He had several, because all the cool scientists like cephalopods, and they’re still bottled up and preserved in museums.
No word on the status of Darwin’s pet cat.
In a mildly interesting discovery, a toe bone from a 1.7 million year old hominin has been found to bear an osteosarcoma. The poor individual would have been suffering with pain when they walked, it might even have killed him (not the toe, but the possibility of metastatic cancer) and it’s suggestive that there might have been some social care for them.
But you know what’s not interesting at all? That cancer has been around for millions of years. That’s old news.
The precise origins of cancer have been a source of debate due, in part, to the scarcity of historical evidence. Possibly the earliest reference to the disease is attributed to the great Egyptian physician Imhotep, who lived around 2600 B.C. In his writings, Imhotep describes an affliction characterized by a “bulging mass in the breast” that was resistant to any known therapies.
Errm, Dogs get cancer. Mice get cancer. Whales get cancer. Reptiles get cancer. Sharks get cancer, despite myths you may have heard. Insects get cancer.
That an old mammal got cancer is not surprising at all. And while the subtitle might claim that the observation “could have important implications for modern medical research”, the article doesn’t say what those implications are. It can’t, because there aren’t any.
I just find myself annoyed that here is a thought-provoking but ultimately anecdotal datum that humanizes our distant ancestors and might have some implications for the history of human social behavior, but it’s getting shoe-horned into the trite and pragmatically false paradigm that it’s a discovery that could lead to the Cure for Cancer. Stop the hype, please.
I mentioned that one of the dignified trees in our yard was marked for death — we got the detailed diagnosis. It’s Dutch Elm disease. We have some guys coming by on Monday to hack it to death and haul away its dismembered limbs.
But it’s not all sad and grisly news. We’ve also talked to the city, and they’ve given us their list of trees to be planted around town this fall (the number is how many of each they have on hand), and we can get on the list and name a preference.
10) Accolade Elm
10) Acer Sienna Maple
5) Hackberry
5) Deborah Maple
5) Thornless Hawthorn
10) Cathedral Elm
5) Ivory Silk Japanese Tree Lilac
10) Siouxland Poplar
5) Ironwood
5) Bur Oak
10) Northern Acclaim Locust
5) Silver Maple
5) Willow Weeping
We’re going to do some research ourselves, but I thought I’d be lazy and ask all of you readers — which ones do you like and why?
When I was growing up, it was quite common for pop-science to illustrate the evolutionary future of humanity: it was all big bulbous heads and spindly limbs and skinny little bodies. It was the kind of thing that probably played a role in shaping the conventional image of what extraterrestrials would look like, since obviously they would be more ‘advanced’ than humans.
It was all nonsense, of course, but that kind of thing is tough to shake off — almost as tough as ‘great chain of being’ fantasies, which seem to resonate with our naturally selfish idea of a biological destiny.
Now these pop-sci delusions have gotten moderately more sophisticated. Meet Project Graham, an awful, but very slickly produced, demo of the future of humanity if we were selected for car-crash survival.
So he’s got this massive double-walled cranium with a small brain suspended by rubbery ligaments inside it, air-bag cushions built into his ribs, a face thickly padded with fat, and knees that can bend side to side. Apparently, we’re going to have a kind of Mad Max future where the human race is going to be intensely culled by a lives of near constant collisions.
I detest this sort of thing. I can sort of see that the point is to educate people about the damage inflicted by car crashes, but it’s doing it badly — I’m not going to be terrified into driving more cautiously by the thought that my many-times-great-grandchildren will be uglified — and it’s doing it by inserting more misconceptions about how evolution works into the general public.
Also, if the selection pressure from driving were that severe, I know what the future of humankind would look like: a population of pedestrians, and people sensible enough to stay out of those death-traps on the road.
Don’t toy with my fantasies like this, GE!
We have this lovely old slippery elm in our backyard — it’s huge and thickly branched and towers over our house. This evening we noticed that sometime during the day, we had a visitor.
That is not a good sign. We’ll have to call the tree doctor tomorrow and get a diagnosis.
You can find out with the Audubon Native Plants Database. Just type in your zip code, and it’ll tell you what kind of plants were originally in your area, and what birds are attracted to them.
Watching carefully, I noticed that two other activities added to the commotion: sloughing of skin and defecation. Like other whales, sperm whales shed skin on a regular basis. This may be a mechanism to reduce the risk of infection and to rid the animals of external parasites. As the whales rubbed against one another, the physical contact dislodged flakes, sometimes entire sheets, of skin, which floated in the water like a blizzard of translucent dandruff.
Group defecation also seemed to play a prominent role. When a dozen or more whales defecated simultaneously, it created a cloud of poop that engulfed the ensemble, obscuring them from view and turning the seawater into an oily soup.
I think it’s a metaphor.
