Animal Biology WebTalk.
March 15, 2009
My friends, Mike and Lottie, have a very talented son who has created a great website for animal lovers — adults and children alike. After taking a look at it, and finding it to be as good as I’d imagined it would be, I promised I’d give it a bit of a plug.
So, if you have a moment, please take a look at Animal Biology WebTalk. Also, if you have a similar site and would like to swap site links, please drop him a line.
Great work, mate!
Penis Fencing — a Valentine’s Day Special.
February 14, 2009
Courtesy of Wired, a fascinating video revealing the violent hermaphroditic flatworm courting ritual of “penis fencing”.
If your partner initiates foreplay by saying “en garde”, be afraid — be very afraid.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
All text © 2009 Gary William Murning
Richard Dawkins Interviewing the Novelist Ian McEwan.
February 3, 2009
A little short on time and inspiration again, today, but I have, thankfully, an interview that I really must share with you. An atheist and a novelist! How could I not?
All text © 2009 Gary William Murning
Happy New Year!
December 31, 2008
My, doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself? It only seems the briefest of moments since we were all preparing to ring in 2008 and, now, here we are again, on the brink of a fresh, brand spanking new year.
So, here’s wishing you a healthy, fulfilled and safe 2009 — with heaps of good fortune and freedom from superstition!
Normal Gary William Murning Online service will resume in a day or two. Be good or, if not, at least be careful. 
(Sperm-Related) Quote of the Day.
December 5, 2008
“This does not mean that men who prefer Play-Doh to Plato always have poor sperm.“
Dr Rosalind Arden
Institute of Psychiatry
Though I’m betting they don’t always get much of a chance to prove it.
The Whole Universe in a Glass of Wine.
December 3, 2008
“A poet once said “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imaginations adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secret of the universe’s age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are there in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that Nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!”
Richard Feynman.
The New Quantum Universe (2003) by Tony Hey and Patrick Walters; Epilogue. (Originally, from “The Feynman Lectures on Physics,” by Feynman, Leighton and Sands.)
The “deepest ever” living fish have been discovered, scientists believe.
A UK-Japan team found the 17-strong shoal at depths of 7.7km (4.8 miles) in the Japan Trench in the Pacific – and captured the deep sea animals on film.
via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | ‘Deepest ever’ living fish filmed.
I found this both stunning and eerie — truly an insight into just how otherworldly this world of ours can at times be!
I think the scientist who found the fish “quite cute”, however, just might have the odd issue in need of addressing!
From Pavlov’s Dogs to Bacteria?
October 3, 2008
Today I came across an interesting article concerning claims by researchers that single-celled organisms, such as bacteria, can be trained using associative learning in a similar way to that used with Pavlov’s dogs. Once I’d stopped amusing myself with the subtitle (“Single-celled organisms could be ‘trained’ to deliver drugs”), imagining multitudes of bacterial “mules” clip-clopping through customs after having tiny condoms full of cocaine inserted in inappropriate places, I settled down and read the piece — marvelling at the possibility of E. coli being conditioned to recognize certain chemical processes in the body and reacting to them accordingly.
And then I thought of the possible negative side of this. Smart bacterial warfare. Sleeper cells of single-celled organisms being passed from one individual to another, waiting for a trigger — the germ equivalent of a ringing bell. I’m not easily spooked where science is concerned. I see, on the whole, highly responsible behaviour by the majority. But the application of science — what politicians and those in the military do with it — always has to be a concern when something like this is proposed/discovered.
Used responsibly, this could have an incredible life-changing/life-enhancing potential. Used inappropriately… I don’t really need to say it, do I? Nevertheless, I look forward to the benefits that could come from this, content in the knowledge that by the time it becomes an issue I’ll probably have my own highly-trained (and suitably cultured… sorry, couldn’t resist it!) defensive team of bacteria, marching around my body and shouting “Halt! Who goes there?” when anything fishy crops up.
Richard Dawkins at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
September 30, 2008
Richard gets “speculative”.
Episode Three of “The Genius of Charles Darwin.”
August 20, 2008
As some of you may have noticed, I didn’t get round to writing a summary of the final episode of Richard Dawkins’s Channel 4 series “The Genius of Charles Darwin.” The truth is, I’ve only just got round to watching it myself — and forgot to make notes!
To make up for it, I’m going to suggest that you read the excellent summary provided by John over at Homo economicus’ Weblog. You could do a lot worse than add this blog to your feedreader. John has excellent credentials and his blog is always a good, well-informed read.
One thing I would like to talk about regarding this particular episode, however, is the attitude of teachers in British schools to the teaching of Darwin/evolutionary theory. In the course of this episode, we are introduced to a gentleman called Nick Cowan, who is a science teacher at Liverpool’s Blue Coat School (the school isn’t named in the documentary, but this gentleman didn’t take much finding!)
Mr Cowan can be seen in this segment, about seven and a half minutes in, and in the following segment — and if you haven’t already seen the documentary, or if you haven’t guessed, he is a creationist.
Watching, I was utterly dumbfounded. At one point, Dawkins asks the viewer if he/she would want someone like Mr Cowan teaching their children, and it was like being five and at a pantomime all over again! I actually shouted “no!” at the screen, that’s how strongly I felt about this issue.
Choosing my words carefully, I have to say that from where I’m sitting Mr Cowan’s credentials as a science teacher of any kind are completely undermined by the nonsense he spouts during this segment. If I had kids and this man was teaching them I would have been waiting at the school gates on Tuesday morning suggesting very strongly that he should be dismissed.
Now some might argue that because he isn’t teaching creationism as part of the science curriculum (he teaches it in a general studies class), I shouldn’t have an issue with this. But the man is a scientist, for God’s sake! (Yes, that was deliberate.) A scientist believing in God is bad enough, but I can just about accept that. But a scientist (okay, a science teacher — not always the same thing!) believing in creationism?… no, it’s too much of a dichotomy, and whilst he might be able to live with that and rationalise it using the unscientific intelligent design copout, I certainly can’t.
It is extremely depressing. People like Nick Cowan are potentially damaging our future understanding of science and quite possibly contributing to shortages of properly qualified scientists in science-related industries. Evolutionary theory is a fundamental part of biology. It’s vital that these kids have an accurate and truthful understanding of it, that they know just like I know, just like Dawkins knows, just like many, many of my regular readers know that it is a fact. The evidence is so overwhelming that it is now, in spite of what creationists and intelligent design proponents might claim, simply absurd to “believe” otherwise. It is a fact, as Dawkins points out, in the same way that gravity is a fact.
As my former headmaster, Phil Willis MP, says concerning the creationist packs that were sent to five thousand secondary schools in the UK back in 2006,
“This is quite frankly a distraction that science teachers can well do without.”
In April of 2006, the Royal Society summed it up quite perfectly, however. I leave you with their comment and the first segment of Episode Three of “The Genius of Charles Darwin”.
“Young people are poorly served by deliberate attempts to withhold, distort or misrepresent scientific knowledge and understanding in order to promote particular religious beliefs.”
