Is there anything geekier than blogging from the prom? Come on out to St Paul for the party—Mary and I are the pair in lab coats, and yes, that is just a squid in my pocket.
Hey! Coturnix is horning in on my turf, with a link to fornicating devil beetles (these are not popular beasties in my neighborhood—we get swarms of them every summer, crawling through every crevice to invade our house.)
It’s cool to see, but I may have to send a few of the boys over to the quail-man’s house to teach him a lesson. Either that or reconcile myself to the fact that my niche faces growing competition.
The kooks at Answers in Genesis never disappoint—they always come through with their own daffy interpretations of things. It didn’t take them long to scrape up a few excuses for Najash rionegrina, the newly discovered fossil snake with legs.
They have a couple of incoherent and in some cases mutually contradictory arguments against Najash as evidence for evolution.
John Wilkins has an excellent linky post on the subject of race. My position on the issue is Richard Lewontin’s (seen here in a RealAudio lecture by Richard Lewontin), and more succinctly stated by Wilkins:
So, do I think there are races in biology as well as culture? No. Nothing I have seen indicates that humans nicely group into distinct populations of less than the 54 found by Feldman’s group (probably a lot more – for instance, Papua New Guinea is not represented in their sample set). And this leads us to the paper by the Human Race and Ethnicity Working Group (rare to see a paper that doesn’t list all the authors). They rightly observe that while there are continental differences in genetics, there is no hard division, and genetic variation doesn’t match up with cultural differences per se. There is a genetic substructure to the human population, but it isn’t racial.
I hear it’s National Poetry Month, but poetry is way out of my skill set. I was sent this interesting poem about Darwin today, though, so that will be my contribution.
If you want poetry with themes similar to what I write about, I suggest you read Phawrongula. It’s still being updated with new stuff!
It’s a busy busy day today.
Chuck Olson of the vlog Minnesota Stories is going to be taping the Geek Prom, so you might get a chance to watch us nerds online later this week…but come on, if you read Pharyngula you qualify to attend the Geek Prom yourself, so bag that boring Saturday night sitting around watching Star Trek reruns, and head on down to the Science Museum of Minnesota.
I’m also going to be interviewed for a podcast by Michael Koppelman of
At least someone found my idea of reinventing humanity inspiring: Nemo Ramjet rendered this version of of my hexapodal sapient.
It’s different than I would have pictured it—the way I juggled about the functionality of the head, I think the face would not have been at all recognizable as human—but the cool thing about imaginations is that ours are all different.
By the way, Nemo says he’s drawn him in the midst of a religious argument, railing against the possibility that humanity could exist in anything other than this divine form, modeled on his God.
It’s been a long, long day of committee meetings and classes and various other time-sucks. Time to unwind with a Friday Random Ten.
| Raspberry Beret | Prince |
| Make Your Move | The Delgados |
| Wayward Bob | Bonobo |
| A Town Called Luckey | Rilo Kiley |
| Horses | Patti Smith |
| Crazy Man Michael | Fairport Convention |
| Wicked Game | Chris Isaak |
| Down Slow | Moby |
| Not A Pretty Girl (live) | Ani Difranco with Indigo Girls |
| Shambala | Donovan |
It’s all about style. When you’re out and about looking for mates, what tends to draw the eye first are general signals—health and vigor, symmetry, absence of blemishes or injuries, that sort of thing—but then we also look for that special something, that je ne sais quoi, that dash of character and fashionable uniqueness. In humans, we see the pursuit of that elusive element in shifting fashions: hairstyles, clothing, and makeup change season by season in our efforts to stand out and catch the eye in subtle ways that do not distract from the more important signals of beauty and health.
Flies do the same thing, exhibiting genetic traits that draw the attention of the opposite sex, and while nowhere near as flighty as the foibles of human fashion, they do exhibit considerable variability. Changes in body pigmentation, courtship rituals, and pheromones are all affected by sexual selection, but one odd feature in particular is the presence of spots on the wing. Flies flash and vibrate their wings at prospective mates, so the presence or absence of wing spots can be a distinctive species-specific element in their evolution. One curious thing is that wing spots seem to be easy to lose and gain in a fly lineage, and species independently generate very similar pigment spots. What is it about these patterns that makes them simultaneously labile and frequently re-expressed?
