h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am currently reading 'Your Inner Fish' which is a book by Neil Shubin who is a paleontologist about evolution in general and the first marginal creatures, the first fish to flop around in the shallows.

Being an American book, there is the subtext that evolution is, actually, true. It's not just an account of a slice of evolution, it's an apologia for it. (Apologia is one of those words I always have to look up; it means "defence or justification". Another word I have to look up is "ontology" which ... well I am not sure what it means. But it turns up alongside Paleo in the word paleontologist. I digress. Here, let me closee these brackets and get back to the subject in question). The slight thread of justification is almost imperceptable though, and good for Shubin for that.

So far, three chapters in, it is about tents I have lived in and rocks I have bashed (in Pennsylvania, in the Arctic, in Utah), as much as it is about anything. Shubin's good company on the train in the morning.

One thing it is easy to forget is just how long evolution went on for before vertebrates, let alone our inner fish. Some years ago I went to a mini-meet in Shrewsbury organised by Vip, and we went to the Darwin museum where there is a wall painting of evolution; 9/10ths of it seems to be microbes. Here's Carl Sagan's 8 minute animation on evolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ONwp56pMBE

And here is the book on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/Your-Inner-Fish-Journey-3-5-Billion-Year/dp/0375424474 other online retailers are obviously available.

*sigh*

*slings a fullstop in after 'paleontologist' and follows up with "It is about..."*

It is always a shock to come across something that seeks to justify something I've been brought up to acknowledge as bleedin' obvious. But I think I'll have to look for this book. Thanks for letting me know it's out there somewhere... If I didn't already have an unread-book backlog of more than 100 volumes, I'd get onto it soonish.

Ivan.

Isn#t this journal supposed to be today's, as in 2nd Nov

I guess MrsZ is being stylishly late

It's about paleontology, so it must have happened before now

Cutnpaste error. The Movember one about peoples' outer facial hair was yesterday's.

pedro's read that and highly recommends it. I have it in one of my avalanches.

I have various books lying about, unfinished. Must read those first.
Sounds interesting, though.

One of the things I have been looking forward to for months is tackling that avalanche.

It's ok, not hugely challenging; I'm reading it because it is this month's bookclub choice for the Embra Skeptics bookclub (first of it's kind ) I'm not good at fiction.

It does sound like an interesting book. My problem with it would be having heard an awful lot about fish paleontology many years ago from someone doing a PhD in that area (one of her supervisors also studies those first fish that came out of the water to start a life on land)

A few hours ago, I was standing in the public library looking for interesting books to read. The one I picked was about Caterina de Medici, one of the warrior queens of the early Renaissance in Italy.

If "Your Inner Fish" had been there on the new books shelves, I might have checked it out as well.

Your mention of the Darwin Museum put me into an interesting mood. Why wasn't evolution discovered by an American, or at least an international team that had at least one American on it? As an American, I often get the sense of having been late to the banquet. When Bach and Handel were putting their touches on the Baroque, we Americans were still draining swamps and trying to figure out how to get more revenue for our tobacco and kumber (we had slave labor on the southern plantations, and a lot more trees than Britain had). The closest we came to having a real live Baroque composer was Johann Pachelbel's son, who played the organ in Charleston, Philadelphia, and perhaps Boston. How many pieces of music did this American Pachelbel write? One. It's a charming piece, and it lasts about five minutes. America had a five-minute Baroque! Yay! When Beethoven was shaking things up, our first composer of any significance whatsoever (William Billings, whose day job was as a tanner) was operating from a Renaissance compositional manual -- two centuries (at least!) out of date.

We did better at producing homegrown writing talent, thanks to the generosity of Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife, who died young and bequeathed her considerable fortune. Emerson had a gift for drawing talented writers to his house and letting them do their thing. Meanwhile, George Eliot and Charles Dickens were going strong back in Europe.

Don't get me wrong. I'm delighted that an American paleontologist is defending Darwin, and in the process has written a fine and readable book. America has had some outstanding people who have stood up to the forces who would not allow evolution to be taught in the schools. In general, our scientists seem to be every bit as good as the rest of the world's scientists. I worry about the climatologists, though. In Australia, angry citizens having been assassinating climatologists for saying that global warming is happening. We might need to offer protection to our own at some point.

Anyway, I agree with the broad idea of evolution. I suspect that there might be more to discover, though. We will need to be openminded as these things emerge.

The great thing about evolution is that things just keep on evolving whether we believe in it not.

Indeed. And it is happening in labs, schools and universities around the world right this moment. No, not students But good ol' drosophila (fruit fly) which thanks to its super-fast life-cycle is used all the time to demonstrate how organisms evolve to suit their conditions. They can change the appearance of their features and genetic expression in a few weeks (a few hundred generations I think?).

So quite how anyone can deny a process we can witness repeated in thousands of labs around the world, any day of the week, is beyond me. But then your average evolution denier probably isn't dealing with the full deck of cards, is a little dim, and is likely to be very ignorant of a great many basic facts of life.

Why? Because god!

You can't argue with willful ignorance. I know, I've tried.

Re: post 12.

>> In Australia, angry citizens having been assassinating climatologists for saying that global warming is happening.<<

Paulh, what is your source for this absurd statement?

Yes, it does sound absurd. I'm sure I read it in a reputable journal or newspaper a month or two ago. The issue in dispute was/is the Gillard government's proposal of a "carbon tax." This bill was proposed last July, and has provoked large amounts of anger in the Australian electorate.

Here's a link to a story of a member of Australia's Parliament who has received death threats:

http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/special-features/labor-mp-gets-carbon-tax-death-threats/story-e6frg19l-1226164177410

Here's a site that details the abuse that climatologists in Australia have endured in the wake of this controversy:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/06/more_on_the_threats_on_and_abu.php

In any event, I cannot find the original article about climatologists being killed. Maybe it will turn up again someday. Maybe it was in one of the Internet's rabbit holes. I'm sorry that I can't find it. Such is life....

nnn...I imagine that would have been on Ivan's news horizon.

I can assure you all that no climate scientists have been killed in Australia. None.

There are a number of complete numpties roaming around the place abusing anyone who has environmental interests, that much is true. Some scientists and politicians are bearing the brunt of it.

The whole business with opposition to the Emissions Trading Scheme - tagged a 'Carbon Tax' by its opponents - is that it is inextricably linked to the main opposition party, which is a right-wing entity even though it calls itself Liberal.

So basically, it's Australian politics-as-usual, which does tend to be robust and volatile, combined with sensationalist journalism in a Murdoch-dominated media. Or to put it another way, there's no real story.

And now, back to evolution...

Ivan