Category Archives: biology

The Legs Of The Whales

Posted on by
1

I had a rather interesting conversation with someone close to me last night who I have always known to be one of the faithful. She explained that she had finally come to a point in her life where she believed in a loving and actively involved creator, but that the particular dogmas of her faith had long since fallen flat with her, and that she looked at so much of the theology as ridiculous rubbish. This made me happy. However, she then expressed that she similarly couldn’t believe other stories, like how we came from apes. This made me sad.

The near-perfect lack of understanding of evolution held by the masses frustrates me, because the lack of understanding leaves doubt in their minds. It was this same frustration that led to Boy Infidel and I starting this blog; reason is beautiful, and ignorance is unfortunate, and we wanted to do all in our power to promote the rational.

Continue reading →

The Eyes Have It

Posted on by
1

(The usual caveat applies to this piece. I am not an expert on the eye, and have at best a layman’s understanding. This is not a post that will contain absolute factual bloop-a-dee-doo about the eye, so inaccuracies they are to be expected, and if you know better than I about anything I say here, by all means please correct me in the comments. The inspiration for this posting was reading the section on Tarsiers in Richard Dawkins’ delightful The Ancestor’s Tale, which if you are intrigued by evolution and fascinated by the tree of life, I highly suggest you read.)

The more you learn about eyes, the more you realize just how cool we are. Eyes are just essentially packages of these weird thingies that respond to electromagnetic waves, and the brain takes note of which thingies are reacting and creates for us a representation of that electromagnetic input in what we determine is color. Because we generally have blue, green, and red thingies, meaning receptors that react to the waves at frequencies that we associate in our brains with those colors, we see the world in shades of those three. We don’t (as a rule) have thingies that react to extremely long waves like radio waves, and we don’t have thingies that react to extremely short waves like ultraviolet, and so we simply don’t see those colors.

Continue reading →

Those Darned Crows

Posted on by
1

I’ve mentioned before how impressive I think crows are. From all that I’ve seen, they appear to be evolving an intellect that is impressive to say the least. Of course, there are some key words in that statement, the most important one is “appear”. It is possible that crows have always had this kind of intelligence and it isn’t something that is evolving before our eyes.

Tool use is an important factor in how we assess animal intellect, and this Wired article talks about yet another possible example of tool use being shown by a group of New Caledonian crows. It’s fascinating stuff in my opinion, and a logical step that would lead from the initial tool use we have seen.

Continue reading →

Eyes Of The Maggot

Posted on by
Reply

I know, it sounds like I’m about to review the newest metal album by some band called Drosophila Excrementus, but this is actually a nifty science post. I just read this article from Jerry Coyne (who’s book, Why Evolution Is True, is utterly fantastic and you should read it) and felt that not sharing it would just be a real dick thing to do.

What I love about this and articles like it is that it underlines an important aspect of science that ultimately helps drive scientists: we don’t know everything yet. As much as we’ve been studying maggots for ages and who knows how many individual labs catalog everything they can about generation after generation of fruit fly, we still find new and amazing things about them.

Enjoy the article!

Jim

Nature: She’s A Ruthless Piece Of Work

Posted on by
Reply

I just read me an article about the assassin bug on the Discovery Magazine website, and it just serves as a reminder of the ruthlessness and duplicity of the natural world. The assassin bug has figured out how to strum a spider’s web in a pattern identical to a struggling insect. The spider, being nature’s big sack of stupid, comes to investigate, and finds him or herself turned into dinner.

Now, spiders have eyes. This I know. They have several eyes, usually eight, and you would think that the spider would see the assassin bug, who is a rather big fella. So I thought I’d look into it a bit. If I was a spider, surely I’d say to myself, “Gosh, what a big mean bug who is clearly not struggling in my web. I think I’ll just hang out here and wait for it to either leave or die before checking things out too closely.” So I found me a web page from the Australian Museum that explained to me that the eight eyes of the spider are usually rather poor. They use their eyes mostly to determine day and night, and for the rest they rely on their heightened senses of touch and taste, and presumably the spider sense that Peter Parker shares with them.

Continue reading →

Laying Down The Ground Rules

Posted on by
Reply

Once upon a time, we were pretty much all sure that some kind of creator invented us. I have never heard of a system of faith (though it’s possible this is just my ignorance) that does not have it’s own take on how we got here. Some of those creation myths are remarkably interesting, but that hardly changes the truth. They’re stories we told to try to know the unknowable. But we know stuff now, and those myths seem laughable.

We know, for example, that there was a big bang. Believing in the big bang is not an act of faith. It is believing in something that we may not directly see, but it is based on the best understanding of all the known information. We can come up with tests to confirm the concept, and they are time and again proving to be accurate and further cement the fact of the big bang. The amount of evidence at this point is harshly in favor of the big bang. Would it be impossible to find evidence that disproved it? Absolutely. But that evidence would have to conform to the existing evidence and provide an even clearer explanation. We don’t get dumber, we get smarter. Current work in physics tells us that there was no need for a creative force to trigger the big bang, that it was an inevitability.

