America's Top 25 Most Visted Places Meme

ReBecca did this meme a month ago, and I'm only just getting round to having a go myself. I consider myself pretty well travelled, but I think on this one Paul will beat me, if only by virtue of having been to Florida! The figures are the number of visitors each year, and I've emboldened the places I've visited.

1. Times Square, New York City, NY - 35 million
   
2. The Las Vegas Strip, Las Vegas, NV - 31 million
   
3. National Mall and Memorial Parks, Washington DC - 24 million
   
4. Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Boston, MA - 20 million
   
5. Disney World's Magic Kingdom, Lake Buena Vista, FL - 17.1 million
   
6. Disneyland Park, Anaheim, CA - 14.9 million
   
7. Fisherman's Wharf/Golden Gate National Recreation Area, San Francisco, CA - 14 million
   
8. Niagara Falls, NY - 12 million
   
   
   
9. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN/NC - 9.4 million
   
10. Navy Pier, Chicago, IL - 8.6 million
    
11. Lake Mead National Recreation Area, AR/NV - 7.6 million
    
12. Universal Studios/ Islands of Adventure, Orlando, FL - 6.2 million
    
13. SeaWorld Florida, Orlando, FL - 6 million
    
14. San Antonio River Walk, TX - 5.1 million
    
    
    
15. Temple Square, Salt Lake City, UT - 5 million
    
16. Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, PA/NJ - 4.8 million
    
17. Universal Studios Hollywood, CA - 4.7 million
    
18. Metropolitan Museum, New York City, NY - 4.5 million
    
19. Waikiki Beach, Oahu, HI - 4.5 million
    
20. Grand Canyon, AZ - 4.41 million
    
    
    
21. Busch Gardens Africa, Tampa Bay, FL - 4.4 million
    
22. Cape Cod National Seashore, MA - 4.35 million
    
23. SeaWorld San Diego, CA - 4.26 million
    
24. American Museum of Natural History, New York City, NY - 4 million
    
25. Atlantic City Boardwalk, NJ - 4 million

A respectable non-American score of 11/25! I do wonder what the most visited British places are, and whether I'd do any better there. For example, I've never been round Buckingham Palace, nor have I ever visited Madame Tussauds, even though they're two of the most popular tourist attractions in London, and even though I work five minutes from the Palace!

More interestingly, I wonder if there's a way of correlating the top 100 geological places visited with the visitor numbers for each attraction? Possibly not as with so many geological sites there's no way of tracking accurate visitor numbers.

Animals At Kew

Another trip to Kew Gardens was made last weekend. And although it was mainly a plant-spotting trip, there were plenty of animals around to keep me occupied on that front too.


This chap was hanging out in the Evolution House. I'm sure it's just a regular common toad, Bufo bufo.

On top of the palm house, I was able to take an unusual photo of the gulls (at an angle from which it is usually very dangerous to do so...):


And our old friend the Chinese water dragon, Physignathus cocincinus was hamming it up for the cameras in almost exactly the same spot I found him in July:


Think this was his better side though:


So it's been a while since I blogged, and I've been very bad about replying to comments (and I owe a few people some interview questions!). I really want to get a post out about Miragaia, the "stegosauropod" (I wish I'd thought of that word, but until he says otherwise, I shall give Zach full credit for being smarter and quicker than I was). Maybe I can take a shot at it tonight, but until then I'm sure none of you will object to the herp totty above...

Looking For Atlantis

Our newspapers, especially the ones designed for the hard-of-thinking, have a few set stories guaranteed to sell copies. Health scares ("X gives you cancer"), anything about immigration ("They come over here, they take all our jobs") and the supernatural or pseudoscience are all popular. Today is no exception. The Torygraph, the Daily Fail, and even the Sun (with special guest reporter Plato) are all reporting on the discovery of the lost city of Atlantis in Google Earth:


A rectangular region "the size of Wales"(which is the official journalistic unit of area) has been found over 600 miles off the coast of west Africa:


My first thought was that there are a few engineers at Google having a laugh, and that this is a bit of an "easter egg". But looking at the rectangles, if it is meant to look like Atlantis it's pretty shite! It's also way too big. Wales has an area of 20,779km². The heaving metropolis that is the Geater Los Angeles Area is 12,562km². Is Atlantis really meant to be twice the size of Greater Los Angeles at a time when the population of the entire Earth can't have been much greater than the population of LA?

