Friday Coffee Break

Noah brings us flying squids. No that’s not a typo, these are squids that jump out of the water similar to flying fish.

From a few of our contributors are reading a post about how to get tenure without killing yourself. Some solid advice…

Jeremy is reading about the importance of specialization in pollinators. By removing honey bumble bees you can change the landscape of a meadow!

CJ is tired of being covered by mosquito bites and so she’s reading about why she’s more susceptible to bites than say… everyone else she knows.

Amy has a thing for charismatic megafauna (who doesn’t really) and is reading about over heating cheetahs… that aren’t actually over heating. 

Also from Amy, a new tick virus! The Heartland virus, and how the CDC scientist were able to identify it. 

Sarah is reading about baby sharks duking it out… in utero.

Sarah also thinks we should all be advocating open access science. It’s a PhD comics animation of what open access is and why it makes sense and is important.

Baba Brinkman says he wants my money

But he doesn’t want it badly enough to actually address the substance of any of my criticisms of his scheme to rid the world of meanness via “an entirely defensible ‘bottom up’ form of eugenics.”

Oh, and I see he’s speculating about my sex life. Real charmer, this guy.

Source

In his non-response response, Brinkman doubles down on his fixation with the fact that, across human populations, males become more likely to be involved in violent crime right around the time we hit puberty:

We’re not missing the penis bone, we just lost it

** Hey y’all – it has come to my attention that the article this post is criticizing might have been more of a tongue-in-cheek textual criticism than a literal hypothesis (like I treated it). Instead of it being “this is what we think is true” opinion, I think it’s more of a “this interpretation of the Bible is more justified by the natural world”. Read at your own risk and sorry for my confusion. – S.Hird **

During his Society of Systematic Biologists presidential address at this year’s Evolution meeting, Jack Sullivan mentioned a rather…unusual…article. (Well, letter, technically.) Congenital Human Baculum Deficiency, by Scott Gilbert and Ziony Zevit was published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics in 2001; it describes their hypothesis that Genesis 2:21-23 doesn’t mean Eve came from one of Adam’s ribs, she came from his baculum.

Walruses have bacula almost 2 feet long – it is required that a picture of a walrus accompany any discussion of bacula.

What’s that, you say? Baculum is the technical term for the penis bone. Many mammals have one – presumably to aid in sexual intercourse. For mammals that mate infrequently, prolonged intercourse ups the chances that a particular male sires some babies. For mammals that must mate quickly, the baculum provides immediate rigidity. And for all mammals, keeping the urethra straight while copulating is imperative, so maybe it’s there to prevent a kink in the works, so to speak. The truth is, there are a lot of hypotheses about what bacula do but – as you might imagine – they’re kind of difficult to test. Regardless, our nearest evolutionary neighbors, the great apes, all have bacula, as do most other primates. Gilbert and Zevit cite this– the fact that our baculum is missing – as evidence for their argument. Which goes like this:

1. A rib seems like an unlikely origin for Eve because male and female humans have the same number of ribs.
2. Ribs also lack “intrinsic generative capacity”, which penises have “in practice, in mythology, and in the popular imagination”.
3. Most mammals – and especially primates – have bacula, humans do not.
4. It is therefore “probable” that Adam’s baculum was removed to make Eve, and not a rib.

The authors then continue to support their argument with alternate translations of the Hebrew word for “rib” (which they say could mean “support beam”) and claim the raphe of the human male scrotum is what Genesis 2:21 is referring to when it says “The Lord God closed up the flesh.”** I’m almost convinced!

Friday Coffee Break

I feel like we don’t post about Bill Nye Enough. Sarah apparently feels the same way as she brings us Bill Nye talking about climate change.

Amy is reading recent work linking male infertility to taste. Not taste their taste in women, but your actual taste buds!

Jeremy is breaking the vicious cycle, when anxious get more sleep.

Also, Jeremy brings us blog about getting it wrong in research. What’s the next step?

