Entries tagged with evolution

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Shaker Heights is noted for its diversity, but as far as its street names go, it's wall-to-wall whitey here. Every road bears a faux tweedy, upper-crust English moniker, with some lowlands Scots mixed in around the bad parts of town. This can get a little confusing, so if you're driving by Horseshoe Lake, and you see me out running, and if my body, forced to consume its own fatty deposits, has decided to ignore my belly and instead start eating into my gray matter, and you ask me how to get to Claythorne Road, it is entirely likely that I will give you authoritative, impeccably correct directions to Sherbrooke.

There is a cliché, or to a sociobiologist, a datum, that men are less willing to stop and ask for directions than are women. I cannot speak to the accuracy of such a suggestion, or to its possible cause, but I know that I'll almost never ask a stranger for assistance. I suspect though that this is not due to some innate feature of the Y chromosome, but instead is a behavioral tendency learned after a long history of being stopped and asked for directions. I am a very courteous person -- does a good deed daily -- and I have a phenomenal geographic sense -- taught the orienteering merit badge -- so I always try to help people out. But ten minutes later I realize that the directions which seemed so sensible at the time I gave them were in some way crap and I've just made things immensely worse. I suspect many people have had this experience, and been discouraged from asking for directions of their own by their own examples. Perhaps it is an experience shared by a larger proportion of men than of women, because at the same time that the patriarchy is spewing out misdirection and confuddlement, we're also serving up large amounts of propaganda extolling our putative superior spatial facilities.

So, really, ask women for directions, or just anyone but me, and try to live in a city with the streets laid out in a nice numbered grid.

Current Mood: 18:13/19:11 (Acrostic)

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From the front of the New York Times Magazine

Jim Holt examines the perils of psychoanalyzing our Intelligent Designer by reverse engineering His Creation.

While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

To be fair, this sounds no more kludgy than the semi-intelligently designed Windows 95.

Later in the Magazine, Rob Walker writes about hyperrealistic "reborn dolls."

But why do people want to buy an extremely realistic baby doll? For some, Gernand speculates, it's a means of reminiscing -- perhaps they have saved their actual children's clothes and enjoy dressing up the reborn doll to recapture a happy time. Garma says she thinks some others might want the dolls to ''fill a void,'' perhaps because they could not or did not have children. And there is probably the simple aesthetic attraction, heightened by the fact that many people just plain love babies. ''Some collectors have whole rooms set aside as a nursery,'' says Mitchell, the Doll Crafter editor.

"Once you get past the creepier aspects of all this," Walker writes, and I never did. It's even weirder when you read it with the misconception that these dolls were being commissioned, the motivation of cloning applied to the Cabbage Patch. However, Walker does not mention that the makers of these dolls are, in fact, taking orders to match actual specific babies. Yet.

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birthday,
evolution

(no subject)

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln!!!

Current Mood: 5:19

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From, in rough order of appearence on my friends list,

gehayi,

scrollgirl and

londonkds: ( do I believe . . . )

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The first twelve icons

11:23. After a few weeks of this, I'll have medians established for each day and I'll know how disappointed to be.

I've decided to do

scrollgirl's icon meme, because other than cutting and pasting some <IMG SRC=url> tags, there's not much for me to do. The entire onus is on you! Muahhahaha! So, go right ahead and tell me which of my icons are most representative of me, or which you like the best, or which you'd hope to never see again.

( These, then, would be my icons. )

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Fish with feet

My mother, who last week was installed as the new pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Nowheresville, Michigan, just sent me this email:

As I listen to Diane Rheme talk about the Florida case, I would like to tell you my wishes. I do not want to be kep alive if I am in a persistent vegatative state is. After I reach 80 or so, I would like to die naturally. If I break my neck I do not want to be put in a halo. One of my parishioners who is over 90 broke her neck and is in a halo. It looks terribly painful.

To which I responded, "In that case, you really picked the wrong line of work. You should have stayed a lawyer – they never get put into haloes." Not that my mother, in her heretical Zen Presbyterianism, puts much stock in the concept of an afterlife -- or in many of the other tropes of Conservative Christianity. She really wants to get one of those Darwin Fish for her car, an act that might be seen as antagonistic to community values, judging from the number of Jesus Fish I saw affixed to cars on the Ohio and Indiana Turpikes when I drove up to visit her. (It should be noted that I was down with the Jesus Fish long before it sold out and went mainstream: it was an important symbol to Philip K. Dick, and as a crossword devotee, I love it just for its simplicity as an acrostic.)

