Two Centuries Ago...

Once in a while, maybe not quite once a century, a person will come along who will have the Next Big Idea, who will shape the course of history. A person that can change the way people think, and can in fact still affect our ideas today.

Oddly enough, on this day in 1809, two people were born on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean who would come to shape their century. One, of course, was our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln.

The other was Charles Darwin.

Happy birthday, Charles Darwin!

This year is not only the bicentennial of Darwin's birth. He published The Origin of Species at the age of fifty, which makes this year the 150th anniversary of its publication, as well. So as you might imagine, this is a jubilee year for evolutionary biologists. There are conferences going on all month, commemorative articles, magazines and journals, and other fun and celebration. Check out the Darwin Day official website to learn more about what's going on this month and all year!

Celebrating Darwin Day is nothing new; scientists were celebrating him by 1909. This year, of course, is a Big Round Number year, so there are more things going on than usual. Have a very happy Darwin Day!

For your reading pleasure:

• The Origin of Species, available through Google Books.
• The Descent of Man, same
• Newsweek article about Darwin and Lincoln
• Smithsonian Magazine article about Darwin and Lincoln, and the table of contents for the February 2009 with them on the cover!

The 40 Million Year Old Virgins

Imagine, on this cold near-solstice day, that in the spring you go out to a nearby pond and collect a sample of water. You bring it home, put a drop on a microscope slide, and take a look at the pond's microcosm. Zooming around your sample are a wide variety of "wee beasties" -- you might see a blobby amoeba, a diflagellate like Chlamydomonas, and many other single-cell organisms.

Then a large, mostly transparent creature comes into focus. It doesn't look like all the others. It's far more complex, like a mechanical sea creature in miniature. Something like this:


Beautiful, isn't it?

This is a rotifer, a tiny aquatic animal in the phylum Rotifera. It may be small, but it is bilaterally symmetric and has a distinct head. It pulls in food particles with the wheel-like structure (hence "rotifer" or "wheel-bearer") around its mouth.

The rotifer pictured above is, however, special for another reason. This is a bdelloid rotifer (the b is silent). You are looking at a species that has not mated in at least 40 million years.

All bdelloid rotifers are female, and they reproduce by parthenogenesis. (Olivia Judson talks about them at length in her excellent book, Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, and wrote a column about them in June.) This is highly unusual, since it is generally thought that gene exchange is an important mechanism for evolution. Yet with no sexual reproduction, how could the bdelloids have speciated so intensely (there are estimated to be 350 species) and persisted for so long?

Researchers at Harvard and Woods Hole may have the answer. In a paper published in Nature in May, geneticists found that when they analyzed rotifer DNA, they found genes known to occur in plants, fungi, and bacteria. This evidence suggests that rotifers have been engaging in horizontal gene transfer (HGT).

HGT is a well-known phenomenon, but it was primarily known from single-celled organisms. For example, many bacteria are known to incorporate novel genes from other members of the population, or even from other species. When you only have one cell, it's not too hard to get a novel gene into that cell. Most animals, which are by definition multicellular, can't do this; most of us pass our genes to our offspring via specialized reproductive cells, which are typically hidden away inside gonads. Unless novel genes make it to the sex cells and can therefore be passed on to the next generation, HGT has not taken place. (Passing genes to your offspring is vertical inheritance.)

Bdelloids, however, appear to be capable of massive horizontal gene transfer. Gladyshev et al. point out that this is not a case of rotifers simply retaining genes that are common to all life; that case is both extremely unlikely and not supported by the data. Instead, they suggest,

It may be that HGT is facilitated by membrane disruption and DNA fragmentation and repair associated with the repeated desiccation and recovery experienced in typical bdelloid habitats, allowing DNA in ingested or other environmental material to enter bdelloid genomes.

With their proclivity for moist habitats, bdelloids also run the risk of dessication. They are able to withstand repeated dessication; in fact, it might be necessary for the continued success of the entire class, since this appears to be the mechanism by which they gain new genetic material. The authors conclude,

Although the adaptive importance of such massive HGT remains to be elucidated, it is evident that such events have frequently occurred in the genomes of bdelloid rotifers, probably mediated by their unusual lifestyle.

So, in conclusion, bdelloids have done away with sex as we know it, but periodically get turned into rotifer jerky, incorporate new genes while their cells are cracked open, and when reconstituted and repaired produce more copies of themselves, thus passing new genes to the next generation.

