TGIPF: The Dawn of the Deed Edition

By: | November 2, 2012

First, a disclaimer. This is the kind of discussion that happens when friends talk evolutionary biology over a bottle of wine. (Specifically, me, my husband Dave–whose knowledge of evolution comes from reading New Scientist magazine — and our friend Kevin.)

Christie: Penises make no sense. They’re floppy, vulnerable appendages and males spend an inordinate amount of their lives just seeking places to poke them.

Dave: You can’t pass judgement like that. They’ve obviously outcompeted other things.

Kevin: Hey — you’re dissing a man’s most important unit.

Christie: But imagine how much more productive humans could be if we didn’t have such an urgent and time-consuming urge to copulate.

Dave: You’re looking at it from a single point in time. We think of ourselves as the endpoint of evolution, but we’re not. We’re just an evolutionary snapshot.

Christie: So you’re saying that nature might find a better solution for human reproduction?

Dave: Yeah. Thanks to technology, men can already broadcast our sperm without engaging in sex.

Christie: Like those pinyon pines whose pollen make me sneeze all spring? But that takes all the fun out of it!

Kevin: Yeah, we can’t let evolution take away the act of sex. It’s what makes us human.

Dave: I’m certainly not giving up sex. But who knows where evolution might lead.

The genesis of our discussion? A review copy of The Dawn of the Deed that landed on my doorstep recently. Continue reading →

The Mystery of the Windsor Chair

By: | November 1, 2012

Ann and Richard were each pleased and proud that their books have won the same lovely prize, the American Institute of Physics’ Science Communication Award. The prize comes with money — always nice — and a Windsor chair that says American Institute of Physics on the front and has a formal citation inscribed on a large brass plate on the back. Ann received her chair in 2008. Richard’s will arrive some time following a ceremony at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach in January. They are honored and deeply grateful for the prize, but they wish to discuss this Windsor chair business. Continue reading →

Carbon (Spin) Cycle

By: | October 30, 2012

We’ve got a lot of dead trees in the Rockies. More than usual. As the region has warmed, bark beetle populations have exploded, and they’ve been killing off massive swaths of pine and spruce. It’s hard to miss the damage, and when British landscape artist Chris Drury visited the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie, he proposed to tell the forests’ story in an outdoor sculpture.

“Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around” was installed on the UW campus in late 2011. Funded by an anonymous donor and by the state Cultural Trust Fund, it consisted of a 36-foot-wide circle of logs from beetle-killed trees, arranged in a whirlpool pattern around a pile of coal. Drury hoped the sculpture would be left in place until it disintegrated, and the director of the campus art museum said there were “no plans to uninstall it.” It was, Drury said, intended to inspire a conversation.

In May 2012, however, just after most students left campus, Carbon Sink quietly disappeared. Continue reading →

Guest Post: How to Visit a Natural History Museum

By: | October 29, 2012

I go to a lot of natural history museums. Something about all those pretty rocks and dead animals, and the chance that I might see something I’ve never seen before or learn something new—I can’t resist it. In the last three years, I’ve been to at least 15 natural history museums on two continents. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve learned.

1. Don’t try to see everything. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 27, 2012

Oct. 22 – 26

This week’s posts were unusually beautiful, every one of them, with the exception of Abstruse Goose, who was merely funny.

Abstruse Goose shows — not tells — why nobody’s ever going to make a movie about solving a math problem.

Junk food everywhere = epidemic in obesity.  “We don’t know which foods to ban,” says the govenment.  “Yes, you do,” says Cassie.

Migrations of hawks, of people: “How fragile they are,” Cameron writes. “How amazing that they know the way home, that some of them make it, and that then they do it all over again.”

Young men and young elephants both are subject to raging hormonal imbalances, says Thomas, leading sometimes to mayhem.  Obvious, cheap, and lovely solution:  the presence of older men and older elephants.

An Ixil Maya farmer finds under the paint on his living room wall an ancient mural of the subversive Dance of Conquest.  He’s trying to preserve it, says Heather.  The government isn’t helping.

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Photo:   Lasse Christensen 

 

Dance of Conquest

By: | October 26, 2012

This is the kind of story that I love, a story about an ordinary person doing something perfectly ordinary, digging out the last of the potatoes from the garden, say, or chasing off after a dog that’s bolted into the woods, and suddenly stumbling on something wonderfully unexpected, something almost magical, something that abruptly, almost shockingly, slides open a portal of time.

These are rare, rare events, of course. But five years ago, Lucas Asicone Ramirez, an Ixil Maya farmer who lives with his young family in the remote, highland village of Chajul in Guatemala, stumbled on just such a portal. Asicone was working on some improvements at the time in his one-room home. He started by opening up a wall, and as he stripped away layer upon layer of plaster, with fine white dust flying everywhere, he spotted something colorful underneath, something odd. It looked like part of a painted human figure.

Puzzled, Ascione removed more of the plaster, then more. Along the wall, stretching for several square feet, was a lost, ghost mural—a strangely familiar scene painted in vivid color. Continue reading →

Where the Boys Are (The men need to be, too)

By: | October 25, 2012

The outline of the story is as familiar as it is tawdry: a group of high school boys turn sexual insecurity into a contest, and a contest into emotional brutality. Adults in their orbit express shock and outrage, and observers pretend that the migration of teen sleaze onto the Internet represents something new. But why are we surprised by something that is a persistent feature of the (young, male) human condition, and a staple plot in teen raunch movies?

Piedmont is a small town in Northern California, completely surrounded by Oakland the way Lesotho is encircled by South Africa. Only in the Californian case, the surrounded entity is an island of relative prosperity, calm and really, really good schools. It has been around for over 100 years but still, the city seems to exist primarily to justify its own public school district.

That’s probably why a recently exposed “fantasy slut league” at Piedmont High School has caused a significant furor throughout the state. (That, and because it gave a lot of people the chance to say “fantasy slut league.”) In the competition, modeled after fantasy sports leagues, male students apparently “drafted” their female classmates and earned points for “documented engagement in sexual activities” with them, according to a letter sent to parents by the Piedmont High principal. Continue reading →

Migrations

By: | October 24, 2012

When Iben Hove Sørensen flew to Ghana for her work with Dansk Ornitologisk Forening, a partner of BirdLife International, she couldn’t help but think about the birds. The passerines that she was headed south to study follow a similar course that her plane took to their wintering grounds–over the Mediterranean, sometimes through cloud-choked skies, for thousands of miles. “You can’t see trees, you can’t see water,” she said. “If I was a bird, I’d be so scared.” Continue reading →