The scale is all out too. If we approximate the rectangle as 160km by 130km, then many of those "city blocks" are in excess of 10km wide. The "roads" must be 500m or wider. Now, in theory, the residents of Atlantis could have enjoyed nice wide avenues, but I think 500m is taking the piss a bit, don't you?

So if it isn't Atlantis, what is it then? This is when I wish I'd been listening more in my Geological Sciences B lectures instead of wishing I didn't have 9am lectures on a Saturday morning. Igneous rocks can form spectacular cracks and joints. Giant's Causeway is a wonderful example of hexagonal columnar jointing. But can we get jointing on such a large 10km scale or more? I'm looking forward to seeing what my more hard-rock geobloggers have to say about this. Do feel free to link to your own blog posts about the discovery in the comments.

Interview Me Meme

Here's a slightly different sort of meme going round - Silver Fox posted hers here. And you'll see it's a slightly more voluntary way of being infected with a meme. So here are the questions Silver Fox wanted to ask me - they were great questions that really got me thinking (exercising the neurones always helps!).

1. How did you get into geology in general and palaeontology in particular?

Geology has always been a means to an end for me. Palaeontology was my real passion, but I'll admit to being very blinkered towards dinosaurs and only dinosaurs until about my third year of university. It all started when my dad brought home a little Natural History Museum Tyrannosaurus rex model for me. He bought me a different one every time he went to London on business, and eventually at about the age of 11, I had the entire set.

Almost as all-consuming as my desire to be a palaeontologist was my desire to go to Cambridge University, to the extent that my tutor had to plead with me to put more than one university down on my UCAS application form. To do anything scientific, one had to study Natural Sciences. One applied for either Biological Sciences or Physical Sciences. I was really crap at Biology at school, so by applying for Physical Sciences I got out of having to do well in my least competent subject. And you should have seen the Directors of Studies' faces when I showed up at Cambridge and promptly decided NOT to do Physics.

Geology was one of THE ways one learned Palaeontology. And I took a Biology of Organisms class (which I found really boring as the first half of the animals module was on sponges and the second half was on jellies). It became very obvious that I should probably stick with Geology as a means to get into Palaeontology. And Geology is great. We get lots of cool holidaysfieldwork, get to spend a significant amount of time colouring with crayons, and for a few weeks each year we get to sit in a class and talk about whether a pack of Utahraptor could take on Tyrannosaurus in a fight.

2. Do you have a favorite outdoor activity; if so what is it?

Has to be my garden. When the garden really needs some work, when I have a load of plants to pot up, weeds to remove, compost to turn, shrubs to trim, then I'm in heaven. If I can't be in my garden then I want to visit someone else's. And if I can't be in a garden then I want to be out in the hills, hiking. And if money were no object I'd want a horse I could ride Western style (because English style is rubbish and unnatural) any time I like. I don't know about the US, but having a horse is a very expensive option in the UK and pretty much the preserve of the rich, as there is rarely enough room for the average person to keep a horse on their own land.

3. What was the most outrageous thing you wanted to do/be/have as a child?

On the grand scheme of things I was a pretty un-outrageous child. I did go through an awesome goth phase, and I still have the eyeliner and the tendency to wear black. I remember wanting a GameBoy, but instead we played games on the BBC Micro (and they were mostly educational...). I always wanted to be a palaeontologist, except for a brief period every fat, ugly little girl goes through when they wish they could be a model. Aren't I boring?

4. Who is your favorite author, and what books of his/hers in particular do you recommend?

I am not a big reader. Last year I made the shocking discovery that the only book I had read was "Lipstick Jungle". So I must try harder. But I do still have a few favourites. "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" by Douglas Adams is a must. I'd recommend the rest of the trilogy too, although the fifth book in the trilogy isn't as good as the first four. Carl Sagan's "Contact" is also well worth a read. For one thing, it's one of the first books I remember with a strong, scientific, female protagonist. For another, I love the exchanges between Ellie and the pastor. If you haven't, you should try any of the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. Start in order, and it would help a great deal if you have visited Cambridge University at some point in the past. And finally, there's some idiot who thinks he can write gothic fantasy novels. He sometimes comes up with some good stuff.

