"He who rejects with scorn the belief that the shape of his canines, and their occasional great development in other men, are due to our early forefathers having been provided with these formidable weapons, will probably reveal, by sneering, the line of his own descent."
That's a quite hilarious jibe from someone I thought was a serious dude. Guess who. The quote is via a New Scientist article (subscription-only) on evolution running backwards (i.e, supposing it had a direction, which it doesn't). The propensity for organisms to go backwards on their evolutionary path is also known as Atavism.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The evolution of life on earth has no direction and no predetermined end; what is adaptive today might not be tomorrow, and the scores of extinct creatures preserved in the rocks of this planet attest to an ongoing process that results in what Charles Darwin rightly called "endless forms most…
[Note: I know I'm about a month late coming to this one, but it still provided for some good blog fodder. It seems that the initial response at Pharyngula ended up changing the summary I discuss [see comments section], and that's definitely a good thing. The show has also been pushed back to July,…
Not infrequently, I’m asked why it is that I do what I do. Why do I spend so many hours of my free time, both here and at my not-so-super-secret other blog (NSSSOB), to write my detailed analyses of various forms of quackery, analyses of scientific studies, and expressions of my dismay at the…
Preface
I originally wrote this post during the late summer of this year, a piece that was fraught with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and an overall cumbersome attribute that made me admire anyone who was able to get through the whole thing. I have revised and edited the text starting…