An article over at Wired talks in detail about the overblown reputation and fears of the notorious brown recluse spider (Loxosceles reclusa) and, as is so typical of any attempt to impart some needed perspective to the general public, it crashes like a wave against the rock
Category: Science & Evolution
Seeing is believing. But not necessarily true
Perspective, in the usage of considering some topic from a different standpoint than originally, is a great thing, and something I play with a lot on this blog. In the usage of how things appear to us visually, based on our position, it’s a useful thing to play with in photography as well. But sometimes, it’s hard to override our mental perspective to recognize the visual one.
Crepuscular
So, why should we bother?
In a previous post detailing the difficulties and uncertainties of tracing our hominid ancestors, I kind of led up to a question, expressed now in this post: Why should we bother? It’s a lot of effort to determine something that happened in the past, which is highly unlikely to have much
You can call me Al
Over at the New York Times, Carl Zimmer has an article on the difficulties of pinning down hominid species, which illustrates an interesting perspective in biology, but is unfortunately a little too brief. There are a couple of factors at play, and no easy way to resolve them.
The very first thing to bear in mind is that ‘species’ is an arbitrary distinction in many ways. The word was
Too cool, part 20: Stop it, you’re creeping me out
Lyssomanes viridis, known to those of us who do not speak dead languages as the magnolia green jumping spider, is a lovely translucent green spider that wouldn’t hurt a fly um, is harmless to anything larger than a honyebee and is undeserving of any arachnophobic reactions. Until you get close. Really, really close.
Because, while all jumping spiders have the same equipment, on the magnolia
Limitations
Several years ago, I witnessed a particular action from a friend’s dog that startled me. The dog had come into their living room on a lazy afternoon and looked around for a place to lie down, to find the other dogs had already claimed all of the best snoozing spots. He actually got a slightly pained expression, tail dropping and ears twitching back slightly as if hearing a harsh sound –
Buried at the crossroads
You go, Randall
xkcd is great today:
Ophrys apifera.
Yes, I read xkcd before Why Evolution Is True, but the latter has more detail on the whole subject.
Book review: The Selfish Gene
When this book was first published, I was 10 years old, in that directionless, awkward stage between playing Bionic Man and shooting Stormtroopers with my blaster, so if you want to consider this review ill-timed that’s fine with me. There is likely nothing I say here that hasn’t been said before, but that’s probably true of the entire blog anyway. I also need to note that the
A whooshing noise high overhead
Following links just now, I began reading a post on what Vanessa Williams discovered about her DNA. The money quote:
My DNA breaks down as follows: I’m 23% from Ghana, 17% from the British Isles, 15% from Cameroon, 12% Finnish, 11% Southern European, 7% Togo, 6% Benin, 5% Senegal and 4% Portuguese.
Now, I can’t wait to go to Ghana and Cameroon and Togo and Senegal — it’s a great opportunity