5. How do you see yourself 30-40 years from now?

Haha! Sometimes I can't even bring myself to imagine this time next year! But I'm hoping to have the PhD done and dusted by the time I'm 35 (so only 10 years late...). And in 35 years' time I'll be expected to retire. Which is why I hope I'll be within academia, so I don't have to stop playing with dinosaurs, even if I don't get paid for the privilege. I hear 60 is the new 40, so neither Paul nor I will be planning on slowing down, settling into old age and waiting to shuffle off the mortal coil. I hope Paul has a very successful writing career which he will continue until he can't figure out how to switch the computer on anymore. I want to have been able to teach a bit, research a bit, run some wicked field trips and garden a lot.

I am never going to be a Romer-Simpson prize winner at SVP. I am never going to be elected to the Royal Society. I am unlikely to "make it", and by the time I'm in my mid-thirties there's no way I'm upping sticks and moving over the other side of the world for a postdoc, so it all might grind to a halt then! But if I inspire one person to go into palaeontology, or to study any form of science, then I'll be very happy with my impact on the world.

So...

If you want to be interviewed, here are the rules.

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me" AND leave your email address (or blog link) in the comment!
   
2. I will respond by emailing you (or commenting on your blog) with five questions. I get to pick the questions. [It has recently become standard in this meme to limit the number of interviews I will have to do to the first three respondents.]
   
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions. (If you don't have a blog, I can post your answers here.)
   
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
   
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. [Again, the limit will be three interviewees according to new memish practice.]

Birthday

You'd think after Twelve Days of Darwin that I'd want a break from blogging, but no, here I am. It's my birthday today. All the best people seem to have been born around the middle of February. I was born 171 years and one day after Charles Darwin, in his home town of Shrewsbury - they loved him so much they named their shopping centre after him! The arguments about how to pronounce the town's name have been going almost as long as the town itself. My family have always called it "Shr-eauz-bry", but some people (mainly from Telford) call it "Shr-ooz-bry".

Anyway. You may be wondering, what could you get for me that would make me happier beyond my wildest dreams? That would make my birthday that little bit more special? Well, I have a modest suggestion...

What's Your Favorite Toy? Brickfish

How about another few votes for Amanda? Come on, every eight hours, chaps. You can do it!

Tonight Paul is cooking steak and cheesy mash for me. And then I have an appointment with a tub of Baileys ice cream.

I Shall Sing This All The Way Home

A composition by friend, fellow palaeontologist and keen reader of the blog, Thomas R. Holtz, Jr:

The Twelve Days Of Darwin

A perfect way to round off the celebrations!

Darwin's Image

  
Today is Darwin Day, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Robert Darwin. I know that, but for a few twists of fate, we might be instead celebrating Wallace Day on 8th January each year (with the bicentenary in 14 years’ time), but Homo sapiens is a funny creature, and we like to have an event to celebrate. We have National Doughnut Week, National Conifer Week and a whole lot of other worthy causes, so why not have a Darwin Day to celebrate evolution by means of natural selection?

All the media bumf (possibly aided and abetted by the NHM's Darwin exhibition posters) insists on showing Charles Darwin the old man. Hell, both the icons and codes I put at the top of the post show the old, grey-bearded Darwin. It is the old Charles Darwin who is most caricatured in the Punch cartoons, a bias I put down to the fact that the satirists only really got going on Darwin after the publication of "The Descent of Man" in 1871, when he was already in his sixties.


It's this Darwin-as-an-old-man portrait which is so haunting. I think it is because the eyes look so sad that the images of the elderly Darwin stay etched in our memories. Darwin was 71 years old when this photo was taken.

But what did the man look like when "On the Origin of Species" was published?


This was him at the age of 51, just after the publication. Still not looking overly happy with his lot, but by now he had lost his daughter Annie and, over his gradual loss of faith, stopped attending church with his family.

