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I’m indebted for this to Brian Switek at Laelaps, who did all the work and posted it almost a week ago. One week ago was the anniversary of T.H. Huxley’s birth. These days, his name is associated with the epithet, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” and the task of defending the new theory of evolution. But he was much more than that, a scientist and thinker in his own right.
Read about Huxley’s life.
Hilary Clinton is showing her usual lack of class, according to Bob Clinton’s “Seeds of Destruction” in the New York Times.
Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd.
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.
There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.
He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!
The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years….
… to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.
…it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.
The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.
The Skeptical Adaptationist asks, “Why are humans such lousy dog-trainers?“
It is all about communication. By Charades. As police have found out when they realized that they’ve trained dogs to get all excieted at the smell of money, not drugs on money.
When you won’t help, pray?
And now we have to put up with newspapers calling the platypus “part bird.” PZ Myers at Pharyngula lets off a little steam in his intro to the platypus genome:
Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is “weird” or “odd” or worse, they imply that the animal is a chimera — “the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri — part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal”. No, no, no, a thousand times no; this is the wrong message. … What’s interesting about the platypus is that it belongs to a lineage that separated from ours approximately 166 million years ago, deep in the Mesozoic, and it has independently lost different elements of our last common ancestor, and by comparing bits, we can get a clearer picture of what the Jurassic mammals were like, and what we contemporary mammals have gained and lost genetically over the course of evolution.
Go over and read what the new platypus genome actually tells us about the course of evolution.
Here’s a diagram showing the evolutionary splits. PZ will explain it.
Diagram notes:
Emergence of traits along the mammalian lineage.
PZ writes:
This is a fairly conventional picture of our evolutionary history, and I have to emphasize that this paper reinforces the evolutionary explanation for the illustrated relationships.
Scientific logic, executive summary:
if we find a feature in birds that is also present in monotremes, marsupials, or eutherians, it is likely that that feature was also present in our paleozoic common ancestor….
For instance, one of the unusual (for a mammal) features of the platypus is meroblastic cleavage…. the early [cell] divisions are incomplete — they produce a sheet of cells on top of the large yolk that are cytoplasmically continuous with the yolk cytoplasm…. Birds (archosaurs) and lizards and snakes (lepidosaurs) exhibit meroblastic cleavage. [In contrast, marsupials and eutherians, exhibit complete cleavage from the first division. So] meroblastic cleavage is likely to be a primitive character, one that was inherited from the last common ancestor of synapsids and sauropsids, over 300 million years ago.
Go on and read more: why the platypus isn’t “wierd,” how its venom evolved, what other animals are being sequenced—you know you want to.
A couple of weeks ago, Blogger deleted ERV’s blog, without warning and for no apparent reason, deep-sixing her Google stats in the process. Now, she’s back at the top of the search results:
I PWNS TEH INTRAWEBZ!!!
Congratulations, ERV!
Anton Zuiker lets us know that the NCSBC will morph into ScienceOnline’09 for 2009. There’s already a date and time: January 16-18, 2009 at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.
Now, you, too, can use image macros to generate any church sign you like.
is important to good health:
more cat pictures
Especially if you’re going to get up and do something active tomorrow.
Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous writes about archean bacterial mats that are important evidence of life 2.9 billion years ago. Unfortunately, someone is trespassing onto the site, which is private property, and stealing samples, presumably for sale: “Archean bacterial mats under the hammer.”
