Another failed prediction

Poison the well much?

In a post that calls participants in the March for Science “spoiled brats,” “full-time complainers,” and “crybullies,” David Klinghoffer stopped just short of predicting that the March would become a riot:

The March for Science website includes a “Statement on Peaceful Assembly and Nonviolence,” …Why the need for a statement that you don’t “condone violence” if you’re not concerned that participants in your event will get violent?…

The crybullies, as [Daniel Greenfield] calls them, specialize in anger. Like small children throwing fits, they are liable to lash out physically, as recent incidents on college campuses have shown.

If violence occurs on April 22 on the National Mall, or hundreds of satellite protests elsewhere, that’s where it will come from.

I witnessed the rage myself, and it wasn’t pretty. [Warning: this gets pretty graphic below the fold]

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Invasive Pleodorina indica in Poland

Figure 3 B-I from Knysak and Żelazna-Wieczorek 2017. Pleodorina indica (Iyengar) H. Nozaki 400x.

Figure 3 B-I from Knysak and Żelazna-Wieczorek 2017. Pleodorina indica (Iyengar) H. Nozaki 400x.

A new paper in Oceanological and Hydrobiological Studies reports a massive bloom of Pleodorina indica in a reservoir in central Poland. Piotr Knysak and Joanna Żelazna-Wieczorek sampled the reservoir on the Olechówka River in Łódź during the summer of 2015 and found that P. indica made up ~95% of the algae collected.

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New fossil proves plants are younger than previously thought

That’s not a headline you’re likely to see again. Hopefully it made you think something along the lines of “how does that work, exactly?” Because it doesn’t. If your estimate of the age of a taxon is based on its oldest known fossil, finding a newer fossil isn’t likely to change that estimate. If it’s an extinct group, a newer fossil might show that it stuck around later than you thought, but not that it originated later. Paleontologists recognize that fossil-based estimates of ages are almost always underestimates, since the fossil record is spotty (and generally spottier the further back you go).

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Pandorina(?) in The Atlantic

In The Atlantic, not in the Atlantic. A new article in The Atlantic is making the rounds on social media, “Scientists Brace for a Lost Generation in American Research.” The article speculates on the likely long-term effects of President Trump’s proposed ~20% cut to the NIH budget. Which is fine, because what has the NIH ever done for us? Okay, there was the whole genetic code thing, plus

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J. S. Huxley part 2: Volvox

Last time, I wrote about Julian Huxley’s 1912 book, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom, and his use of the volvocine algae as an example. I liked most of what he had to say, though I took issue with his assertion that

…all the other members of the family except Volvox…are colonies and nothing more—their members have united together because of certain benefits resulting from mere aggregation, but are not in any way interdependent, so that the wholes are scarcely more than the sum of their parts.

This is, of course, a matter of how we define a multicellular organism, but I think any definition that excludes, for example, Eudorina, is not a very useful one.

This time, I’ll look at the rest of what Huxley had to say about the volvocine algae, most of which is about Volvox:

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J. S. Huxley part 1: Gonium

Julian Huxley was one of the biologists responsible for the merging of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution in the early 20th century, the modern synthesis. His most influential work was Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, published in 1942. Thirty years earlier, though, he published a book on biological individuality, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Thankfully, the copyright on this book has expired, so it is now part of the public domain, and a scanned version is available for free in pdf and epub versions from Google.

Huxley Cover

Any book with Volvox on the cover can’t be all bad!

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