I far prefer the photo of Darwin shortly after his wedding:


He looks ready to change the world. He's brimming with ideas from his long voyage on The Beagle. He's a newly-wed with a long life ahead of him. He did so much of his scientific research between the return from the Americas and the publication of "Origin".

There's a film coming out, called "Creation", starring Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin. Paul Bettany is an excellent actor, and I think he will do a great job of bringing out the facets of Darwin's personality that we don't often see. I like the casting of Toby Jones as Huxley and Benedict Cumberbatch as Hooker. But I'm really unsure about the plot. I have a horrible feeling it's going to make me very unhappy indeed. I think it's going to try to put faith where there wasn't faith, and add the supernatural to the natural.

Enjoy Darwin Day wherever you are.

Evolution In Action

Here's an extra tidbit for you, courtesy of Discover Magazine.


Can't find the original journal article for love or money though, so all links gratefully received!

Celebrating The Big Day

Running out of steam a bit on this Twelve Days Of Darwin blogging marathon (I have never blogged so hard!), but I thought it would be good to give a quick run-down of some of the events going on to celebrate Darwin's 200th Birthday.

Your first port of call should be the Darwin 200 website, at least if you're in the UK. There are hundreds of events over the next few days and throughout the year. At the Natural History Museum there's a great big birthday party for Chuck complete with cake. I wish I could go to it. There are almost certainly things going on at your local science museum, so check them out for more details.


How about online? There are already some great posts about Darwin and evolution linked from the official Darwin Day 2009 site. There's some nifty code if you're participating, which will give you a spiffy Darwin Day badge (as modelled by my post above). There's a Blog For Darwin carnival from 12-15 February. If you're on Facebook, join the "Can we find 200,000 by Feb 12 to wish Darwin a happy 200th birthday?" group. As of this moment they have about 170,000 so they need about 30,000 more. Go do it and invite all your friends.

Finally, haven't you always wanted to be best buddies with Charles Darwin? Well now you can, by becoming a Friend Of Charles Darwin. It's free to join and you can put the letters FCD after your name. I dare you all to put those letters on your CV. And then to keep a straight face the next time you have a job interview and they ask you what they stand for. And then to put both opposable thumbs up.

If there's a link I haven't mentioned, please feel free to post it in the comments.

Newsflash

Today I am really motivated to do research! I went to the library and got out Arkell's "The Jurassic System of Great Britain". This is A Good Thing.

Firstly, it was my first trip ever into the Birkbeck library. Secondly, I'm a big fan of starting off with the classic literature - getting the historical perspective, whether or not the science has changed is a very important aspect of research for me. I like to know whose shoulders I'm attempting to stand on (although to be honest I know I will be lucky if I manage to score a piggy-back!).

I have a few other good British Jurassic sedimentology papers to get stuck into, but please feel free to suggest anything that comes to mind - I'm not expecting you all to do my literature review for me, because that would defeat the purpose of it, but I'll never turn down hints, pointers and advice. Now I'm just counting down the minutes until I can rush home (via the stationers, because this merits a new lab book) and read!!

Extinction, Rubbish And Saving The Planet

Words of wisdom on our place on the earth from the late, great George Carlin:


Hat-tip to Garden Rant.

I Do Not Believe In Evolution

Bet you weren't expecting that were you? But I don't believe in evolution. Believing in something implies that a degree of faith is needed in order to accept something that cannot be proven one way or another. Oooh, like the existence of God for example.

Creationists often use the strawman argument that "evolution is just a theory, even the scientists say so". Yeah, well we also refer to gravity as a theory, but that doesn't mean that we don't think it's a FACT, or that we're happy to have intelligent falling taught in schools as an alternative to gravity!

As the AAAS explains:

A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world. The theory of biological evolution is more than "just a theory." It is as factual an explanation of the universe as the atomic theory of matter or the germ theory of disease. Our understanding of gravity is still a work in progress. But the phenomenon of gravity, like evolution, is an accepted fact.

So I don't believe in evolution for the same reason that I do not believe in gravity. There is no need to believe in something that is happening constantly, measurably and without us thinking about it. It is as silly to believe in evolution as it is to believe that 2 + 2 = 4.

