Darwin Day!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Happy Darwin Day, dudes! I’m celebrating by focusing my worldbuilding on animals—that is, giving one of my alien species, the orlys, some good old-fashioned evolutionary borking,* and I’m designing plants and animals like mad. Perhaps when I acquire a scanner that isn’t broken beyond all repair, I will show you!

Biology is one of the coolest subjects you can study. And thanks to Darwin, it makes a lot more sense, and gets a lot more interesting to boot. So a high-five to the good naturalist, and a wing-five to the finches and pigeons who gave him the idea. It’s a doozy.


*I’m making their trunk serve as both a proboscis and as a main manipulating appendage. At least they don’t have the earthly land vertebrate design flaw where they have to breathe, eat, and talk through the same orifice. Way to cut corners, evolution.

Comments

[tomatocaco.livejournal.com]

My biology class this quarter is all evolutionary deliciousness. I went gibbery this morning when I found out about Ken Dial's ontogenetic transitional wing hypothesis. It suggests that wings evolved because, hey, half a wing is still useful even outside of flight. Stoneflies use wings to powerski across water, and some young birds can use their wings to run up 60-degree inclines before they can fly: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7181/extref/nature06517-s2.mov

I find this stuff so cool, but not everyone agrees. :C

(Icon is the inappropriate, but it's the only Darwin icon I have. This must change. Gradually. Over time.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

I remember that even Darwin had written things that disagreed with Social Darwinism before anyone even came up with the term. Something along the lines of how the fact that certain traits would be selected above others didn't imply that those traits were more ethically desirable, or that traits more desirable for the survival of an individual weren't always desirable for the survival of a society if they were developed at others' expense. That 'survival of the fittest' was simply a descriptive term, and not a prescriptive one. Would that this addendum to his research had been as well remembered as the rest of it.