Do you know any cell biology? Any biology at all? Then you might want to stop reading now. Here’s something to make any competent biology instructor weep.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Do you know any cell biology? Any biology at all? Then you might want to stop reading now. Here’s something to make any competent biology instructor weep.
Friends for a Non-Violent World (FNVW)
Presents:
Leaving Iraq Now
Why it’s the best chance for peace & security and why September is our best
chance to make it happen.
Phil Steger
In Morris on
Saturday, September 8
11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Morris Public Library
America needs an “end the war” push in
the last months of 2007 to equal the “no
to war” push of 2003. Bring friends, neigh-
bors, family members. Learn why leaving
is the best, most just, most secure choice
for Iraqis and Americans. Learn why Sep-
tember is a must-act month for ending the
war and what YOU can do.
Phil Steger is a three-time traveler to Iraq and has
been one of Minnesota’s most prominent, widely
seen and best received voices explaining, opposing,
and proposing solutions to the U.S. war in Iraq. He
was executive director of FNVW from 2002 to 2007.
It’s been a regular gay social whirl here at Chez Myers; we’re having a party tonight, and last night, we had visitors from the Great White North, or “Ottawa” as they quaintly called it: Eamon Knight and Theo Bromine, familiar names to old hands at talk.origins. And they brought Canadian beer! I encourage all Canadians to feel free to swing south and stop by, as long as they follow suit. (It’s a beer called Maudite, appropriately enough, and I just got a close look at the label: 8% alcohol! Hide the lampshades, I’m going to be dancing tonight!)
Unfortunately, while they were gawking at the Big City of Morris — impressed, I’m sure, by the absence of large trees, polar bears, and glaciers — Canada got a little crazier. Or revealed some long-hidden lunacy.
John Vanasselt, with the Ontario Alliance of Christian Schools, said there is no reason why Ontario shouldn’t join other provinces that make room for religious beliefs within the public education system.
The alliance’s 78 schools already teach evolution in science class, but it is taught on par with creationism, he said.
It sounds to me like Mr Vanasselt has just made a case for removing state support from Canadian religious schools.
Don’t let this stop you all from visiting me, though: really, there’s no causal relationship between saying hello to that evil atheist in Minnesota and having your home transported back into the Middle Ages!
Our president has been away in Australia. Who knew? Who cares? I only care because Australia has some of the most venomous wildlife around, and because anything that sends the asshole-in-chief to the other side of the planet is a good thing.
Anyway, the Australians waste $A165 million on security, rather than giving Bush a few hundred dollars and telling him to go play with the stingrays up around the Great Barrier Reef, and look what happens: a comedy troupe gussies up a few cars to look officially Canadian, and drove an Osama bin Laden imitator right up to the president’s hotel. They simultaneously showed that all this anti-terrorist security nonsense is pure performance art made to inflate the egos of the government and instill fear in our citizens, and made a sharp jab at our president’s priorities and accomplishments.
Bravo. Brilliant.
Now, please, can we impeach the incompetent boob? He’s an evil joke. We really need to end the long national embarrassment.
It’s Friday! I have no classes today, so this is the day where I desperately struggle to catch up with the backlog; it also happens to be the day we’re hosting a party at our house (you’re invited: 5:30, my place, across the street from the university; everyone who is anyone will be there). If you can’t make it, I expect you to make small talk and chat sociably in this open thread.
Here are a few ice-breakers to help you get started.
The next edition of the Tangled Bank will be at the Behavioral Ecology blog — send those links in to me or [email protected] before Wednesday, 12 September.
LA has the most interesting restaurants — it’s too bad I don’t get out that way very often.
The vertebrate jaw is a product of evolution — we have a serially repeated array of pharyngeal structures as embryos (and fish retain them in all their bony glory as gill arches), and the anterior most arch is modified during our development to form the jaws. The fact that they’re serially repeated raises an interesting possibility: what if, instead of just the one developing into a jaw, others were transformed as well? You could have a whole series of jaws!
One animal has done exactly that. The moray eel has modified one of the more posterior pharyngeal arches into a second pair of jaws, with a set of muscles that can slide it forward to bite prey already held in the mouth.
When we look at the face of another person, we can recognize specific features that have familial resemblances. In my family, for instance, I can recognize a “Myers nose” that my grandmother and my father and some of my siblings and kids have, and it’s different than my wife’s or my mother’s nose. These are subtle differences in shape—a bit of a curve, a knob, a seam—and their inheritance suggests that these differences are specified somehow in the DNA. If you think about it, though…how can whether the profile of a nose is straight or curved be encoded in a linear stretch of nucleotides? The complicated answer is that it isn’t—morphology is a consequence of epigenetic interactions during development—but we know that the alleles present in the genome do contribute in some significant way to three-dimensional form. How?
We don’t know all the details. This is one of those huge research problems that has gaping holes, full of promise and interest, where we don’t understand exactly how all the pieces fit together. However, here’s an important point that is relevant to other, larger issues in evolution: even where we lack full information about mechanisms, we can roughly perceive the shape of the answer, and that helps us rule out many alternative explanations and guides us in the general direction of a more complete understanding.
People’s noses are a difficult subject for research; we don’t get to define human crosses, people tend to be a little snippy about telling them who to breed with and taking their genes apart, and humans are awfully slow to breed. Fish are better experimental animals, much more pliable and faster and more prolific in their breeding. Some fish, such as the African cichlids, also have highly diverse populations and species with easily recognized and often quite dramatic morphological differences—and we can explore how those differences are generated by genetic and molecular differences in development. In particular, we can start to figure out how fish jaws are shaped by developmental processes.
Hey, look, everyone! Canada
has
creationists! Ha ha!
If you look at a map and notice how that big peninsula Toronto is on is protruding into the US, and note that that penetration has been going on for hundreds of years, I guess it’s not surprising that they’d catch a nasty disease.