Lots of questions remain; for example, what are rotifers doing with all these new genes? (One example is a bacterial gene for cell walls; no one knows how an animal might make use of a cell wall.) I will keep you posted on all rotifer-related news updates. Stay tuned!

References
Gladyshev, E. et al. "Massive Horizontal Gene Transfer in Bdelloid Rotifers." Science 30 May 2008: Vol. 320. no. 5880, pp. 1210 - 1213

Judson, O. "The Weird Sisters" The New York Times, June 3, 2008.

Better Know an Insect: Fungus Farmers

Happy Thanksgiving!

A few weeks ago, I read some interesting papers about mutualisms in ecological networks.

Here is a thought-provoking opening sentence from one of them:

About 40 – 60 million years before the advent of human agriculture, three insect lineages, termites, ants, and beetles, independently evolved the ability to grow fungi for food (Mueller & Gerardo, 2002).

As you digest your delicious Thanksgiving meal, think of all the things we farm, and the complex relationship we have with agriculture, with farmers, and with the organisms we farm. Then contemplate that insects did it all way before us with their tiny little nervous systems.

Leafcutter ants are one of the lineages that have developed the ability to farm. You might have seen leafcutters in a museum -- they're popular exhibits because they will build their entire colonies readily inside an enclosure and only require a steady supply of leaves. They are the champion farmers of the insects; in some areas, they are considered major agricultural pests because they will strip all vegetation near their colonies to feed their fungus colonies.

The life cycle of leafcutter ants is something like this: when a new queen hatches, she takes a small amount of her home colony fungus along with her on a specialized structure on her thorax when she makes her nuptial flight. After mating, she founds a new colony with the fungus she carried with her. The fungus grows on decomposing vegetation -- leaves -- which the queen initially supplies. After her first offspring have developed, they take over the role of leaf-gathering so that the queen can focus entirely on laying eggs.

Humans go to great lengths to maintain their crops. We spray insecticides, fungicides, and other chemicals to keep our crops disease-free. Ants have developed a system to do this as well -- on each worker is a small patch containing beneficial bacterial colonies. These bacteria secrete antibiotics that help protect the fungal crop from disease. The ants can also adjust the kind of vegetation brought into the colony, and will not bring leaves that have previously been rejected by or toxic to the fungal crop.

Two amazing, related facts about leafcutter ants: 1) they are native to the Americas (especially Central and South America) and are not found on other continents; therefore, when you see a line of leafcutter ants in The Lion King (sorry, I'm having a hard time finding a screenshot) that is an error.

2) While most leafcutters make their homes in the tropics, one species actually lives as far north as southern New Jersey.

There's loads more to say about leafcutter ants, but I mainly wanted to talk about farming in this post, since it sort of relates to Thanksgiving. Perhaps I'll write about them again soon. Eusocial insects are my favorite insects to talk about since they do so many amazing things. Look for more on ants in the future!

Sources:
Mueller, Ulrich G. and Nicole Gerardo. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 November 26; 99(24): 15247–15249.

Better Know an Insect: Femme Fatale Fireflies

Last night Dustin and I took an evening stroll through the park. It was a lovely, warm evening, with robins singing from the treetops and a slight breeze rustling the grass. And, of course, there were fireflies, lighting up the summer night with their romantic display, a visual analog to a bird's song.

Males, seeking females, blink their message in code, while females sit and wait on the ground for the right guy to come along. When she sees him, she blinks back until he finds her, and that's where baby fireflies come from. Aww.


Unless she's a hungry female of the genus Photuris, that is.

After Photuris females have mated, they don't need to mate again. But why waste a perfectly good signaling device? Instead, the Photuris females signal back to males of another species, Photinus, luring them in and catching them for dinner. Delicious!


But he's not just a tasty meal to help her lay eggs. It turns out that Photinus males produce a chemical that protects them from attacks by spiders and other arthropod predators. By eating Photinus males, the Photuris female acquires this armor and is herself protected from attack.

So, the next time you're out for an evening stroll in July, consider the drama playing out before you. There are dangerous femme fatales everywhere you look.

Read more about it on this page from Cornell.

