laelaps | November 26, 2008I only just noticed that Janet tagged me with the 5 Things meme. Here we go...
5 Things I Was Doing 10 Years Ago:
Absolutely despising high school
Taekwondo (2nd degree black belt)
Being an emo kid before I even knew what that was
Learning how to drive
Playing DOOM
5 Things On My To-Do List Today:
Work an 8-hour day
Brave the grocery store with Mrs. Laelaps
Tidy up the sections of the human evolution chapter about "Ramapithecus," Miocene apes, Louis Leakey, W.E. le Gros Clark's study of australopithecines, etc.
Start reading The Lions of Tsavo
Find more papers about chimpanzee infanticide…
laelaps | November 26, 2008
A pair of black-crested gibbons (Nomascus concolor), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | November 25, 2008
When I last visited Sea World in Orlando, Florida, I saw the Shamu show. It didn't matter that the original Shamu died in 1971; she was so iconic that the biggest of orcas at each theme park is still presented under her name. (The individual I saw was actually called Tilikum.)
This kind of symbolic naming is nothing new. It has been going on with performing animals for over 100 years. One example was Consul, a performing chimpanzee (or, rather, a series of performing chimpanzees). As I have written about previously, the public was very interested in gorillas, cavemen, and "missing links"…
laelaps | November 24, 2008
149 years ago today, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was released to the public. It was instantly sold out. For a "secret" formulation of a mechanism by which evolution could occur, there certainly was a lot of excitement about it, even if On the Origin was not a book Darwin had intended on publishing.
Please do not misunderstand; Darwin had long been working on a volume about evolution by natural selection. It was going to be called, simply enough, Natural Selection, but A.R. Wallace forced Darwin's hand. 150 years ago this past summer, an essay on…
laelaps | November 24, 2008The results for the 3rd Annual Blogging Scholarship are in, and, I'm sad to say, I did not win. I came in 5th, and the winners were The Burnt Orange Report, USS Mariner, and American Papist.
I must admit that I am little disappointed, but as I have said before, I wasn't expecting to win. It's not all bad, though. For making it to the final 20, I received $100, but what I am more grateful for is the support of my readers, friends, and fellow bloggers. By the end I racked up about 2,100 votes, which was far more than most of my competitors received.
More importantly, I appreciate everyone who…
laelaps | November 24, 2008
A pair of giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | November 23, 2008
A group of female nyala (Tragelaphus angasii), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | November 22, 2008During the opening act of the propaganda film Expelled, Cornell historian of science Will Provine summed up intelligent design as "utterly boring." The same could be said of Expelled, a film steeped in the controversy over the brand of creationism known as intelligent design. An hour and a half long experiment in "Gish Gallop," Expelled is a film that ultimately gets so frustrated by the incoherence of leading ID advocates that it ultimately collapses in upon itself and admits that, yes, this really is all about finding the Judeo-Christian god in nature.
The film seems to have been slapped-…
laelaps | November 22, 2008
A California sea lion pup (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | November 21, 2008
Another day, another 10 pages. The human evolution chapter now stretches about 40 pages long, and it still requires quite a bit of detail. (It will, of course, balloon again when illustrations are worked out. One particular illustration of the branching tree of hominin evolution will require that I do some digging in the literature to find the best current estimates for the ages of particular genera and species.) Even so, it now presents a more-or-less coherent story, from early discoveries of stone tools in Europe to our strange position as the one surviving variety of human. Now I have to…
laelaps | November 21, 2008
"The Lion of the Season," from Mr. Punch's Victorian Era.
As Charles Darwin was readying to release his treatise on evolution by natural selection (which was turned into an abstract rushed into press in 1859), Richard Owen was trying to separate humans from other primates. In 1857 he proposed that we belonged to our own distinct subclass, and it was peculiar structures in our brains that made all the difference.
That our species were more cognitively developed than apes was clear, but did our supposed superiority stem from something anatomical, unique to us alone? Owen thought so, the…
laelaps | November 20, 2008... and Traumador, it's host, has something special in mind;
So my thinking for this themed boneyard is for anyone and everyone out on the innerweb to put up a post about their favourite museum... it doesn't have to be a really "smart" or sciencey one, cause afterall it's me the archosaur without enough grey matter to fill a walnut running the show! rather i'd like to get to know other museums of the world through the eyes and words of other palaeo lovers who have been to them.
Other posts about paleo will be accepted, of course, but it would be fun if everyone could contribute something…
laelaps | November 20, 2008
A grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
[Like what you see here? Then vote for me in the 3rd Annual Blogging Scholarship contest!]
laelaps | November 19, 2008Earlier this year, intelligent design advocates were trumpeting the forthcoming "fall of Darwinism" with the release of the propaganda film Expelled. The film stirred up some controversy, had a modest (at best) showing, and generally preached to the choir, but it didn't seem to have as momentous a reception as the filmmakers were hoping for.
I was curious about what the entire film was like, but I wasn't about to support the people behind it by seeing it in theaters or purchasing a DVD. Last week, however, I noticed that Netflix has added Expelled to a list of movies subscribers can watch for…
laelaps | November 19, 2008
A red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta elegans), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
[Like what you see here? Then vote for me in the 3rd Annual Blogging Scholarship contest!]
laelaps | November 18, 2008
Lately it has been difficult to work up the motivation to work on the book. My free time is so fragmented that I rarely have the ability to sit down and concentrate on what I'm doing for more than an hour or so. The fact that it gets dark by about 4:30 does not help, either, as it makes me feel that the day is essentially over even though I have a few hours (depending on the day) to work. I really do hate autumn and the winter here.
My wife does not let me get away with moping around the apartment, though, and at her behest I worked for about two hours last night. I honestly do not think…
laelaps | November 18, 2008
For nearly 150 years, various critics and authorities have been predicting the death-knell of "Darwinism." It is a crumbling ideological edifice, they say, and it will soon collapse. Just as predictions about Armageddon have turned out to be invariably wrong, so too has the wailing and whining of many of Darwin's critics, but there was a time when evolution by natural selection was being eclipsed.
As I have said before, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection served to stir debate rather than resolve how evolution occurred once and for all. It was widely appreciated as a…
laelaps | November 18, 2008
A polar bear (Ursus maritimus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
[Like what you see here? Then vote for me in the 3rd Annual Blogging Scholarship contest!]