And then the muskrat sneezed purple goo

[fayanora]

Potpourri

Funny song: "Reluctant Pirates" by Strong Men Stoop.

Stories that would have been different if they'd had cell phones. "But soft! What SMS through yonder RAZR breaks?"

Funny: Interview with a Dalek!

A comic about a character who knows he's a character in a comic.

52 ways to piss off Naraku. (Explanation, though some of the details

Comments

[underlankers]

And to think that one chromosome that merged from two is all that separates me from Bonzo.

I think Bonzo would be insulted by that. No doubt he's organizing with General Ursus now that Charleton Heston is dead....

[christinaathena]

Heh. Well, there's more than the one fused chromosome. Still, there is a remarkably little amount of difference. Most of the differences are actually in regulatory elements, bits of DNA that, simplifying somewhat, control when and where genes are active, and for how long (especially important in developmental genes).

In terms of sheer genetic difference, horses and donkeys are more different than humans and chimps. Which is why some biologists have proposed extending Homo out to include chimpanzees and possibly even gorillas, which would give our genus 3 or 5 living species (there are two species each of chimp and gorilla). So, in addition to H. sapiens, we'd have H. troglodytes, H. paniscus, H. gorilla and H. berengei. That would also require renaming all the extinct hominines, like Australopithecus and so forth, since they'd have to be merged into Homo as well.

[underlankers]

Well...we still keep mice and rats as separate species, so I hardly see a need to make Pan, Australopithecus and Paranthropus meaningless genera.

Although, long before Darwin proposed his theory, the first taxonomist to deal with Chimps (Carolus Linnaeus himself) made the Chimpanzee Homo sylvestris. If Pan were to become Homo, that would be the proper appellation for the Common Chimp and the Bonobo.

I've often been fond of referring to humans as deformed chimp feti, because an adult human is like a chimp fetus grown to a large height and weight. I love evolutionary biology, and especially paleoanthropology with a passion.

[christinaathena]

Mice and rats are actually distributed among a large number of genera in the Muridae family. They consist of hundreds of species in a group that goes back much further than the human-chimp-gorilla grouping (whose last common ancestor was somewhere around 7 million years ago)

The troglodytes species would remain for the common chimp and paniscus for the Bonobo. Specific names don't generally change when a species is recategorized into a different genus.

Also, I've read that Linnaeus categorized chimps as Homo troglodytes, using the same specific name that's used now.

[underlankers]

Ah....thanks for the information on those two particular types of creatures.

And again, thanks for the information on Linnaean classification.

I had heard he used Homo sylvestris, but I may have heard wrong.

[christinaathena]

I've often been fond of referring to humans as deformed chimp feti, because an adult human is like a chimp fetus grown to a large height and weight.

Yeah, there are a number of neotenous features in humans.

[underlankers]

What would make me curious is if those neotenous features were H. sapiens specific, if they came only from the descendants of H. erectus or if they were a general Homo trait. And if the last one, if that had any impact on interaction between Homo and Paranthropus.

[fayanora]

Domesticated dogs have a number of neotonous features as well.

[christinaathena]

Yeah. Domestication in general tends to select for neoteny. In the case of domestication, it's probably a side-effect of selecting for lower aggression, a trait associated with infancy.

[underlankers]

Interestingly enough, all human fossils found before 10,000 years ago everywhere, even in Australia, are basically both much, much larger and show none of the various traits commonly called "races." In effect, Cavemen in Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia, and America all would have looked more or less identical (big, brown, not-geographically-differentiated).

Then, about 10,000 years ago, domestication-type-features start showing up in the human fossil record. We were domesticating ourselves, and it didn't have to do with farming even (as it happened in Australia, too).

[fayanora]

Or maybe aliens came down and domesticated us? *Cue Twilight Zone music*

[underlankers]

Considering my err....unique...way of looking at things, that might be cool to believe, but nah.

;p

[fayanora]

Seriously, though, that is fucking awesome!

[underlankers]

Indeed. The two oldest geographical groups (because race as a rule is a flawed concept, and all races include lighter and darker skin tones (and the biggest groups of Caucasians are brown people (India and Iran))) are Australians and Africans, followed by Americans, and then Europeans and Asians last in line.

It's interesting to note that the early fossils of Homo sapiens tend to show that even as more violent as early H. sapiens likely was....they still lived in the largest groups of any bipedal ape, a minimum of 70, while Neanderthals and other such groups got little bigger than perhaps a gorilla troop. So...science is solid that right from the beginning that it was groups of people and not individualism that got people somewhere. Rugged individualism did Neanderthals in.

:P

[christinaathena]

Rugged individualism did Neanderthals in.

Well, that *might* have been. But there are other possibilities. :-) One is simply that H. sapiens wiped them out. There's also evidence to suggest that they might've bred more slowly, and thus H. sapiens simply outbred them.

[underlankers]

Even assuming mostly-peaceful interactions (which the cases of America and Australia have shown doesn't really hold water amongst just reg'lar ol' humans, let alone some other species and humans)....8 Neanderthals are in for a world of hurt against 150 humans.