Fashion + Science

At first I was very distressed that these flippin' awesome shirts appeared to only come in one color each for women, while men had their pick of several. Then I realized that you can actually just design your own -- color, cut, everything. Sweet!

Now the only question is, do I prefer "the devil put dinosaur bones in the ground" or "the five basic elements"? Such hard decisions!

Teach the controversy... Atlantis did exist!

Better Know an Insect: Plant-Ants and Ant-Plants

"In the present paper, plants with ants living in them will be called 'ant-plants'; the ants will be called 'plant-ants.' "

~Dan Janzen (1966)

Whatever you decide to call them, myrmecophytes (ant-plants) are an interesting area of research. I recently wrote a term paper on the subject because they came up in the chapter on mutualisms and I couldn't stop thinking about them.

This is a bullhorn acacia tree; similar trees live in the tropics around the world:


This is a South American acacia-ant, Pseudomyrmex ferruginea (sorry, it's sort of blurry):


These species need each other to survive. The acacia produces enormous thorns, which a recently mated queen can hollow out to build the first chamber of her colony. She lays eggs and cares for them by using food provided by the plant in the form of extrafloral nectaries (glands on the tree that produce nectar) and Beltian bodies (small blobs of protein that grow at the end of leaflets). As the colony grows, they hollow out more thorns to use as brood chambers and for other purposes.

Sounds great for the ants, but what does the tree get for giving so much? Easy -- the tree gets a standing army, equipped with painful stingers and biting mandibles. The colony of ants protects the tree from all herbivores, both small (they will either kill or carry away any insects that try to eat the leaves) and large (those stings are effective on large mammalian herbivores as well!).

An African acacia, with large mammalian herbivores.

The ants also act as a landscaping crew. The workers use their powerful jaws to mangle any vines that attempt to climb the tree and destroy any saplings growing within a certain radius. Acacias are susceptible to being shaded out by other trees, so this landscaping is of great importance to the tree's survival.

Mutualistic ants are critical for the tree's wellbeing. In fact, if the ants are experimentally removed from an acacia, the tree is rapidly destroyed by herbivores. (Janzen found this in his landmark study in 1966, the source of the introductory quote.) It is believed that ants have taken over the role of secondary plant chemicals, which normally function as the plants' defense against herbivores. Rather than increasing the toxicity of their leaves, this group of acacias has lost their secondary chemicals and have gained instead a standing army.

This relationship has, not surprisingly, been parasitized by closely related species of ants. You can learn more about this, and the role that large herbivores play, in this video.

There's a lot more to tell about this relationship, but this post is getting long. I wrote a term paper on it, so let me know if you want more ant-plants and plant-ants!

Links: More photos of acacias; "Weird Plants"; a webpage comparing the symbiosis between ants and plants to a nuclear reactor (welcome to the Internet!).

Massive NY Times Update

One of my favorite hobbies (if you can call it that), as you have surely noticed by now, is reading the New York Times. I love the Times. I am a Times junkie. When I don't get to read my articles I get a little cranky.

What's your favorite section? (Tell me in the comments!) You might think that mine is Science, but you're only half-right... it's actually more of a toss-up between Science and Opinions. I love the editorials and columnists, especially arguing with David Brooks and calling people with incorrect opinions names while sitting at my computer. I also read the Education section religiously, looking for religion trying to interfere with education.

The upside of this is that it gives me a lot of blogging material. The downside is that I got backlogged during the end of the semester and I now have more articles to post about than I will ever get to, since new stuff keeps appearing! (That's why they call it the news.) Very frustrating. So, here is a rundown of everything I wanted to post in the last few weeks, with brief commentary, all in one big post. They're not in any particular order, and some of them are not recent, but they're all interesting reads. Enjoy!

• Exodus Exegis -- Kristol's editorial about the 3 presidential candidates' Passover greetings.
  
• Bambi (1942) -- the original review of Bambi, back when deer were more cute than a nuisance.
  
• Tests Confirm T. rex Kinship with Birds -- geneticists confirm what we've known for a while.
  
• 2 Clues Back Idea that Birds Arose from Dinosaurs -- paleontologists had this idea already fleshed out in 1993. Based on evidence from bones. Oh, the horror.
  
• Noble Eagles, Nasty Pigeons, Biased Humans -- humans tend to assign morality to the animal world, to varying degrees and with various consequences for our perception. I could write a whole blog post about this, but I think I'll hold off for now.
  