Sadly this distinction has been lost on the journalist who wrote this report on a survey of evolution versus creationism, and I presume on an awful lot of the people who filled in the questionnaire, whether they are part of the 25% who "believe" evolution is definitely true, or whether they are strongly opposed to it. As for the actual figures reported, that half the people surveyed do not accept evolution, looks like we're in for a battle like the Americans have been fighting.

And because it needs to be said, evolution is a testable scientific concept. We can now see it happening in nature and in the lab. We can see it in our own embryology and that of other animals. It is as real as that force keeping you on that chair rather than atomised in space.

Darwin's London

I'm lucky enough to work in one of the most historic parts of London, Mayfair. Within five minutes I can be at Buckingham Palace, St James's Palace, Berkeley Square, and of course Burlington House.


Burlington House contains, among other institutions, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Geological Society, and the Linnean Society.


I've never been in. I don't know if I'm allowed.

The Linnean Society is where Charles Darwin's first abstract of his ideas on natural selection were read. It is the oldest extant biological society in the world.


Down the road is Albemarle Street. If you've heard of Albemarle Street it's probably because it has the Royal Institution on it. But there is smaller building that even I, until today, had just walked past, wholly unaware of its significance.


It's a subtle building, next to a bank. I walked right past it today, and on this occasion I was looking for it! You probably can't see the sign very easily.


There you go. John Murray. Founded in 1768. The publishers of "On the Origin of Species".

Selection

The key theme in Charles Darwin's "Origin Of Species" is that of natural selection. There are variations within a population, some of which may be advantageous to the individuals, some of which may be disadvantageous or deleterious. Those with disadvantageous qualities are less likely to survive to adulthood and to pass on their genetic information than those with advantageous qualities.

Where am I going with this? Well, there has been a 36% rise in cases of measles in the UK in the last year.


Measles is a really infectious disease. 90% of unvaccinated people in the same household as an infected patient will also get measles. It is an airborne virus. If a child at your own child's school has measles, you'd better be damned sure your kid has had a vaccination against measles. Measles still kills three people out of every 1000, even in developed nations. The death rate can be 100 times higher in developing nations or in immuno-compromised patients. It can still cause brain damage, blindness and a host of life-limiting complications. An epidemiologist will be able to confirm this, but if I remember my Biology A-Level correctly you need about a 95% vaccination rate to prevent measles from becoming endemic in a population.

Yeah, it's now endemic...

Masterminded by the Daily Fail, a few years ago, was a scaremongering campaign. Journalists, backed up by some scientists who really should have known better and who were being commissioned by some parents to find a link between autism and vaccination, failing to be able to distinguish between a causal relationship and coincidence, noticed that the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, given at 18 months, coincided with the onset, in some children, of autism. The peer-reviewed literature has, of course, comprehensively put to rest any suggestion that the MMR vaccine causes autism, but the Daily Fail have never let facts get in the way of a good story.

Cue thousands of yummy-mummy Daily Fail-readers listening to someone with barely a journalism qualification, let alone a second MB and years of general practice experience, and deciding that there is a big conspiracy by doctors to give all children autism. I'm with Miss Prism - babies are not epidemiology qualifications!

But for the prosperity of the UK and the Western medicine that these dumbass parents seem intent on ignoring, there would be up to a 1 in 3 chance that a child with measles would die. But for the fact that money has almost removed us from the evolutionary process, this would be a highly effective way of removing all humans with a deleterious tendency to read the Daily Fail from the gene pool. We can only hope...

Economically Beneficial Science

It has been remarked upon in a number of blogs and other websites, that 2009 is quite the anniversary year. It is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species", the 250th anniversary of the creation of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and in fact the 250th anniversary of the opening of the British Museum (from whence the glorious Natural History Museum came) to the public. Edit: I just found out it's the Science Museum's centenary too!

So in a year when science, evolutionary science and above all British evolutionary science is being celebrated, I cannot for the life of me figure out why the UK science minister, Lord Drayson is calling for a debate on whether scientific funding should be shifted more to economically beneficial research.

