laelaps | April 23, 2008This past January I was somewhat shocked to discover that one of my posts had been voted into the 2nd edition of The Open Laboratory, a collection of 50 of the best science posts published in 2007 by writers from all over the science blogosphere. Now you can purchase the book via amazon.com, although the best place to get it is still lulu.com. Why? Because proceeds from the lulu.com sales will go towards ScienceOnline'09 (the official site to be launching soon), an event that I hope to be attending next January.
Also, don't forget that you can start nominating excellent posts for the next…
laelaps | April 23, 2008
A female lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
By the year 1799, the Great Chain of Being had effectively been sundered, although some still clutched the shattered links in the hope that some linear order to the Creation would be found. The concept was no longer tenable, Charles White having to base his entire case for the superiority of Europeans over people of Asian and African descent (each "race" acting as a species to fill in a slot in the chain of "lower" to "higher") in An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables on…
laelaps | April 23, 2008Yesterday I managed to tack a few paragraphs on to the end of the human evolution chapter, bringing the page count so far up to 10, although some of this will ultimately be cut. I wanted to write more last night, but by the time I walked home from class and ate dinner it was 9:30 and I was feeling a little sleepy-eyed. Adrian Desmond's book The Ape's Reflexion has given me a lot of food for thought, however, especially the absurdity of the question "What makes us human?" as if it were a plea to find something (anything) that would divide us from the rest of nature. (New concepts are in bold)…
laelaps | April 23, 2008
A female cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) photographed last year at the National Zoo in Washington D.C.
laelaps | April 22, 2008
Although not as aquatically-adapted as their distant ancestors, Indian elephants are certainly capable swimmers.
A number of my fellow ScienceBloggers have covered the "Aquatic Elephant Hypothesis" lately (see here, here, and here), and even though I'm a little late to the party I thought that I'd throw in my two cents about the significance of ancient, waterlogged pachyderms.
The idea that the ancestors of elephants (including the two living genera Loxodonta and Elephas) were aquatic at some point in the past has been circulating for a number of years now, especially given the close…
laelaps | April 22, 2008Happy Earth Day, everyone. I doubt my own ability to come up with something especially meaningful and poignant today, so instead I will refer you to two of my favorite quites from Carl Sagan and Aldo Leopold.
It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder…
laelaps | April 22, 2008Here are some pictures my wife took of the three kittens presently staying in the apartment with us, although all of them will soon be off to the adoption center to try and find good homes;
Elice (she likes to sleep in that box).
Emma
Mishu
All three together.
laelaps | April 22, 2008
A white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) photographed last year at the Philadelphia Zoo.
laelaps | April 21, 2008
During the 17th and 18th centuries, when taxonomy was being sorted out and suffering from growing pains, the term "nondescript" was a useful placeholder for any creature that was known but not yet described. This fairly straightforward use of the term was used less and less often as more of the natural world was cataloged until it was more of an admission of ignorance than anything else. This doesn't mean that it went away, however. Giving the name "nondescript" to potentially unidentifiable fossil fragments or to things that seemingly bent the rules of nature became more popular in the 19th…
laelaps | April 21, 2008The newest edition of The Boneyard went up this past Saturday at Archaeozoology. It's a good one, so make sure you check out what's been going on in the paleo subsection of the blogosphere. The 19th edition will go up at Familiarity Breeds Content on May 3rd.
laelaps | April 21, 2008It's Monday morning, three days after the opening of the creationist propaganda piece Expelled, and everyone seems to be talking about whether the film can be considered to be a success or not. Wing Nut Daily says that it was a resounding success (despite coming in at #8), while many of my fellow science bloggers don't see it that way at all. I guess it all depends on what your definition of "success" is.
The numbers that have come in so far indicate that Expelled took in about 1.2 million dollars on Friday, which quickly dipped to $990,000 on Saturday on $958,000 on Sunday, making the total…
laelaps | April 21, 2008
A five-lined skink (Eumeces fasciatus) photographed last year at the Delaware Water Gap.
laelaps | April 20, 2008I was able to get another five pages done today, although (as always) I'm not entirely satisfied with them. There are so many juicy details and excellent narratives that it's difficult to get them all in, and it is sometimes difficult to discuss a topic that I know something about but also will require the use of my library for. Rather than run to look up everything at once, I decided to just keep writing and put up the basic framework of what I want to say, and I'll go back to fill in the details a bit later (which will also give me an opportunity to trim the fat a bit). At the moment,…
laelaps | April 19, 2008No angry creationists gathered outside my door with torches & pitchforks last night, and I presume that the first-night impact of Expelled (at least in my area) was not as great as the producers of the film might have hoped. We won't know for sure, though, until the box office results are in on Monday.
The above was written in a tongue-in-cheek manner, of course, and I really don't care about Ben Stein's creationist diatribe today. This morning I stopped by the local library book sale where I picked up a copy of Richard Leakey's Origins, the pop-paleo junk food Tyrannosaur, and (a book…
laelaps | April 18, 2008It's difficult to think about dinosaurs and not imagine what they might have been like in life. Museum restorations have tried to recreate scenes from the Mesozoic from the bones of dinosaurs for about a century, but new technologies are allowing museum patrons a new way to think about what dinosaurs might have been like. A new exhibit called "Be the Dinosaur" will soon be launching at the Louisville Science Center, and visitors will be able to not only take control of a dinosaur in a virtual world, but also to observe the virtual behaviors of dinosaurs programmed with artificial intelligence…
laelaps | April 18, 2008Even though I was busy yesterday (3-hour lab and 2 lab reports due), I got into the writing groove and was able to produce about five pages of new material. I've been jumping around from chapter to chapter a bit, writing on whatever I feel most interested in on any given day, and yesterday was all about human evolution.
Edward Tyson's 1699 dissection of a juvenile chimpanzee provided a natural jumping-off point, and Harriet Ritvo's excellent book The Platypus and the Mermaid has proved to be an excellent resource for issues dealing with finding "Man's Place in Nature" (with a little help from…
laelaps | April 18, 2008The next edition of the paleo-carnival The Boneyard is going to be up at Archaezoology tomorrow, so send in your entries there or to me a.s.a.p.! I'm also in need of a host for the following edition on May 3rd, so please let me know if you're interested in hosting.
laelaps | April 18, 2008
If creationists had their way, today would be the "Waterloo" of evolutionary science. Lab equipment would begin to collect dust, once proud scientists would have to find jobs flipping burgers, and creationism's Trojan horse (intelligent design) would successfully "reclaim America for Christ," all thanks to a little documentary called Expelled. The film has been surrounded by controversy from day one, not only for it's propaganda-like vibe, but also for the dishonest tactics employed by the creators of the film. Popular songs have been lifted without permission/under shady pretenses, computer…