• An Elephant Crackup? -- one of the most moving, fascinating, and troubling articles I have ever read. Published over 18 months ago, it still haunts me. War has considerable consequences for animals other than humans.
  
• Albert Hofmann Dies at 102 -- the inventor of LSD made it to 102; in related story, flying pink elephants have turned 70.
  
• From Auschwitz, a Torah -- a Torah that survived Auschwitz is restored and rededicated. The story of how it was found is a great read.
  
• Battle at Kruger -- how an 8-minute amateur video of lions, buffalo and crocodiles became an Internet phenomenon and then the subject of a 1 hour documentary. If you haven't seen the original, check it out. Note: had I posted this video, I probably would have titled it, "Between a Croc and a Herd Place."
  

What, you're still here? I didn't give you enough stuff to look at? Go read some of these articles!

Jurassic Peck

This morning was notable in that (among other things) it was the first time I've been bitten by a dinosaur hard enough to draw blood.

I'll start at the beginning.

As part of my course on field ID of birds, our field excursion today was to our professor's house to mist net for birds. A mist net is a very fine-gauge nylon net that, when properly hung up and stretched taut, is nearly invisible to birds. The nets we were using were for small birds; catching the resident turkeys takes considerably more than a mist net!

Step 1: Hang up mist nets and go away for a while.

Step 2: Come back and check out the catch of the day.

A little help here?

The little cutie in the net there is a tufted titmouse, henceforth a "tuftie". Tufties are related to the chickadees. They can hang upside-down from branches while foraging, they're fun to watch at feeders, and they can open sunflower seeds by hammering on them with their bills.

The next step is to disentangle the bird from the mist net. All you need to do is gently loop all the little openings in the net over the various limbs and head of the bird, coaxing it out while retaining a firm but gentle grip on it. After all, they are small and very delicate. Be gentle and it should be relatively painless.

The question is... for who?

Getting a screaming, angry tuftie out of a net is a pain in the hands. As in, the damn thing bit mine AND WOULD NOT LET GO. You know the webbed part of your hand, between your thumb and index finger? Imagine a beak that is meant for cracking hard seeds has just gotten your hand into its mouth and you cannot do a damn thing to convince it to let go. The upper bill is slightly decurved, which means that simply pulling your hand out of its mouth will cost you a piece of hand.

Now, imagine that it finally does let go, and begins using that strong, pointy beak to hammer down on the back of your thumb knuckle, which is the closest piece of flesh to its face, but there's no way of holding the bird without exposing something to it, and this is the best option. Oh, and did I mention that they can hang upside-down? That's because they have very strong feet with very sharp claws. And the thing is... if you let go of the bird for a second, they have a tendency to get themselves more caught up in the net than before, prolonging the time the two of you get to spend together. Also they're noisy little critters, and they don't stop yammering the entire time they're biting you.

So your best option, really, is to swear like Calamity Jane on a bad day, adjust your grip, and remember that you weigh approximately 2600 times as much as it does.

Was it worth it? Look at this photo -- that's my hand!!

Deceptively cute!

It's just like they always say, a bird in hand is worth being pecked and bitten! (Something like that anyway.)

The other birds we banded were not *nearly* so quarrelsome as the tufties. We had a total of two robins, three tufties, and four or five white-throated sparrows.

Untangling a sparrow.

Once you have the bird in hand, it does actually get pretty easy. Even the angry little tufties calm down a good bit when they're out of the net and in your hand. The next step is, naturally, to actually band the bird. You pry open a tiny aluminum ring, record the number on it, and close it again so that it just hangs on the leg of the bird.

Haha, we've got you now!

After you've banded the bird, you let it go. It's that easy. If we were doing a study of bird diseases, bird health, or anything like that, we might take a blood sample, weigh the bird, take a few measurements, etc., but today was just a banding day.

Nice sparrow picture.

Sparrow showing off his leg band.

One of the robins after banding.

The way we released the birds was by holding them on their backs and slowly opening our fingers. Some of them fly off almost immediately, but not all... occasionally they need to "take a moment" before getting back to what they were doing before they got all tangled up. Watch in this video as Jay releases a bird! (Don't bother adjusting your speakers; there isn't any sound. My camera only takes silent movies. Just imagine the sound of wings flapping.)