It's happening in the US too - Republican Senator Coburn is apparently proposing an amendment to any economic stimulus package to remove funding from museums. It seems that science is the first thing to be deemed "frivolous" or "non-economically viable", and from my perspective the evolutionary sciences will be the ones to suffer most. After all, as I was repeatedly told throughout my year at Wash U, we're not curing cancer.

However, I do think it's a very bad idea to try to divert funds away from what might be deemed more economically advantageous research. Here's why.

Predicting the future

Firstly, who has the foresight to predict what science will be best for the economy? Politicians cannot predict what economics will be best for the economy, so I certainly do not trust them as far as I can throw them. Scientists also cannot predict. No one can predict what will be best for the economy.

If we stopped funding "non-essential research", what might we lose? Particle physics seems very far removed from everyday life. We don't need that, right? Well, if we didn't have particle physicists needing to communicate across a vast site in the middle of Switzerland, we wouldn't have the internet. Amazing discoveries come about directly and indirectly.

What if the extra bit of programming that finally identifies a foolproof vaccine against influenza came about because a frustrated palaeontologist couldn't get the existing software to do the calculation they wanted?

What if the zoologists on fieldwork looking for caecilians in a remote part of the Amazon discovered a new species of plant while they were there that could stop cancer in its tracks?

If Thomas Edison had been told to concentrate only on research of direct benefit to the economy we would now have the best, most efficient gas lighting ever, but no electricity. If you try to stop part of the scientific machine working, you cannot predict what knock-on effects there will be.

Stewardship for the next generation

I do not know a single scientist who didn't, when they were younger, want to be a palaeontologist or an astronaut. My husband, a lawyer-turned-writer, wanted to be both at various points (and a priest, but that's a different story). Even my brother had a brief flirtation with geology when he was about nine years old. Some of these subjects, the ones with more obvious "wow" factor but less obvious practical use to the average person, are essential in hooking young minds in and getting them interested in science.

How many prospective palaeontologists then went down a different route, working on different organisms? How many students arrived at Cambridge, fully intending to be a physicist but discovering geology? I have a friend who wanted to be an astronaut, did planetary sciences, then space sciences and still wants to be an astronaut.

And the young people depend on new discoveries to get them excited. If there was never another story about a new, massive dinosaur found somewhere exotic, within 20 years science classes would be having great difficulty recruiting undergraduates.

Actual real results

Evolutionary science generates amazing findings of incredible importance. More and more, palaeontologists are having to justify their funding requests by saying that they are studying an ecosystem that existed at a time when global temperatures were much warmer/cooler than they are today, and that by assessing how species reacted to these fluctuations they can better predict how the planet will cope with global warming/ice ages.

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Take the discovery of Titanoboa, as expertly reported by Ed Yong. Titanoboa depended on a mean annual temperature of 32°C. This is higher than modern tropical forests, and something we didn't know about this part of the Palaeocene. This is another data point, an amendment for someone's climate model. Perhaps a slight shift in predicted temperatures for the next 200 years.

You cannot draw a line between economically advantageous science and non-economically advantageous science. People who "play with dinosaurs" are often seen as doing something pretty useless, but in fact everything we do feeds into other sciences. We work with computer programmers, microbiologists, engineers and orthopaedic surgeons. We learn an awful lot from these other very talented scientists. And they, in turn, learn an awful lot from us.

So go forth, palaeontologists, evolutionary biologists, botanists, morphometricians. Be fruitful and publish, and tell Lord Drayson he can stick his idea up his arse.

Darwin Coffee

I bought this a year ago. The coffee is long gone, drunk mainly by Paul, but the can remains as a wonderful keepsake.


The blurb on the label says:

The Galapagos' one-of-a-kind ecosystem fuelled Charles Darwin's theories on evolution and natural selection, with several independent species found on each island. San Cristobal has evolved into a producer of exceptional coffee that proves the fittest not only survive but prosper.

The question is, how many times, while you read that paragraph, will you roll your eyes and groan at the bad puns?

