harvard Medical School. “I think it says more about us that we wish there was something like this. We wish there was an explanation.”
I suspect the explanation is going to be more a consequence of individual experience, although of course biology is going to shape how we respond to circumstance. But to go rifling about in a genome we don’t understand to find a simple cause is ridiculous and futile. Sure, freeze some cells down and store them away; maybe some day we’ll understand more and there will be a legitimate and specific hypothesis that can be tested by examining killers’ genetics…but a fishing expedition is pointless and dumb, and at this state of our understanding, only opens the door to misconceptions and ethics abuses.