So, aside from the fact that my knuckle still hurts, this morning was amazing. Birds are so tiny -- sometimes we forget how little there is under all the feathers. Feeling their hearts beating in your hand is amazing. They're so fragile and so beautiful. And yet despite their size they will stand up to you and let you know exactly how they feel about being deceived, ensnared, and manhandled. Marvelous little creatures.

PS: Don't believe me that I was bitten by a dinosaur? Read this... geneticists have finally agreed with what we've already known for a while!

Eat More, Make Boy Babies

It's always a nice thing when things I learned about in Animal Behavior class come back and may actually *gasp* apply to humans!

Boy or Girl? The Answer May Depend on Mom's Eating Habits

A little background: I can't find the reference right now, but a few years ago I read about a study that showed that mating success among male red deer (I think it was red deer) was directly correlated with how much they were fed as fawns. Only a fraction of the males in a population -- the biggest and most impressive -- will mate. However, since these males get all the mating opportunities, their mothers' genes are spread through many grand-fawns. This is good for grandma deer, since her fitness goes up every time her son reproduces.

On the other hoof, a wimpy son won't get to reproduce at all, effectively halting the spread of grandma deer's genes through the population. When times are tight, it makes more sense for a doe to produce a female fawn, because most females, even ones that didn't quite get enough to eat as babies, will reproduce at least once or twice in their lifetimes if they make it to adulthood. She might only get one or two grand-fawns, but this is a lot better than none at all.

At least, that was the hypothesis. But the researchers checked out the sex ratios of deer during good and bad years... and found exactly what they had predicted. Remember, deer are mammals too, and have the same kind of X-Y determination that we have. But females can control, to a certain extent, the sex of their offspring. That is pretty freakin' amazing, in and of itself.

And that's what they're referring to (at least partially, I think this has been found in other organisms as well) in the last line of this article. If it really does happen in humans, we wouldn't expect to see a radical skewing because we still have a genetic component and I would guess we don't want heavily skewed ratios. But we might expect to see a slight change in the ratios, which we do. Your body doesn't know that there is a lot of food in the world or that you want to be a size 6; all it knows is what you put into it. Skip breakfast? Times must be lean; better make a girl. Hearty breakfast? Excellent chances of producing a dominant male -- make it a boy! If I remember correctly, our closest relatives do have dominance hierarchies with top males getting most of the matings (although I think there are opportunities for other males to breed as well), so this isn't coming from out of left field, evolutionarily speaking.

I have to wonder what the implications of this study might be. Moms in China having big breakfasts to increase chances at boys? Women who want daughters skipping meals? What if parents want different sexes? Will fathers be able to say, "You're not eating enough, you're trying to deprive me of a son!" I don't know what the end result will be -- after all, it's a small study. There are still so many things that are unanswered. What is the mechanism for this kind of sex determination? As some comments on the post have pointed out, how does the father's health figure into this equation? It should be an interesting area of research for years to come.

Edit: OK, here's some more info. What I'm talking about is the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. I realize that Wikipedia isn't a great source, but not everyone will be able to access the original paper at JSTOR. (Also, they were talking about caribou, not red deer. My bad.) Oh, and the Wikipedia article also includes a citation about primates, although they're macaques and not great apes. There's also this article at BioOne titled "Maternal Diet and Other Factors Affecting Offspring Sex Ratio: A Review." If you want to try to find it through your own institution, here's the rest of the info: Rosenfeld & Roberts, Biology of Reproduction, Volume 71, Issue 4 (October 2004).

PS [dang, I wish I had a timestamp]: EVEN MORE info from the Science website, but this should be accessible to everyone for the next few weeks. But they mention Trivers-Willard as well, so I was on the right track before and therefore I am not crazy, I am just a bio geek. Yay biology!

Smoking Guns and Drunken Logic

Today is April 18!

You know what that means, right?

Today's the day Expelled opens nationwide!

The Times has a brief and scathing review.

From the review, it sounds like Ben Stein listened to Billy Flynn: "Give 'em the old razzle dazzle, razzle-dazzle 'em... Long as you keep 'em way of balance, how can they spot you've got no talents?"

You're just a bagel, Ben. And your arguments are like a piece of Swiss cheese -- nutty and full of holes.

PS: I couldn't bear to post a picture of Ben Stein's smug face on my blog, so I put up a picture of Mr. D. instead. He looks displeased about the movie too.