However, if the Darwin Fish is antagonistic, those antagonised by it give as good as they get. Before I had even left the East side of Cleveland, I passed a car with the bumper sticker:

I felt a little antagonised myself, because I first thought that this was referring to the old canard that Darwin had renounced evolution on his deathbed, a canard that even creationists have abandoned. (The one story of a noted agnostic scientist undergoing a deathbed conversion to Christianity which is well documented is that of John Von Neumann, who was born into Judaism and spent most of his life as an atheist, but did in fact convert to Catholicism -- for the second time in his life -- while he lay dying in Walter Reed Hospital. Of course, Von Neumann was instrumental in the invention of game theory, and he may have just been taking Pascal's Wager.) After a moment of reflection, I decided that the bumper sticker was merely saying that Darwin, now that he is burning in Hell, has probably reconsidered, which is Argument No. 39 of the 519 Arguments for the Existence of God, the Argument From Post-Death Experience:

Person X died an atheist.
He now realizes his mistake.
Therefore, God exists.

In any case, while I like both the Jesus Fish and the Darwin Fish, I'm a little disappointed in some of the other options. Frankly, it's not enough for me just to say whether or not I accept evolution, I want the ability to say which of the strains of modern evolutionary theory ("modified descendants," if you will) I favor, all from the comfort of my driver's seat. For example, were I too favor a gradualistic view of evolution, I could paste the following to my bumper:

(Do note that I could stick an outline of an acacia tree in front of each fish and have a pretty good iconographic reduction of Lamarckianism.)

( On the other hand, were I instead a subscriber to the theory of punctuated equilibrium . . . )

Ahh, car fenders. They're the new Lyceum, I tell you!

Current Mood: Suddenly very shy
Current Music: Oxford American Sixth Annual Southern Music Issue CD

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Total destruction to your mind!

I've been begatten, or begot, or something. Thanks, Masq! It only took a little grovelling . . . I grovel so well.

I'm not quite sure what this will turn out to be: it may turn out that LiveJournal is not the place for someone who deals with as much writer's block as I do. This may turn out more bloggish than LJ; most of my online reading is in the blogosphere rather than in LiveJournals. Someone once commented that blogs tend to be a male domain while LJ tends to be dominated by women. Of course, someone else tried to make a sociobiological point about this: men "hunt" links, while women "gather" together into communities. Of course, there are plenty of female bloggers (though I only have one bookmarked; my favorites folder is as disturbingly sexually segregated as my CD collection). There are probably lots of male LJers too -- I just don't know any. (In any case, I reject simplistic notions of sociobiology, such as the straw man [my straw is pretty sexually segregated too] I set up a few sentences above. Yes, I strongly oppose the caricatures of arguments I draw myself!)

I should talk about "Touched," being somewhat known as someone who talks about Buffy (the Rosicrucians cited me! take that Ded!), but I have yet to figure out the cut-tag, so no spoilers yet. All in all though, I was pretty underwhelmed. "Underwhelmed" has been my Buffy-theme since "Smashed." Over on ATPo there's a kerfluffle over whether Angel or Spike is Buffy's true love. (I'm considering reviving my saga of the Sha'i-Pir Wars.) At this point, the only relationship I really want to see Buffy indulge in is with a large bottle of Prozac.

After reading about it in The Major Lift, The Minor Fall, I had to go out and get the Oxford American Annual Southern Music Issue. I already have the Swamp Dogg (but you don't, and you should), but I didn't have Little Milton's version of "Grits Ain't Groceries," which rocks righteous! Plus, the Blind Boys of Alabama! Esther Phillips! R.L. Burnside! A bunch of people I've never heard of! A whole bunch of great blues, rockabilly, soul, gospel and hillbilly at that point where they all come together and genre (color?) doesn't mean a damn. The Marilyn Monroe/Jane Russell track from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes seems a bit out of place, but what do you want to bet

rahael loves it?

In other music news, cjl demands that we all go buy the new reissue of Live At Leeds. I (for once in my life) am showing sales resistance. I've already bought the damn thing twice: first, in its original six-track configuration (which the AMG claims runs for 19:14 -- if they're correct it may be the shortest major album ever released); second, in its 1995 18-track configuration. I just don't see much reason to buy it a third time; I don't even like The Who that much anymore, and I think endlessly mutating permutations of Live at Leeds may be part of the reason.

Anyway, welcome to my nightmare. Hope you enjoy it!