Mutant Mynah Bird

A little over a month ago, Galspanic and I were driving near the intersection of Kapiolani and McCully, when we spotted this Mynah bird with a ridiculously long beak. I have no idea if this is a standard variation of the Mynah's beak or what. The Common Mynah was introduced to Hawaii to control sugar cane pests, including armyworms and cutworms. A beak like this might be kind of useful for that, but I've never seen any Hawaii Mynah birds sporting a specialization like this.

No Darwin films allowed here

"A British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer. "

Read the whole article.

(And sorry if you've all already seen this! It's a few days old.)

Darwin's Interactive Tree of Life

This thing is everywhere, but I can't not post it. The video is clear and really beautiful, and the linked site has a sweet interactive cladogram, as well as swell resources for educators and scientists (and animators!). The project is at least a little creative commons and a little open source, too. All of it is downloadable, for classrooms with weak internet connections. All in all, this is a very good use of resources--not only is the content well-done and completely sharable; it's remixable, to boot. Great job, Wellcome Trust.

Teaching an Understanding of Science

As uncool as this may sound, I think I actually agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson here. Discuss.

Happy Mother's Day!

On this Mother's day, from the not-at-all sensationalist special, In the Womb: Extreme Animals!

Parasitic wasps infected with a nudivirus over 100 million years ago lead to this:

I hope you watched to the end for the full effect. Geez, thanks, Mom!

Via: Observations of a Nerd

Human evolution

Hey! Check out this artist's vision of how our bodies could evolve to accomodate modern consumer choices. This woman has an extended shoulder for holding a phone.

The above link has more photos. A preview:

Other proposals include a ridge in the nose developed for wearing glasses, ears moulded to accommodate earphones, a thumb with an extra joint for sending SMS messages more efficiently and a foot adapted to create the same posture as wearing high heels.

So the Spore Creature Creator is out. Yay.

The free creature editor itself is pretty nifty. You've got some rudimentary controls over body shape, a bunch of malleable appendages to apply, and some basic color schemes. I'm betting the $10 full version is tons of fun. One of my big worries was that everything would look too uniformly like muppets and that's still kind of the case, but there's the sporepedia showing some decent variability in design, so I'm hopeful.

Here's a few observations, though since it took them a trillion years to finally release the game I'm sure none of this would be realistic to change: 

1) Everyone gets a central spine--clearly, that sucks. At least one or two different options here like a segmental architecture, jellies, or something like Philip Pullman's mulefas would be great to play around with. (Ooo, it's like that sugar coating of science and evolution all over again! Though this time due to impracticability rather than purposeful misinformation ^_^)

2) Basic physiology is nonexistent. For example, people can't have wings. WE JUST CAN'T. Our chests would stick out a good foot or more to support the muscles needed to use them, man. Likewise, an arm at the end of a tail would just go floppity floppity all the time and be completely useless and eaten off a lot. It would be neat, though, if by putting an arm somewhere the necessary support structures would alter the look of the thing so that they could actually work. And the reason this might be worthwhile in Spore, would be to cut down on retarded looking creatures.

3) There's too many retarded looking creatures. Seriously--lack of creativity aside (which includes me), why, whenever there's the opportunity, do hundreds of people instantly feel the need to make a shitload of penises? I mean, after the first one, what's the point? Am I just getting old? It's not that I find them at all offensive, just boring. Although I have to admit this one here is pretty cute.

4) They look like muppets.

All in all it looks like a pretty great time waster so far, so yay, it's not the disappointment I was worried it would be. And it might get me to stop hearing these guys in my sleep at night, so double yay!

The evolutionary evangelist

You'll love this: a pastor who calls himself an evolutionary evangelist.

For the last six years, he has traveled across North America with his wife, Connie Barlow, in a van that displays an image of two fish kissing each other — one labeled Jesus, the other Darwin — explaining to conservative and liberal congregations why understanding and accepting evolution will bring them closer to spiritual fulfillment.

He thinks evolution will help us "understand our sinful ways" (To use the reporter's words.) I'm not sure this way of thinking really harms anyone - so long as school boards don't force teachers to teach it in science class. But the article quotes a scientist saying it could encourage society to think less rigorously about evolution.

Direct evidence of evolution

Bacteria Make Major Evolutionary Shift In the Lab

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens...

In a nutshell--after tens of thousands of generations the bacteria evolved to thrive using a growth medium they had no business eating. A small step of sorts, but that's also the point.

We've got more evidence showing that we understand evolution than we do for gravity. For seriousness. Compared to gravity, evolution is cake!

See? Don't get me started... >_<