10 Reasons to Rent "Life in the Undergrowth"

Rent it! D. and I just watched the last episode a few weeks ago. It is amazing. It was far too short, in my opinion, for all the diversity of creepy-crawlies out there, but it was nonetheless an astonishing nature documentary.

There are actually eleven good reason to rent it. Check out these ten video clips that the producers considered the highlights of the series.

(Don't worry, they're short, but if you're really pressed for time, the slugs mating, the feather-legged bug, and the titan beetle are my favorites. Oh and the bees. Check out the bees!)

The eleventh reason? This man:

Sir David, with friend.

Sir David Attenborough -- do you need any more reasons to watch anything? Go rent it now! I know for sure that Netflix has it. Enjoy!

Godwin's Law: The Movie

A new movie is coming out this Friday called Expelled. It claims to present evidence that intelligent design (aka creationism) is being pushed out of academia despite being well-supported and a good alternative to evolution. Oh, and it also links Darwin to Hitler.

Right.

It is propaganda and lies, pure and simple, which is why I'm not actually linking to the movie's web page. (Learn more here.) I actually had this quandary a few weeks ago, and here comes Pharyngula with a solution to my problem! I couldn't bear to link to the actual movie page and boost their Google ranking, but I couldn't just let Ben Stein and his pseudoscience slide under the radar entirely. NCSE to the rescue!

The Tortoise and the Hare

This morning I volunteered at Run for the Woods, the EcoGSA's spring 5K to benefit Helyar Woods. I'm not a runner (I think I've mentioned my knees), so I was staffed at a tricky part of the course, guiding runners and making sure they stayed on track.

Standing about in the woods on a beautiful morning left me plenty of time to think. I was thinking about races in general, and Aesop's story about a tortoise and a hare, and I wondered: what's the difference between a turtle and a tortoise or a rabbit and a hare?

I'm pretty sure I can outrun this guy.

First, tortoises. Tortoises are a kind of turtle; specifically, the kind that lives on land, eats plants, and can't swim. (Although they can float. Maybe.) All of the tortoises are in the family Testudinidae, in the order Testudines. As far as I can tell from Wikipedia and from Vertebrate Life (one of my favorite textbooks!), they seem to be a "good group;" that is, they are all descended from one slow ancestor. I can't seem to find anything called a tortoise that is not in Testudinidae. Which is actually not what I was expecting to find; I had been under the impression that tortoise was a catch-all term for turtles that live on land. Interesting! So, tortoises are a kind of turtle.

Definitely not this guy.

Hares, on the other hand, are not a kind of rabbit. Rabbits and hares, along with pikas, are all in the order Lagomorpha. Lagomorphs, in turn, are not rodents; they're the sister order to rodents, and are thus closely related, but there are significant differences between the two. Rabbits and hares are both in the family Leporidae, but the "true hares," again, as far as I can tell via Wikipedia, are all in the genus Lepus. (Which is a very large genus.) There are other lagomorphs also called hares, but they are in other genera. So... what does this mean for rabbits and hares? I'm pretty sure it would be wrong to say that all hares are rabbits, or that all rabbits are hares. Both of them are lagomorphs, and some of the common names seem to be arbitrary. (Jackrabbits are actually in Lepus, for example, making them hares despite their common name.)

This is why I like scientific names. All of the lagomorphs in Lepus are more closely related to each other than to any lagomorphs in Sylvilagus, whether you call them hares, jackrabbits, bunnies, cottontails, or Peter.

Aesop should have called it "The Testudine and the Lepus," just to clear things up a ... hare.

I hate puns. I am not a punny rabbit... damn.

PS: Three interesting things to know about hares:

1. Those big ears aren't just good for hearing; they help the hare radiate body heat and cool off.
   
2. Hares give birth above ground, rather than in nests like other lagomorphs. To compensate for this, their babies are precocial, meaning that they have fur, their eyes are open, and they can run soon after birth. Most other lagomorphs are born in burrows and are altricial, that is, blind, naked, and helpless.
   
3. Hares can hit top speeds of 45 miles per hour!
   

Two Stories, One High School Student

Matthew LaClair is a troublemaker.

