Category Archives: Darwin Eats Cake

Guillaume’s Mailbag

So,

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I’ve set up Guillaume’s e-mail: guillaume@darwineatscake.com now, and Guillaume confirms that he received the test message that my wife sent to him. You can also reach Dev, Eleonora, Brooke, Todd, iBall, Douchebert, Drillbit, and Tacey.

I can’t promise how quickly or appropriately any of them will respond, as some are much more responsible than others.

Wrinkly fingers for gripping?

So, here’s the latest in adaptationism:

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Hat-tip to Justin Blumenstiel, who is the king of transposable elements, which I think means that every time one of them transposes, they have to tithe to him.

Changizi M, Weber R, Kotecha R, & Palazzo J (2011). Are Wet-Induced Wrinkled Fingers Primate Rain Treads? Brain, behavior and evolution PMID: 21701145

The Wrath of Douchebert

So, here’s the second in what should be a short series of Darwin Eats Cake strips featuring Douchebert, the round peg who is compelled by some sort of biological determinism to attempt to insert himself into any square holes he sees.

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Before you comment, yes, I do know that Spock was fixing the warp drive, not plugging a hole in a reactor core. If it makes you feel better, think of this as a poor-taste mash-up of Star Trek II and Fukushima.

Darwin Eats Cake: Douchebert

So, here’s a thing

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Adams’s blog can be found here. His spirited defense of Gwyneth is in this post, and was covered by Gawker. His new post was covered by Jezebel.

Now, to be fair, what I have done here (as has much of the media coverage), is to take part of Adams’s post out of context. In my case, it is for (attempted) comic effect. In fact, I intend to take further license in future strips, introducing a new character, “Douchebert,” who will embody the idea that we have certain innate (biologically determined) impulses, and that we have no capacity to overcome those impulses.

If all you do is read the stories written about his posts, you’ll come away with the impression that Adams is a racist rape apologist. That’s actually unfair. In both cases, Adams has some legitimate and interesting points. He has perhaps made the indelicately — using language that lends itself to being taken out of context. But, come on, he’s a comic-strip writer. If he worried about ruffling people’s feathers, Dilbert would be boring as hell.

In summary, what I have done here is completely unfair to Scott Adams. I will continue to be unfair to him in the future for as long as it seems useful to do so. Hopefully that can lead to something that is informative and/or entertaining about other topics. However, if you are interested in what Adams actually has to say, avoid the second-hand media coverage, and go check out his original posts.

On the other hand, there is something just sort of sad about defending Gwyneth Paltrow.

Antibiotic resistance and corporate agriculture

So, over the weekend, Nicholas Kristof wrote a nice piece in the New York Times in which he laid out the basic facts and statistics regarding the cavalier use of antibiotics in agriculture. His column is full of interesting (i.e., depressing) figures, one of the most striking of which is that the agricultural use of antibiotics in the state of North Carolina exceeds the medical use of antibiotics for the entire United States.

Anyway, the basic punchline is this: when someone in your family is hospitalized or killed by some food-borne, antibiotic-resistant pathogen, you can thank the huge agricultural corporations and the millions of lobbyist dollars they have spent blocking food-safety legislation.

Happy eating!

These full-page comics come out badly here on the blog, so to see a more readable version, go to the Darwin Eats Cake website.

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Sørensen SJ, Bailey M, Hansen LH, Kroer N, & Wuertz S (2005). Studying plasmid horizontal transfer in situ: a critical review. Nature reviews. Microbiology, 3 (9), 700-10 PMID: 16138098

Happy D-Day

So, you all know that on this day in 1944 a coalition of allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, but do you know what else happened on June 6?

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Diamonds unlikely to form in gas giants like Uranus

So,

This paper is a few years old, but it appears that back in 2007, its working title was actually “Diamonds unlikely in gas giants like Uranus,” and this was the title of multiple news stories covering the results at the time.

Unfortunately, it seems that the title had been changed by the time it actually made it into PRL, possibly when one of the senior authors actually read the manuscript.

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Ghiringhelli LM, Valeriani C, Meijer EJ, & Frenkel D (2007). Local structure of liquid carbon controls diamond nucleation. Physical review letters, 99 (5) PMID: 17930770

Traffic, preterm birth, and adaptationism

So, here’s a thing:

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This relates to a criticism that I made of evolutionary psychology, but which applies to many naive adaptationist arguments: it is easy to come up with a plausible-sounding adaptive explanation of just about anything. In most cases, it is equally easy to come up with an equally plausible-sounding explanation of the exact opposite phenomenon.

Barnett AG, Plonka K, Seow WK, Wilson LA, & Hansen C (2011). Increased traffic exposure and negative birth outcomes: a prospective cohort in Australia. Environmental health : a global access science source, 10 PMID: 21453550