 

Inane pseudo-scientific claptrap of the week: “Don’t sleep with mean people”

The maestro behind the “Rap Guide to Evolution,” Baba Brinkman, has a new idea for changing the world: don’t sleep with mean people. I know, right? You hadn’t thought about doing that, either?

Are you amazed at the clarity of Brinkman’s insight into the roots of human suffering? Then he would like you to give him money to help make his plan a reality. Well, to make a music video and a documentary and some billboards, anyway.

Or, you know, you could do something more useful with your money, like baking it into muffins as a fiber supplement. Or shredding it up to mulch your vegetable garden. Or using it to line a bird cage.

Batesian and aggressive mimicry in academic publishing: A proposal for escalation of the coevolutionary arms-race

The following is a guest post from friend of the blog and Assistant Professor of Biology at Willamette University Chris Smith.

Figure 1. Kingsnakes and milksnakes are Batesian mimics of the deadly coral snake. 1A: An eastern coral snake. Photo by Norman Benton, via Wikimedia Commons. 1B: A Mexican milk snake. Photo by Dawson, via Wikimedia Commons.

Mimicry is a common phenomenon in the natural world, where one organism evolves to resemble another. Familiar examples include (harmless) king snakes that have banding patterns remarkably similar to the (extremely venomous) coral snake (Figure 1), or (palatable) Viceroy butterflies that resemble (toxic) monarchs. These so-called ‘Batesian’ mimics enjoy the benefits of appearing to be dangerous while paying no costs. That is, they escape being eaten by predators without having to produce toxins themselves.

A second, less familiar, form of mimicry is ‘aggressive’ mimicry, in which predators use deception to more effectively attack their prey. For example, some fireflies mimic the sequence of flashes emitted by females of other species, and then attack and eat the unsuspecting male fireflies that come to court them. Similarly, some butterflies in the genus Maculinea are social parasites of ants, and produce chemicals on their exoskeleton that resembles the scent of ant larvae. Foraging ants discover these seemingly helpless babies that appear to have wandered away nest and carry them back to the brood chamber, where the butterfly larvae proceed to devour the ant larvae.

The world of academic publishing has recently seen the convergent evolution of mimicry in ways that remarkably mirror the strategies seen in the natural world. As has been carefully researched and documented by Jeffrey Beall, a reference librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, the Open-Acces movement has inadvertently given rise to a legion of ‘predatory publishers’. The publishers offer (for a hefty fee) to publish research papers without the process of rigorous peer review that would normally precede the publication of scholarly work. (NIB contributor Sarah Hird described her experience with a predatory publisher here).

Most of the papers published by such ‘predatory publishers’ are Batesian mimics. They enjoy the imprimatur of academic legitimacy without having to pay the cost of rigor, but like the king snake they are otherwise ‘harmless’. These are typically papers of low importance and low impact, sometimes with shoddy experimental designs, that would not pass muster in more rigorous journals. But rarely, if ever, is the work truly fraudulent.

Friday Coffee Break

Sarah leads us off this week with human biology news: The first farmers were also inbred!

A rock that bleeds… or something like that. Also from Sarah.

CJ is reading a great article about the importance of understanding population structure... from our contributor Jeremy!

Friday Coffee Break

Ever want to actually write into your methods why you did something? For example: “We don’t know how the results were obtained, because the post-doc who collected them has since left to start a bakery.” Check out these overly honest methods.

What happens when lightning hits sand? A masterpiece. CJ is checking out this awesome article debunking a currently trending photo, and talking about what really happens.

MERS, the now emerging relative of SARS has epidemiologist all a twitter in Saudi Arabia. Which means CJ is all a twitter too.

Amy is reading about when exfoliation kills. Turns out those microbeads used in popular exfoliation creams… not so good for marine life.

Jeremy brings us the immortal Jellyfish. No seriously, it’s an article about whether Jellyfish are immortal.

Carnival of Evolution, July 2013

It’s fresh and online at Teaching Biology.