Last year, he brought a law suit against his high school (in New Jersey!) for a history teacher's utter failure to make the separation between church and state in the classroom. He secretly taped the teacher saying things like, "only Christians had a place in heaven, that the Big Bang and evolution theories were not scientific and that dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark." (Did I mention that I live in New Jersey too?)

Other than the fact that I'm still getting over this sort of thing happening in New Jersey (!), there are two sentences I find alarming in this article. First: "After the tapes became public, Matthew received a death threat and was shunned and bullied by some of his classmates, he has said." Wow. It's unbelievable to me that his actions would actually be cause for people to shun someone. If this had happened in my high school, I'm pretty sure we would have thrown him a parade.

Second: "In the fall, the board reprimanded the teacher and later adopted a policy barring students from taping in class without a teacher’s permission." I find this vaguely unsettling. What if another teacher is saying wildly inappropriate things in the classroom? How can students prepare themselves to keep church out of school if the school makes rules against what Mr. LaClair did? Very shady if you ask me.

Anyway. Sometimes you don't need a tape; the evidence is already written down and published.

You can't keep a good rabble-rouser down, and he's causing some more trouble in history class. This time, his beef is with a textbook that plays down the causes and impacts of global warming. (For example, although millions of people might lose their homes as coastlines are flooded, they won't have to pay as much for heating! Yay!)

Whether you agree with him or not, this guy deserves a lot of credit for standing up to The Man. Freethinking is not taught in most high schools; anyone who comes away with that particular skill is likely to be self-taught. Mr. LaClair, I salute you.

Mammal-centrism

It bothers me. Yeah. That's right. I'm tired of cute, fuzzy, cuddly critters. (Except that saiga antelope. Man that thing is crazy looking!)

Vegetarian Times has put its April 2008 edition online as a free trial of online magazines, which is actually pretty cool, except that you can get all of their recipes online anyway. (Part of the reason I stopped subscribing.) But the image that goes with the article on p. 68 really irks me. The article is called "Eat for Change" and that's all well and good, but there are way too many mammals. Aside from the female human in the picture, there is a rabbit (which looks like a white lab rabbit, including makeup!), a skunk, a deer, and a squirrel (also wearing makeup, apparently this is the one Eddie Izzard met). There are two birds and two butterflies.

Ugh.

I realize that my idea of "cute" might not be the same as anyone else's (yes, I did bring home a pair of cockroaches one time, and yes, I did start to find them sort of adorable) but what about, at least, other attractive vertebrates? There are some lovely lizards and fishies out there, not to mention the sheer cuteness of frogs.

But even including more vertebrates is, well... besides the point. We're the minority, folks. The insects have us, tarsi-down. There are more species of beetle than there are of vertebrates several times over. More than half of known animal species are insects.

For the rest of this week, and all next week, I'm going to post about interesting insects and other non-vertebrates. Let's call it "Get to Know Your Neighbors" week-and-a-half. Interesting critters live all around us, if we're open to seeing them. For example, leaf-cutter ants mostly live in the tropics, but one species lives as far north as New Jersey! I'll write more about leaf-cutters in a post of their own, though -- those minuscule farmers deserve it.

In the meantime, here's a picture of a pair of frangipani hornworm (aka tetrio sphinx moth) caterpillars that I took in St. John.


My hand is actually right next to that caterpillar; I am not using Peter Jackson's camera techniques. They grow to be six inches in length and can eat up to three leaves a day; one clutch can defoliate a frangipani (plumeria) tree in very little time. They might look fat and succulent, but I wouldn't recommend eating them; some of them sequester toxins from their food sources. However, another theory is that they're also mimicking the coloration of a coral snake, which is highly venomous. Either way, they're pretty spectacular larvae! (You can see the little horn on their abdomens in this picture; it looks like a little hair.)

Enjoy the hornworms. More insects tomorrow!

Kristof's editorial

Kristof wrote an editorial in the Sunday Times this week: "With a Few More Brains..."

I don't actually disagree with anything he's saying, I generally like Kristof and agree with things he writes. He raises awareness of issues that are sometimes beyond the scope of day-to-day news coverage.