On The Fifth Day, God Created Lampreys

Yesterday I mentioned an interview with Sir David Attenborough. In the interview, he commented that people always give hummingbirds as an example of God's wondrous creation, and he always responds by informing them of a worm that can only survive by burrowing through a child's eyeball. That's something I've noticed - not one creationist or IDiot ever lists hyenas, dung beetles, hagfish, tsetse flies, slime mould or staghorn ferns as an example of the Glory of Creation.


A hagfish. Eww.
And then consider our own, perfect beautiful bodies. Our respiratory system crosses our digestive system so that we can't breathe and eat at the same time. We can choke on food, or suffocate on our own vomit. In males, the reproductive system joins with the excretory system. In birds and reptiles, the reproductive, excretory and digestive systems all come together in one nice big orifice. Is that intelligent?


Slime mould. Vomitastic.
We have appendices that have a tendency to get infected and inflamed. Despite apparently telling the Jews that they all had to be circumcised, the Almighty hasn't had the talent to just remove foreskins from all penises (there you go, my lovely critics, have a cock joke on me!). Men can get breast cancer - why would God need to leave vestigial breast tissue kicking around in a man's body? If Adam was, in fact, created before Eve (so the old joke goes, everyone needs to practise once before they get it just right), why would there have been breast tissue anywhere near his body to start with? Our brains are too big for our pelvic girdles, and it is that rather than a mythical casting-out from Eden, that makes childbirth so painful. If the human body was a GCSE Design Technology project, it would get a C, tops. It is not efficient, well-"designed" or even competent for a lot of purposes. And it certainly isn't perfect.


A staghorn fern. It is no coincidence that I have one that I named Fugly.
Nature is quite often distasteful. My father-in-law has a big problem with "nature red in tooth and claw", is a vegetarian and would quite happily see every carnivore on the earth exterminated. When he watches David Attenborough films he's rooting for the gazelle and the rabbit. But the world is a dangerous and ugly place. Earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, tsunamis devastate communities and kill thousands of people in one go. Animals kill other animals in ever more creative manners, from simple vagal shock to laying eggs within the victim's body. Species are locked in an evolutionary "arms race", where each side has to resort to more desperate measures in order to ensure the propagation of their offspring. And at this point I would just like to warn any creationist readers that if you so much as mention Tyrannosaurus rex eating coconuts, I will hunt you down and tie you to Sue.

The bacteria that bring about flesh-eating diseases are not malicious. They are not sitting there with their tiny nuclei processing thoughts about which cute blonde moppet they're going to strike down with meningococcal septicaemia. They just exist. The cheetah is not plotting to go for that particular wide-eyed baby wildebeest just to upset my father-in-law. God did not sit and think "I know, I'll create something that looks, feels and smells like cat vomit, and my children shall call it slime mould, and it shall be a bane upon their greenhouses".

Now, this post certainly overlaps with yesterday's offering, but I felt that combining the two into one post would have made for one massively incoherent rant, rather than two slightly shorter, less incoherent rants. But join me tomorrow for something a bit more light-hearted...

How To Treat A National Treasure

Sir David Attenborough is probably the greatest living Briton of the past 20 years or more. Palaeontologists under the age of 40 attribute their interest in whatever they study to a timely visit to a natural history museum of their choice, and to David Attenborough documentaries. When he announced his retirement from natural history documentaries it was impossible to think of anyone who could fill his shoes.

So I was more than a little distressed to read that Sir David receives hate-mail from religious nutjobs telling him to "burn in hell". Firstly, I'm pretty sure that in the Gospels, that Jesus bloke said "love God and love your fellow human", and as such inviting another person to burn in hell is not really very Christian, now is it? Secondly though, Sir David is an atheist. Apart from being an unwelcome display of hatred on the part of the people writing to him, do you think he's remotely bothered about going to hell?

The nutjobs concerned have complained that in a science and nature documentary, Sir David doesn't credit God. I assume they want him to say, as he gives his summing-up at the end of each episode "and of course, this was all intelligently designed by the Almighty God".

It reminds me of a time when I worked at the Mammoth Site. One Sunday lunchtime, a good friend of mine was giving a tour, and was interrupted about halfway through by a loud baseball cap-wearing member of the tour group saying "Are you going to talk about evolution here, because I don't want my kids hearing that crap!". My friend was, as instructed by the big boss, extremely polite, said that it may come up, but that if the visitors wanted to move ahead and see the exhibits at their own pace they were welcome to do so.

