I Believe in the Stork

Don't you?

The Great Chain of Being

“The inhabitants of each successive period in the world’s history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, in so far, higher in the scale of nature; and this may account for the vague yet ill-defined sentiment felt by many paleontologists, that organization on the whole has progressed” (Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 345).

Not so beautiful a sentence as it is interesting. Darwin continues his theme of offspring beating their less fit parents in the struggle for survival. Now, however, it is infused with the Great Chain of Being, the ordered list of creatures based on their advancement. Oddly rather than abandon the idea, Darwin chooses to maintain the Great Chain of Being – created through natural selection, not the mind God – in an appeal to the order-bent minds of his contemporaries.

It took many more years to give up the idea of biological progression in the academic world, but it persists to this day among most people as a common notion. For one reason or another, we are raised to have that “ill-defined sentiment” to place ourselves at the top of the chain, and order the rest of life below us. We feel we are most advanced. Apes may use tools, but they do not build cities. Ants may form cities but they do not create wonders of technology. Obviously we are the most intelligent. Self-deception is easy when we use anthropic criteria.

Evolution should make no appeal to the scale of nature. A creature’s success is determined by its fitness, the number of children it has or by ratio the amount of genetic material it passes on. Surely we are ashamed of any ordering based on evolution’s only criterion for we are quickly humbled by the modest rodent, the fertile fish, or the lowly bacteria.

We, all creatures of this earth, descend from a common ancestor. We adapt to life’s challenges not progress for them.

Brittle Star

An order of brittle star known as Phrynophiurida

Spore Release Date Official

Finding out that Spore finally has a firm release date makes me as awed as this photo. March 3rd, 2008!!! <-- The only time I'll ever use three exclamation points in this blog save for March 3rd, 2008 (link via Amazon, scroll down for release information).

The Wilted Rose and the Common Pebble

“Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection” (Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 109).

There is beauty in complexity. We admire the wilting rose more than the common pebble. There is beauty in the delicate balance between structure and disorder. In one sentence, albeit a full one, Darwin cements a structure that embraces both the chaotic and the infinite. At first, chaos would seem to belie order, but in an organic system the two are dependent on one another. A cell must be more chaotic than a crystal to be acted upon evolutionarily, yet it must also have enough order to take energy from its surroundings, grow, and reproduce. Although the father of evolution and a functionalist at heart, Darwin here fiddles with a proto-structuralist view, one in which the underlying “physical conditions of life” dictate organization and change. Darwin recognizes the deep relationships between all things and that this interconnectedness stems from the ideal of limitless change and “infinite complexity.” Given a proper dollop of time, “nature’s power of selection” would populate and speciate the globe.

What is most striking is Darwin’s universality. He abandons his pigeons, his finches, and his beetles and applies this beauty of adaptation to all forms. There are no longer any needs for specific anecdotes of variety and speciation. Darwin pans back effortlessly for the reader to gasp at the vista of his theory, universal in scope and replete in form. There is beauty in the structure of a theory that can bind the chaos of our organic world. There is beauty in this complexity.

Diatoms

Diatoms are microscopic organisms, or more specifically, eukaryotic algae that encase their single cell in a shell of silica called a frustule. It is estimated that by weight they make up one-fourth of the world's lifeforms.

Honeybee Disappearance Explained

Remember how all those honeybees were disappearing, and doomsayers were forecasting the collapse of agriculture and the economy? Well it turns out the problem wasn't as serious as most had thought. And now a group of scientists has linked the "colony collapse disorder" to the rare Israeli acute paralysis virus. (link via Scientific American).

I wonder if I could still make a stock portfolio to play off of this? Eh.

Great Moments in Biological Mixups

Is it a butterfly, a moth, or a horse? You decide, dear reader!

Sphincter for an eye?

Sorry for falling off the horse. I'll try to get back on it in the next couple of days. I've accrued a lot to write about, but for now: the one, the only, the Vampyroteuthis.



The scariest squid in the whole ocean. The Vampire Squid's ancient eye does not have eyelids like yours or mine. It instead must constrict its skin around its eye in a sphincter-like movement. Disgustingly fun.



Originally found on Pharyngula.