The only thing I don't like about this article is that I think I wrote a similar one for the Spectrum about eight years ago, right before (or maybe right after) slightly less than half of this country went slightly crazy and elected our current idiot-in-chief. (Well, you know, "elected" is a strong word to use, but we're not going to go there right now.) It wasn't as erudite or well-read as Kristof's, to be sure, and times have definitely changed at least a little, but I wrote an editorial piece my senior year about how anti-intellectualism was making our nation a laughingstock and was going to send us all to hell in a handbasket. Or something like that. (I believed Al Gore back then, before it was fashionable.) I think it was part of my "revenge of the nerds" phase, in which I was extremely excited that they'd let a geek like me write opinion pieces for the paper.

Unfortunately, I can't actually link to that article, because the Spectrum site apparently went to hell in 2003, then the paper was renamed, and I can't access the Hawkeye site either. So you'll have to believe me on this one. But I was lamenting Americans believing in UFOs over Darwin way before you, Kristof! [Former Spectrum writers... can anyone back me up on this? Or did I imagine this whole thing?]

Until proven otherwise, I'll just believe I'm an uncited source for his article. Is that ok with everyone? Cool.

Oh, and I think Kristof's reference to Darwin at the end of his article, although well-intentioned, shows something of a misunderstanding of how evolution works. He says,

The dumbing-down of discourse has been particularly striking since the 1970s. Think of the devolution of the emblematic conservative voice from William Buckley to Bill O’Reilly. It’s enough to make one doubt Darwin.

The trouble with that, of course, is that he's saying things have gone from good to bad. Well, that's not how evolution works. Evolution supports whatever works best at a particular time, and unfortunately for us that appears to be O'Reilly. He is suited to the TV niche better than Buckley. Natural selection doesn't have value judgements. As I mentioned in my post about fish with knees, evolution works with what it has to make the best solution available, not the best of all possible solutions to a particular problem.

Anyway, this is geeking out and getting off topic. Never mind what percentage of people do or don't accept evolution; it's alarming that we're even using the word "believe" to describe a scientific phenomenon.

As of today, I'll try renouncing my belief in gravity. We'll see what happens.

What scientific theory do you choose to believe or not believe? I look forward to seeing your comments.

Short and Sweet

I admit it. I read the message boards on the Discovery Institute web site on occasion. I like to see who's there, who's posting what, and what their latest nonsense says. Sometimes people get so caught up in the argument that it can be difficult to figure out what they're asking, or saying, or referencing. Currently, Expelled is the hot topic, but I'll come to that in another post when I have more time.

Anyway, I found this great article on Natural History Mag's web site. It gives a short statement by each of three prominent ID nutjobs (Behe, Dembski, and Wells) and rebuttals by three prominent real scientists (Miller, Pennock, and Scott). There's also a short article at the end summarizing how this whole thing isn't actually about science at all, it's about religion and politics. (Shocking.) It's a quick read and really lays out the major problems with the arguments of the intelligent design crew. Have fun.

Do fish have knees?

Well, some of them do. We have knees, and since you could call us fish, then some fish have knees.

I was thinking about fish and knees while walking in the park this afternoon. It's a beautiful day in New Jersey -- clear blue skies, plenty of sunshine -- so I went for a walk. Towards the end, though, my knees started to hurt. I don't have good knees. I have unhappy knees. However, my unhappy knees made me think about why we have the knees that we have in the first place, and that reminded me of a great article I just read recently. This article, which was the cover story in Natural History Magazine in February, is by Neil Shubin, a prominent paleontologist whose greatest hit is Tiktaalik, a recently-discovered early tetrapod.

Along with addressing things like hiccups and hernias, Dr. Shubin briefly discusses the reason we have knees, namely, it was the best we could do with what our fish ancestors gave us. Incidentally, I think bad knees might be sufficient proof to stop the whole intelligent design crew in its tracks; unless we are to assume that our designer was not only intelligent but malicious, why would we have knees built the way they are, easily damaged and held together by little more than a few strips of connective tissue?

But hey, maybe that's just because I have bad knees.

I also love observing, as I walk, that without thinking about it at all, I swing my arms in a characteristically tetrapod way -- that is, the right arm goes forward when I step with the left. Whenever I think about that, I a) fall over, because I immediately get my brain involved in a central pattern generator, which is bad and b) think about videos of coelacanths. Unfortunately, I can't find one to post right now... maybe later. But they too swing their fins in an opposing pattern like that.

Anyway, read Dr. Shubin's article, it's really interesting! I'm thinking about reading his book over the summer when I have more time to think about vertebrates again.