Continue reading →

Stripey Kitty! Spotty Kitty!

Posted on by
Reply

I’m NOT one of the LOLCAT masses. Oh, I get the jokes and have made some on several occasions when circumstances were suitable, and I’ve quoted parts of the Lolcat Bible when trying to be insulting to Creationists. But I don’t spend hours finding OMG SEW KEWT pictures of cats, and I don’t devote posts on this site to kittehs. That’s not a condemnation of others who do; I love Cute Animal Fridays on Skepchick, Caturdays on Why Evolution Is True, and Mary’s Monday Metazoan posts on Pharyngula. I just usually don’t bother.

However, this kitteh story is worth sharing because it’s interesting science. Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True blog has this fantastic article about some research that has been done on cat coat patterns. I thought I’d share it and hope that some of you read it, fall in love with the adorable pictures, and learn a little something about evolutionary theory. As it happens, today I started in (finally) on Dr. Coyne’s book and am already enjoying the bejeebus out of it, so buy the thing and support excellent scientific writing. Better that than more books by Hovind.

Jim

Tasty Lungs!

Posted on by
1

I heard the broadest of broad strokes about this topic yesterday, but only had a chance to look into it today. Our lungs have taste buds. Well, not exactly. In fact, totally not that. There are no taste buds in the lungs, but there are taste receptors. And they’re there for a good reason. According to the researchers who discovered them, the tests they ran showed that bitter substances triggered a reaction in the lungs that “opened the airway more extensively than any known drug that we have for treatment of asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.” This is the opposite of what the researchers anticipated when they saw that they were looking at taste receptors; they assumed that bitter (which is a common component of yucky poisons) would cause the airways to tighten.

It’s really cool news for asthmatics out there, and really cool news in terms of the potential for dealing with breathing and airway problems like asthma, but it’s also really cool news because it’s really cool news! Our lungs have taste receptors! Unfortunately, this seems to beg the question, “ZOMG MY LUNGS ARE TASTIGN TEH AIRZ? Y?” PZ Myers explains this rather well, and I encourage you to read his comments. For my part, I’d like to simply say that why is not the question. How is an important question. How does this work? How does our body use these receptors? And on and on. Why does this happen? Well, the answer is because we evolved that way. It was a random accident at some point in the distant history of our ancestors, and either it helped us or it didn’t hinder us.

Continue reading →

IVF, or My Soul Is In My Other Pair Of Pants

Posted on by
3

My very good friend Sarah has been struggling to have a baby. She and her husband have tried for a very long time with no results. From my own experience, I can relate to how frustrating this is. When my ex-wife and I married, we began the babymaking process, and for the ensuing four years were told flat-out that we would never have children. We dealt with fertility medication and a whole lot of frustration and agonizing depression, and then one day we wound up getting pregnant and having the first of our four children. Sarah’s story does not, at present, have as happy an ending. They have exhausted the traditional options and are now beginning the costly and I’m sure equally frustrating process of in vitro fertilization. I am very hopeful for them, and I know there are many people rooting for them.

It seems interesting to me, then, that the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Robert G. Edwards, who is referred to as the father of the test tube baby. To my mind, IVF was a great benefit to a great many people, and I feel frustrated that so many people are against the technology for religious reasons. Bear in mind, I am in no way saying all religious people feel this way, or that this opinion is only held by religious people. I am speaking only of the arguments I have seen, which all have come from a certain segment of highly evangelized religious people.

Continue reading →

Genes, Genes, The Magical Fruit

Posted on by
Reply

Many years ago, my then-wife’s adoptive mother snapped at me about the topic of Sickle-cell disease (SCD). She told me that she had SCD, and that it was an example of how the government of the United States had silent intentions on killing off blacks because they’re very susceptible to SCD and there was no studies being done to find a cure. At the time, I didn’t have any real knowledge on the subject and wound up essentially listening to her but knowing she was mistaken on the subject. However, it’s an interesting example of one of the aspects of evolution that I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about, so it serves as a good starting point.

SCD is a genetic issue, and it’s an adaptation that has a seriously positive payoff. You see, people with only a single sickle-cell gene are much better equipped to survive malaria. Sure, your lifespan gets cut shorter and there are some serious health issues that go hand in hand with it, but it’s a hell of a lot more genetically advantageous than dying in childhood with malaria, and from a pure evolutionary perspective, people who die as children do not have the potential to be parents. If a genetic abnormality causes death in middle age and prevents death in childhood, then the odds are greater that the person in question can live long enough to pass on their genetics.

Continue reading →