This site is made possible by member support. ❤️
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Interesting hypothesis: young Hollywood starlets are dieting to retain exaggerated child-like features that, evolutionarily speaking, are more attractive to adults. The technical term for this is neoteny.
A classic article by Stephen Jay Gould on the changing biological features of Mickey Mouse. Over the years, Mickey has become more well-behaved and his appearance more juvenile (larger eyes, short pudgy legs, relatively large head, short snout, etc.). “When we see a living creature with babyish features, we feel an automatic surge of disarming tenderness.”
Researchers in Israel and Illinois say they’ve found a second code in DNA, one that deals with the positioning of proteins. Palimpsest anyone?
Tom Coates recently checked out the Royal College of Art Summer Show in London and ran across this project by Tim Simpson:
…three plants compete to reach the light that feeds and nourishes them. The first one to succeed survives. The other two are automatically cut down in their prime.
First plant to grow close to the proximity sensors wins. A simple and elegant idea.
Sarah Trigg’s work combines geographic maps with biological forms. “The explorer system [in colonial North America] caused the Native American system to change its normal functioning, much like cancer cells do to normal cells.” More here. (via moon river)
Profile of Daniel Dennett, “Darwinian fundamentalist” and author of a new book that argues that “religion, chiefly Christianity, is itself a biologically evolved concept, and one that has outlived its usefulness”.
To Dr. David Hague, human pregnancy is a struggle between the fetus and mother. Evolutionarily speaking, the fetus “wants” as many resources as possible for itself while the mother “wants” to do what she can to spread her resources across as many children as possible. In theory, this is a cause of the many serious health problems surrounding pregnancy.
Update: Carl Zimmer has more about this on his blog.
This is fascinating…”sex might have evolved as a way to concentrate lots of harmful mutations into individual organisms so they could be easily weeded out by natural selection”.
Pruned has collected some lovely petri dish scenes full of fractal patterns.
Billions and billions of bacterial landscape architects pruning — no less in environments poisoned with antibiotics — other bacterial landscape architects, dead or alive, to form dazzling arabesque parterres. The self-organizing embroidery of organisms in constant Darwinian mode.
More here. See also ferrofluid.
Justin reports on his family’s results of a neat project called the Geneographic Project, co-produced by National Geographic and IBM. If you purchase a testing kit, they’ll trace the specific genetic markers of your ancestors back to (possibly) our common African root.
Scientists find “lost world” of undiscovered animals in the Foja Mountains of western New Guinea. “Their finds included more than 20 new frogs, 4 butterflies and a number of plants, including 5 new palms and rhododendrons with the largest flowers on record.”
The world’s coolest parasite; it makes zombie cockroaches! When it wants to lay its eggs, the Ampulex compressa wasp stuns a cockroach, numbs its brain, steers it back to its nest, lays an egg inside it, and eventually a larvae forms, it lunches on the cockroach’s insides, and then hatches fully grown. Just…wow. (thx, tien)
Short (and a wee bit hostile) inteview with Daniel Dennett. “Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems. You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul.”
Scientists say there may be two different forms of laughter — authentic laughter and that associated with humor — and that the two developed millions of years apart during the course of human evolution.
Not only is Intelligent Design bad science, it’s also bad religion. “Self-defeating and incoherent, Intelligent Design is worse than useless, not only as science but also, one imagines, for religious folks who might be attempting to understand God by working backwards from the world as their body of evidence.”
Fascinating and disturbing video of a handful of hornets completely annihilating an entire colony of honeybees. (via cyn-c)
“The only debate on intelligent design that is worthy of its subject”. Hootingly funny. (And I have no doubt that someone from the other side of the debate could construct something equally as amusing, so…)
Not from The Onion: US biochemistry professor admits that astrology would be considered valid science according to his own personal definition. Said a spectator of Pennsylvania ID trial: “I can’t believe he teaches a college biology class”.
Is it strange that every time I go into my bathroom and look at the box of tissues sitting on the shelf, I see Charles Darwin looking back at me?
It does look like Darwin, yes? Or have I been reading far too much about science and evolution lately?
Note: My bathroom Darwin orchid has nothing to do with Angraecum sesquipedale, an orchid that Darwin discovered in 1850. At the time, he speculated that in order for the plant to be pollinated, a moth with a 12” proboscis would have to do it, even though no such moth had been shown to exist. This freakish moth was eventually discovered (not in my bathroom) in 1903, 20 years after Darwin’s death.
Flowers don’t smell as good as they used to and part of the reason is breeding…they’re breeding flowers for looks and longevity, not for scent. I believe Michael Pollan discusses this in his excellent The Botany of Desire (tulip chapter).
First photos of the giant squid ever captured. In capturing the photos, they ripped one of the squid’s tentacles off, which has made the squid a bit angry.
Profile of Robert Trivers who “came up with the first Darwinian explanations for human cooperation, jealousy and our sense of justice that made genetic sense, and he showed how these arose from the same forces as act on all animals, from the pigeons outside his window to the fish of coral reefs”.
Cymothoa exigua is a crustacean parasite that eats the tongue of the host fish and then attaches itself to the mouth of the fish and functions as the tongue would have, sharing in the food that the fish brings in.
According to paleontologist Gareth Dyke, “fossil evidence that [predatory] dinosaurs were feathered is now ‘irrefutable’”. Digitally remastered Jurassic Park can’t be too far down the road.
Daniel Dennett on why intelligent design isn’t science. “Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything.”
Stay Connected