Merry Darwin Day!

Sometime today my Darwin portrait, Darwin Took Steps, will be posted on The Eloquent Atheist! I will update this post and add the painting to my deviantArt gallery later on. I'm pretty excited to have another piece featured in The Eloquent Atheist.

If you haven't stopped in to that online 'zine, you really should. Make sure it's during a time of day you have to spend just idly reading. Great poems, essays and prose to be found. And the occasional piece of art from freethinkers.

Also today, sometime before noon eastern standard, I will post a "making of" post of Darwin Took Steps. Why not see the evolution of a painting today as well? Okay, okay, it's really development, not evolution. I suppose it's good ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny when it comes to art. I'd start out in crayon, move my way through finger paint, awkward comic book figures with too many muscles, out of proportion life drawings, then to sunken oil paintings, and finally Darwin would just pop out.

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Other Darwin Day happenings:

-Go to the offical organiser's site, Darwin Day!

-A nice round-up (kid friendly, too!) at The Free Range Academy!

-Can't miss the wild and woolly folks at The Beagle Project!

-Pharyngula should be talking about evo-devo sometime today.

-Carl Buell's 2006 Darwin Day illustration is a classic: check it out on Olduvai George's Flickr site!

-There's always stuff going on at Richard Dawkins' site. Check out the cards!

I'm sure a lot of the science blogs in my blogroll will be involved. Please feel free to post a link to your own art/writing/Darwin Day happening on my comment thread. I'll update this with the link to The Eloquent Atheist as it comes up.

Return of the Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme!

...this time it's personal.

I have already been tagged by this meme once, and now again! It took me a while to respond to the second one, by Dale at The Meming of Life. What can I say, I was gestating.

The meme has an elaborate set of rules, you can read at my first post about it. The whole thing was started by PZ Myers at Pharyngula. Now Dale, being sly and sneaky, has turned the tables and asked to spread the meme back to those previous to himself in the lineage! Rather than use phrases like "blog-the-casbah with Grampa" I prefer to think of these posts as organisms, and the blogs they sit in as environments. The organism's descendants change when they wander through each blog. (My blog environment is murky and oily in case you were wondering. Sometimes there is strange smoke.)

So then here is my lineage:
My common ancestor is Pharyngula.
My great great grandparent is Metamagician & the Hellfire Club.
My great grandparent is The Flying Trilobite.
My grandparent is Leslie's blog.
My parent is The Meming of Life.

My new contribution to the meme, following The Meming of Life, is as follows:
The best romantic movie in scientific dystopia is: Gattaca (1997). Same as my 1st post.
The best sexy song in electronica is: "Angel" by Massive Attack on the album Mezzanine (1998).
The best satirical movie in comedy is: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990).
I will add one new statement:
The best hot coffee in beverages is: caffe macchiato.

To continue the meme this time, I choose:
Frozen Toothpaste

Forms Most Beautiful

Primordial Blog

Please make a comment on this thread if you are participating. Hope you do, it's crazy-weird-fun. On another note, while checking Technorati for my links, I can see this has gone quite far. I am a 5x great-grandparent already. One of the interesting links I found down the line was from Really Small Fish. It contains Darwinian poetry, at Code As Art. That's been my favourite thing about this meme so far; finding blogs and ideas I may not have found through search engines since to find it that way, you have to know what you are looking for.

Surprise is living.

The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme

A blogging and scientific experiment.

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is ...".

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

*You can leave them exactly as is.

*You can delete any one question.

*You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...:, or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".

*You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...”.

*You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the "parent" blog you got them from, e.g. The Flying Trilobite to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.
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My grandparent is Pharyngula.
My parent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.

The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is:
Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

The best romantic movie in scientific dystopias is:
Gattaca (1997).

The best sexy song in rock is:
#1 Crush by Garbage from William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet Soundtrack.

The best cult novel in Canadian fiction is:
JPod by Douglas Coupland, 2006.

I call upon the following to continue this scientific experiment:
Fresh Brainz

A Blog Around the Clock

Life Before Death

Leslie Hawes (after you finish your excellent series, of course.)

Pro-Science

Fish Feet

Anyone else who wants to play out this science experiment, please do, and let me know!

the boy on the back of the turtle

Brief Book Review of...
the boy on the back of the turtle: Seeking God, Quince Marmalade and the Fabled Albatross on Darwin's Islands
by Paul Quarrington

The title immediately caught my eye, and well, you can't judge a book by its cover, but I am a very visual person.

I actually have a copy signed by the author that my wife bid on at a fundraiser here in Toronto, so that's a lot of fun. I had never read Paul Quarrington's work before (that I know of; now I am noticing his writing cropping up in front of me in magazines, since the name is distinctive). I also have a copy of his book, Storm Chasers.

I took this book with me on my trip to Alberta in July, and I whipped through it much faster than I usually do on vacation. Perhaps there is a subtle quality in the writing of a fellow Torontonian that made it feel like an especially rich conversation. And it was a conversation, since it made me laugh, and shake my head, and look forward to my time with it each evening or lazy afternoon.

