laelaps | February 3, 2008
I usually try to avoid putting myself into shots that make it into "Photo of the Day," but I couldn't resist sharing this one. It was inspired by a particular scene from the film Young Frankenstein (one of my most-favorite films), and although I couldn't find the specific part of the movie here's a scene that's funny nonetheless.
laelaps | February 2, 2008I just passed the 325-page mark in Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, which puts me in the middle of chapter 4. Chapter 1 was perhaps the most difficult, the abstracts at the end of the opening section being a bit cumbersome. Once I got into chapter 2, however, the sailing was a little smoother, and by Chapter 3 Gould hits his stride. Whatever complains I might have about the style or need for editing aside, I am getting quite a lot out of this book. I'm curious to see how Gould unveils his hypothesis for hierarchical selection in the later chapters, but as far as the historical…
laelaps | February 2, 2008
Over the course of evolutionary history there have been a number of animals that have sported elongated neural spines, the structures sometimes aiding in the support of a hump (as in bison) and other times as the framework for a great sail (as in Spinosaurus). Of the group of "sail-backed" and "bison-backed" animals, the pelycosaur Edaphosaurus (the spines of which are pictured above) are unique, and the presence of transverse bars arranged on either side has long vexed paleontologists.
Charles R. Knight's sculpture of "Naosaurus" with a revised Edaphosaurus head. Courtesy of Dan Varner…
laelaps | February 1, 2008As if things weren't contentious enough around here already, I've got another subject for general discussion that I'm sure will lead to some debate. In science there has long been a tradition of trying to engage the public, whether it be through public debates/lectures, books, etc. As Stephen Jay Gould noted in the obituary he wrote for Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection entwines both technical and popular writing into an effective and important package. (Indeed, the widely-published version of On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection was Darwin's…
laelaps | February 1, 2008As I mentioned not too long ago, the natural world is more weird and wonderful than anyone can imagine, and yet another example of the diversity of life is the giant Palouse earthworm (Driloleirus americanus). This super-sized worm was thought to be extinct by the 1980's, but a number of the worms have been seen recently, showing that they are still hanging on. Unlike the worms in your garden (which are actually European in origin), this worm is native to North America and presently can be found in Washington state and Idaho. Indeed, this isn't just an ordinary worm, the species being known…
laelaps | February 1, 2008
The new crocodylian Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi. [Image source].
I guess this one slipped by without getting proper attention. In October of 2007 research described a new genus of species of crocodylian, Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi (pictured above) in the journal Zootaxa. It was a late Cretaceous member of the Peirosauridae found in Bauru Basin, Brazil, although it was only one representative of a larger diversity of crocodylians from the location that also included notosuchids, sphagesaurids, baurusuchids, and trematochampsids. Unfortunately the paper is behind a subscription wall (…
laelaps | February 1, 2008
Yesterday I ran into an old friend of mine while shuffling between classes (I was carrying a copy of Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory at the time, so a shuffle was the best I could manage), and we got on the topic of anthropology & science books. My friend mentioned Jared Diamond and noted that he was one of the greatest ecologists of all time. I'm sure he noted the quizzical look on my face, because after starting in on The Third Chimpanzee (which I admittedly did not finish) I didn't come away with so high an opinion of him. Maybe I just read the wrong book, but I didn't…
laelaps | February 1, 2008
Smilodon is perhaps the most famous of all the saber-toothed cats, but the level of notoriety it has received has led to a number of misunderstandings. As a child I remember hearing in a documentary (complete with somewhat hokey stop-motion giant sloths) that sabercats became extinct because their teeth grew so long that they could not close their mouths. I did not know it at the time, but this fallacious idea had been around for quite some time, and was quite surprised to find an effective refutation of it when I read G.G. Simpson's popular book The Meaning of Evolution (1950);
The…
laelaps | January 31, 2008Apparently Sb has been snapping up quality science bloggers at an extraordinary rate, and the latest member of the collective is Maria of Green Gabbro. It's definitely good to have another geo-blogger in the house.
laelaps | January 31, 2008
A little more than two years ago, I asked the woman who is now my wife to marry me as snow began to fall in Central Park. The ruse I employed to get her out to the spot was the excuse that I wanted to make sure I saw the special Darwin exhibition before it moved elsewhere (which was true), knowing that after a visit to the AMNH we'd traditionally sit out by the pond across the street for a little while. By the time we made it back to the her house, though, enough snow had fallen to make driving treacherous, so it looked like I was going to have to crash on the couch that night. To pass some…
laelaps | January 31, 2008
Two grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) playing in a pool at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | January 30, 2008Update: Darren has now posted a more detailed summary of this controversy. Other bloggers will likely weigh-in on the subject throughout the day, and I'll soon have something up on why the issue has gotten to the point of appearing in Nature rather than being settled earlier.