Now, what we would all have liked to do was to smack tht guy upside the head with an expanding foam cast of a Mammuthus femur and say "Of course we're going to talk about evolution - it's a fucking palaeontology site! You'd be appalled if we went into your church and asked if you were going to talk about Jesus because we didn't want our kids hearing that crap!", but apparently you can't say that. Science shows have as much business crediting God with the natural world as religious shows have saying "Of course this is all woo and mumbo-jumbo" at the end, i.e. absolutely none at all.

Science is agnostic. It has to be. If it does not assume that there is no way of ascertaining one way or another whether there is a God, then the moment we come up with something too difficult to understand then we say "It must be God doing it" rather than actually trying to dig a bit deeper. It can stifle an investigative mind. It also short-sells nature. I find it so much more awesome that all this came about by chance, from atoms colliding, membranes forming, cells developing and then joining together, with random mutations responsible for all the amazing diversity of life on the planet, than that there is some all-powerful super-being playing with us like Sylvanian Families.

We Interrupt Your Regular Programming

It's my first snow day in about 22 years. The tube is suspended, the buses aren't running and the fact that the rail websites weren't working didn't give me much confidence that their trains weren't working. As it is, no one else at my company has made it into work, so woo yay hoopla for an extra day off!

So what have I done with my extra day to study, clean the house, catch up on e-mails and correspondence and generally be useful?


Yeeaaahhhh, we made a snow dinosaur. Spot the twigs for arms, and the super tail made by Paul. Charcoal briquettes are the lumps of coal for the noughties of course.

It's started to snow again, so I'm hoping the trail of destruction we left will be covered soon.

Mister Darwin Wrote A Book

Over the years I've owned a lot of dinosaur books. But perhaps one of my favourites is from when I was a little girl. Published in 1980, Hocus Pocus Diplodocus by Tom Stanier, is a book of catchy little poems covering the history of life on Earth. There are few people close to me who haven't heard my rendition of the title verse, and after a few beers the Trilobite poem is to me what the Hedgehog Song is to Nanny Ogg.

The final poem talks all about Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection (well, as much as any simple four-verse poem can!), complete with a delightful illustration of the bearded genius eyeing tortoises under a magnifying glass.

Mister Darwin wrote a book
(The Origin of Species).
Let us look at life, he said,
In all its bits and pieces.

Life is a survival course,
Life's a competition.
Species who do not adapt
Are faced with abolition.

Every tiny little change
Can take a million years;
But if such changes don't occur,
The species disappears.

Changes that improve the species -
That's the key connection.
And I hereby name this process
Natural Selection.

It's a great little poem. Of course, natural selection and evolution is more complicated than these 16 lines suggest. I don't think it's quite true to say that "species who do not adapt are faced with abolition" or that "if such changes don't occur, the species disappears". Consider the large number of species that appear to have remained unchanged for millions of years. From what I remember from my Macroevolution classes, adaptations are but a response to a selective pressure. If there is no pressure on the population then any changes are simply noise and variation within the population.

For this reason there is often discussion as to whether Homo sapiens will continue to evolve, or whether we have effectively so distanced ourselves from the environment that no external factors can have any effect. Are there any real selective pressures on the human species anymore? Is it this point that I should be wheeling out dear old Malthus?

But I digress. It's a delightful little poem, and has served as a very useful means of remembering the basic principles of natural selection. And for the target readership of the average 6-10 year old, I suspect it's more than accurate enough.

Does anyone else know any good evolution poems?

The Twelve Days Of Darwin

I've set myself a challenge. From today up to and including 12 February (the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin), I shall make one post a day about Darwin, evolution, natural selection etc. I'll probably post something on 13 February to mark almost as momentous an occasion for the world of evolutionary palaeobiology - the 29th birthday of yours truly...


Not many countries (and certainly not countries without a separation of Church and State - remember that USA?) can say they have a brilliant scientist on the back of one of their most common bank notes.

Enjoy. I shall sit here and stare at the picture for a while and try to remember when I last saw one of these in real life...