The story is a biographical one, with the authour going on a trip to the Galapagos with his 7-year old daughter and 77-year old father. Mr. Quarrington immediately caught me with a high-falutin' opening paragraph that quickly tripped over some vulgarity on it's way to conclusion.

A lot of research into Darwin's life, and the history of the Galapagos (or 'Encantadas', Enchanted Isles) was poured engagingly into this book. Which is why the following had me whipping out my own pen to retort on the margins of the book:

"Whales are interesting. They are in a sense the largest example of Paley's hypothetical watch, because there are no clear evolutionary ancestors for them, no proto- or mini-whales. They seem to have been popped into the waters by the Almighty. " (p97)

What about pakicetus?! Ambulocetus? The ancestry of what evolved to modern whales is almost as clear as the horse, or our own primate ancestors and relatives. I flipped out, grabbed for a pen. (Cool skeleton re-created here.)

As my fervour abated, I flipped to the frontspiece of the book. Ahh. Published in 1997. That may explain it. On vacation and without easy internet access, I resolved to check when the amazing discoveries in Pakistan were published. It seems that in 1996, J. G. M. Thewissen, S. I. Madar, and S. T. Hussain published their work. It hardly may have been seeping into the consciousness of a Toronto writer by that point. The stellar Walking With Beasts t.v. series by the BBC had not yet aired.

But still. Although this was a footnote in a relaxed style, the book was well-researched and insightful. It was a bit of a shock to see the authour jump from no current evidence to the Almighty in the span of a footnote. It happens again later in the book, when he refers to "the unliklihood of complexity arising out of chance," (p175). However, you can't throw the whale out with the flood. (Or something. ) What a truly excellent book while I was on vacation looking at fossils! Part of the arc of this journey was to come to what Quarrington referred to as the Big Insight, and discover something meaningful in his family for his daughter, and perhaps about his father.

I think he did. The book leaves you with an intimate sense of travel, family, and how searching for self-discovery can be done in the outside world. I found the story to be a gripping one with how a person (perhaps agnostic), can search to be moved, and find it in the natural (not supernatural) world. I would recommend this book heartily to other members of the BrightsOnline, Atheist Blogroll and PaleoWebRing communites.

The rollicking history and natural history lessons of the Encantadas in Quarrington's "voice" make this a great book for people interested in science, family, or just curling up and relaxing.

Hinterland Who's Who: Darwin Fish

(cue haunting sound of a loon calling)

Darwin Fish

This fine specimen was ordered by my wife for my birthday last week. The Darwin fish is a secular, scientific species descended from the "Jesus Fish" found on many cars. We've had sightings of a couple of them on cars here in Ontario, and a few of the rival Jesus fish too; both are invading species to the many highway tributaries here in Ontario. I'm hoping illegal fishing of Darwin Fish discourages our fish from going missing. They are an elusive species, beneficial to our waterways of social discourse. Unlike the Jesus fish, which is parasitic and carries memetic viruses, the Darwin fish are a healthy source of protein and memes.

In true evolutionary fashion, many other types of car-fish species have been cropping up. You can see some recent examples on the pages of Inkling Magazine. This l'il beauty came from the fine folks at Ring of Fire Enterprises.

This parody of Hinterland Who's Who was not sponsored by the Canadian Government. Please fish responsibly.

Brief Book Review of...

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins is always at his best explaining evolution so simply, and with compelling examples. Really, I mean the echolocation of bats kept me riveted to my chair one evening, and I'll never greet the sight of one of those critters quite the same way again. If you want a jargon-free explanation of neo-Darwinist evolution, I would still recommend The Ancestor's Tale as a richer book. The Blind Watchmaker is fun and witty. Each page is a nugget of discovery.
March 30 2007

(re-posted May 1st...I decided to move book reviews off the side and into the main blog.)

I have to say, I like the cover of my Penguin 2006 edition a lot better than the one I have posted here. It's the greyish one with the bubble on the water. What's in the bubble? What made the bubble? Bottom-up emergent properties? Hmm...

My Life With Trilobites

So I did it. I finally decided to register as a Bright.

I was up late and looking at www.the-brights.net and the different comments by people who joined, and I decided I would too. I was happily surprised to see an entire section for people who join somewhat reluctantly.

The idea of declaring yourself as a Bright is that you are saying you believe in a natural (not supernatural) worldview. That's it. That's all I'm saying.

All the other possible baggage (being

a skeptic, atheist, agnostic, Darwinist etc.) fits under the umbrella term "A Bright".

Some people think the term "I'm a Bright" sounds arrogant. I see their point. But come on, saying "I'm a Bright" is not really the same as declaring "I'm a Super-Genius". That would be arrogant.

I guess I wanted to register as a Bright also to be for something, rather than announcing myself as excluding something. Saying "I'm an atheist" is kind of loaded, like declaring verbal war on another person's beliefs, because it's all about the disagreement. Being a Skeptic is kind of the same thing, because of the cynical overtones most people associate with it, (despite Skeptic magazine's definition as an embodiment of the scientific method). And saying I'm a neo-Darwinist doesn't help when discussing gluons or pulsars.

So I'm a Bright. Hopefully it's a bit more of a conversation starter at dinner parties than gluons and pulsars.