(Image without watermark available commercially from CoolWaterPhoto)
(Also on Sb)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Have them teach you what they know. Here’s an animation made from elementary school kids’ imaginative renditions of an evolving population of animals. It’s pretty darned good!
(via io9.)
Don’t tell Jerry Coyne. I am disturbed to see that cats are intruding on the cephalopod domain.
Although…if I were a squid, I think I’d just see this as snack delivery.
Look what just appeared in Ray Troll’s store:
It’s on a t-shirt. I WILL HAVE ONE. IT MUST BE MINE.
It had to by flying squid today, because of this story in Nature about squid locomotor energetics. Scientists measured the velocities of flying squid in air, and noted that they can move five times faster in a less dense/viscous medium (as we say in our technical discussions of this issue…no duh.) So they are proposing that maybe these species of squid do it to travel long distances efficiently.
Querulous voices were raised to point out something equally obvious: then where are they all? Photos of squid in flight are extraordinarily rare — they don’t do it routinely, it seems. It’s more probably an escape behavior only used when predators are attacking.
I’m going to side with the nay-sayers. The observation that squid move through air much faster than they do through water is utterly trivial; the real problem with the interpretation that it is a common locomotor behavior is that it sure doesn’t seem to be all that common. Show me lots of movies of squid schools leaping in a prolonged series and maybe I’ll change my mind.
(Also on Sb)
Both Phil Plait and Sean Carroll and Mano Singham are tentatively reporting that they may have an explanation for the recent anomalous report of neutrinos traveling faster than light: it may have been a case of a faulty connection in a timing circuit. If that bears out, it may be a bit embarrassing.
But it does suggest an important possibility. When we get around to building the first starship, don’t have those fussy, punctilious physicists wire it up. Gather a gang of sloppy slapdash biologists to stick it together with spit and chewing gum. We’ll have it going a heck of a lot faster than light than those experts can even imagine.
(Also on Sb)
I was going to talk about a cool recent paper that described the evolution of novelties by way of modifying modular gene networks, but I started scribbling it up and realized that I was constantly backtracking to explain some fundamental concepts, so I stopped. I was concerned because one of the most common sources of confusion I’ve found in my students in the past was difficulty in distinguishing phenotypes from the complexities of the underlying genotype, and I have to be slow and thorough in setting up those differences early on until it sinks in, a habit I’m continuing here. It’s so easy for students to reify a trait, like eye color, into a single discrete property that must be somewhere on a chromosome. It’s not. It’s so much messier than that.
Let’s talk about eye color in flies. Drosophila eyes have a characteristic brick red color, and the most famous mutation in flies is white, which produces distinctly white-eyed flies. Eye color is too complex to be described as the product of a single locus and only two alleles, though: there’s actually a whole battery of genes that work together to produce eye color.