Some time ago Darren posted two posts on aetosaurs (part 1 and part 2), cryptically hinting that Spencer Lucas and others at New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science might have been involved in the claim-jumping of research involving these ancient crurotarsians. Now the story has come out into the open and an…
laelaps | January 30, 2008"Evolution Sunday" is fast approaching, and even though it's still about 2 weeks off I thought I'd just put up a note that I'll be speaking to the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Morris County for the event. My talk will primarily focus on contingency, human evolution, and where those concepts intersect religion, and the discussion is slated for 9:30-11:30 AM on February 10th.
I'll be borrowing a bit from the "what we think about who we are" post and some of my other writings, but I've got a few other tricks (references?) up my sleeve, too. I know most of you aren't anywhere nearby,…
laelaps | January 30, 2008Just in case any of you haven't heard yet, tomorrow night the Science Communication Consortium is going to hold its next meeting on "emerging media outlets" & science communication. The SCC was formed by my fellow Scibling Kate (among others), and Carl Zimmer will be speaking on the panel tomorrow, so Sb will have a definite presence during the gathering. You can register at the door or online (details about the location can also be found here), and I'm sure the discussion will be vibrant.
Previously I had said that I would be at the meeting, but that's before I realized that my human…
laelaps | January 30, 2008If you're going to be in the Rockford, Illinois area (or within a reasonable distance of it) on March 1st and 2nd, the Burpee Museum is going to be host to a paleo-festival that you won't want to miss out on. Over the course of two days there will be activities and events for both children and adults, and I have to say that the lecture program they have set up looks pretty awesome. Here's who will be speaking at the festival;
Philip Currie- Chinese Theropods and Mapusaurus
Jack Horner- Dinosaur Ontogenies
Eva Koppelhus - Paleoenvironment of Dinosaur Provincial
Jim Kirkland- Cretaceous Utah…
laelaps | January 30, 2008Over at Wired, Thomas Hayden kicks off his brief piece "Why Things Suck: Science" with the following nugget (what it's a nugget of, I'll leave up to you);
Morality, spirituality, the meaning of life -- science doesn't handle those issues well at all. But that's cool. We have art and religion for that stuff.
It doesn't get better from there, and Jake from Pure Pedantry has a near line-for-line takedown of Hayden's ramblings. If you're a fan of pop-evolutionary psychology (i.e. we're just a bunch of hunter gatherers trapped within technologies and cultures we created, hence all our social woes…
laelaps | January 30, 2008When I first started attending Rutgers in the fall of 2001, the football coach had to come and practically beg the incoming freshmen to come to a football game. Promises of free t-shirts and plenty of seating were doled out to try and get attendance up, but the fact of the matter was that we didn't have a good team and no one was very interested in attending games. I've never attended a game and I don't intend to (I've never cared much for organized sports and don't have enough "school spirit" to go), but I have noticed a big change in the way the team has been viewed.
The fall 2006 season…
laelaps | January 30, 2008
The black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata) is one of two species of ruffed lemur (Varecia sp.), although there may be as many as three subspecies of the black-and-white variety. Like many other lemur species, the black-and-white ruffed lemur is presently endangered, populations existing at relatively low densities throughout its range on the island of Madagascar.
laelaps | January 30, 2008
I started in on The Structure of Evolutionary Theory last night and got about 32 pages in, although I hope to cover more ground today. I've been especially fixated upon a brief paragraph involving the interplay of archetypes and ancestors (on pg. 12, I think it was), something that I intend to write about when the idea has more fully distilled itself from my thoughts. While I was half-joking about a "book club" forming here on Sb, other bloggers have picked up on the trend, and here's the latest batch of links for the discussion surrounding Gould's tome. I'll be adding to this basic list as…
laelaps | January 30, 2008Since I've left my old blog on wordpress I've generally left it to mutate on its own, by which I mean I haven't paid much attention to the comments accumulating over there since October. From what I can tell, though, creationists stop by every now and then and have left a number of arm-waving, vitriolic statements about how I've been brainwashed by the evilutionists. Here are two of my favorites;
On Gigantoraptor;
This Is all CRAP and you know it ... This was proven to be a Fruad ! It was carved into the rock. It made the cover of Time Mag ,and they had to retract the whole story. After all…