The heartbreaking beauty of development

This is a spectacular video of the development of Clypeaster subdepressus, also called a sand dollar or sea biscuit. These are stunningly beautiful creatures (as are we all, of course), and it is so cool to see them changing here. The video starts with a little echinoderm porn — these animals are profligate with their gametes — and then we see early divisions, gastrulation, the formation of the pluteus larva, metamorphosis into Aristotle’s lantern (one of the more charming names for a developmental stage), and into an ungainly spiky juvenile.

This is why some of us are developmental biologists: it’s all about the exotic weirdness and delicate loveliness of transformation.


A Sea Biscuit’s Life from Bruno Vellutini on Vimeo.

Pro forma announcement of a pointless change elsewhere

What I suspect is the most popular Intelligent Design site on the net (which is not saying much at all), uncommondescent.com, is getting a bit of a shake-up. Bill Dembski is stepping away from it, DaveScot is no longer a moderator, they’re adding paypal donation buttons…well, OK. I’m feeling ho-hum about it all. Once upon a time, I’d check in weekly to see what flavor of nonsense they were promoting, but increasingly I’ve found that I simply don’t care what the kooks were saying. It’s become a nice self-constructed ghetto for the irrelevant lunatics, with the virtue that I can easily ignore them. The changes will, I think, make them even more boring.

Charismatic cephalofauna

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Christine Huffard sent me a note alerting me to the publication of her latest paper, and she thought I might be interested because I “seem to like cephalopods”. Hah. Well. I’ve noticed that Dr Huffard seems to have some small affection for the tentacled beasties herself.

The paper follows on an old tradition and an old problem. While people have no problem distinguishing human individuals, we have a tough time telling one individual animal from another. This perceptual difficulty complicates problems of studying variations in behavior or physiology, or monitoring numbers and behavior, in natural populations. One solution is tagging or marking the animals in some way, but that always has the risk of changing or harming the disturbed animals — non-invasive procedures are much preferred. This is an especially difficult problem with small animals, like zebrafish or small octopus; I’ve struggled myself with trying to track individual fish in experiments.

I came up with one solution, and Huffard et al. have come up with something similar: humans can be trained to recognize distinctive individual variations, and learn to identify single animals. In this paper, they describe a pattern of white pigmented regions that are consistent within single animals of the species Wunderpus photogenicus…and as you might guess, that is a great excuse to put together a collection of photographs of these aptly named animals.

[Read more…]

Aussie prudes

I’ve never thought of Australia as a particularly strait-laced place — rather the opposite, actually — so why have they elected a government that wants to do something as stupid as putting an internet filter in place for the whole nation? They claim that they’re out to block child pornography, the usual entry-level excuse to impose censorship, but then they also announce that they will filter “other unwanted content”, which means…what? Watch out, Australia, this is the first step towards allowing the government to control all of your information.

One opposition tactic that might work is to point out that there is one common piece of smut that ought to be filtered under these rules, but that many people consider virtuous: that work of unrepentant filth and violence, the bible.

The opposition is stirred, and rouses itself to action: a new party has emerged to fight the censorship, among other things. It’s called the Australian Sex Party, which better fits my image of the land down under.

Chumbawamba drinks a toast to Charlie

All of nature in its place
By hand of the designer
Comes our Charlie spins the world
From here to Asia Minor
In between the Platypus
And perfect Aphrodite
Charlie come with opposing thumb
To question the Almighty

Over the river and over the sea
Through holy storm and thunder
Steer a course for a brave new world
Of common sense and wonder

See the dancing President
The congressman and teacher
Jumpin’ to the music of
The wealthy Midwest preacher
Charlie come with a brand new dance
Get on the floor and follow
Find yourself a partner and
We’ll swing into tomorrow

Over the river and over the sea
Through holy storm and thunder
Steer a course for a brave new world
Of common sense and wonder

Armed with truth we’re stepping out
Come join the worldwide party
Charge your glass and face the world
We’ll drink a toast to Charlie

Over the river and over the sea
Through holy storm and thunder
Steer a course for a brave new world
Of common sense and wonder.

Philadelphia!

Everyone wants to know what I’m doing in Philly this week. Me, too! Here’s everything I know so far.

  • I’m flying in on Wednesday morning, 19 November. At 5pm, I’m giving a talk on science blogging at the Kelly Writers house on the U Penn campus.

  • Thursday, 20 November, is the big event: Janet Browne will be lecturing at 6pm. I’ll be there in the audience, enjoying myself. You should be there, too. You’ve all read her magnificent two-volume biography of Darwin, right?

  • Sometime after that, the evening of the 20th, I’m going to aim to attend Drinking Skeptically, at Tattooed Mom’s, 530 South Street.

  • On Friday, the 21st, I’ll be presenting at a symposium between 11 and 5. I don’t think this is open to the public, but I could be wrong — I’ll let you know. I’ll be talking about abuses of embryology by creationists and by some legitimate scientists.

There are many other items on my personal agenda. I might be doing something with the Secular Society of Temple University, if I can wedge it in. I’m certainly going to sneak away to a museum or two sometime: The Academy of Natural Sciences has always been a favorite spot of mine, and they’ve got a cast of Tiktaalik on display now. The Mütter Museum is also showing an exhibit on evolution and medicine. I’ll post something once I get there if my schedule firms up.

We have more details on the Friday symposium, which is open to the public.

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Hooray! I win the prize for longest title!

It’s a crazy world out there

It isn’t so good for a fellow’s sanity to get the full dose of my inbox all at once, rather than spread out over four days. I got my mail working again a little while ago, and just browsed through some of the crazy stuff you people send me. Be amused.

  • A priest dared to ordain women. He’s getting a reward, though: he’s being excommunicated.

  • A priest denies communion to Obama supporters. He’s intrinsically evil.

  • I have to give the Pastor Ray Mummert award to the Bishop of Lancaster, who has declared that the problem with the church is all those darned educated people who aren’t attending Mass.

  • Maybe I should find a case of a commentator saying something nice about someone. How about this? Sarah Palin is the incarnation of “practical common sense conservatism”. Well, you all know what I think of conservatism.

  • People are worried about the “mark of the beast”? Really? A company that makes recognition systems tries to preempt concerns that their devices are tools of the devil by making a suggestion in all seriousness that people should use their left hand in their scanners, because the bible says the mark is on the right. Little do they know but that agents of the anti-christ will be observing scanner use and writing down the names of anyone who uses the wrong hand in their satanic machines.

  • And of course I’m still getting lots of loony Catholic email over crackers. This one from a Catholic priest, I thought, was amusing.

    What about eucharistic miracles that have happened in our own times?
    http://www.dsanford.com/miraclehost.html
    this one was actually verified by a scientific team and some video footage.

    Also, my patron saint, saint joseph of cupertino (1603-1663), would levitate as he consecrated the host at Mass, this was witnessed by many people including the pope of the time and other secular leaders. he also performed other miracles just like all the official catholic saints …

    I think “just like all the official catholic saints” is the operative phrase here. Cheap tricks in front of credulous audiences…just like all of them.