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Having always romantisised the Hymenoptera (the venerable social insects), and anthropomorphised their wonderful matriarchal feminism, the mysteries of how they make their men has always fascinated. As I learnt a long time ago, boys come from eggs without needing sperm, they are “made” from unfertilised eggs. That means, for the Hymenoptera to carry on their matriarchal lineage, they manufacture small numbers of males to demand, they don’t need superfluous manhood hanging around causing trouble. The old saying “boys will be boys” simply doesn’t apply in their world; boys can only be boys when the Queen so wills their very existence. A “first-wave” radical feminist utopia (not that I share such a utopian vision for “us”, being post-third-wave myself).

Quite how they achieved this feat was long unknown. Boys are haploid, they carry only one set of their chromosomes; whereas girls get the usual two copies. One thing that is usually thought to be derived exclusively from the sperm (not present in the egg) is a wonderous structure called the centrosome, critical in the ability of cells to divide. The current research shows that, at least in the parasitic wasp studied (pictured above is Muscidifurax uniraptor, one of those studied), anomolous organelles called accesory nuclei (that bud off the main nucleus) can be crafted into a centrosome. It takes a lot of cellular energy to do so, and thus sperm are still more efficient for making the bulk of the useful female population (though Queens often store sperm so males are needed yet for but seconds of their life). This feat of construction means that the social insects, unique among the kingdoms of life, could dispense with lazy, good for nothing men until needed in the ultimate quest for efficient civilisation.

Insects that produce males from unfertilized eggs reveal a surprising cellular feat

As once more in the cyclical war of attrition between creationists and scientists, evolution is yet again being grilled over hot coals. The following article published in evolution is a fairly straight response and guide to the current evo-criticism:

PERSPECTIVE: EVOLUTION’S STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE IN AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Now, my Italian-Irish immigrant genes seems to be doing me no good (not that I ever bothered to “measure” my intelligence), what I needed was אַשְׁכֲּנָזִי אַשְׁכֲּנָזִים (Ashkenazi Jewish) persecution-honed intellect; that is if we are to believe the evolution driven hypothesis for the Ashkenazim’s higher IQ:

Read the New York Times article, or the original research PDF for more…

My rating for this: plausible yet unsupported.

I was outraged by reading an article by the American Psychological Association on work carried out over neural mechanisms to detect social cheating. In the last three paragraphs it describes work in which a nonliterate group in Ecuador were tested for their ability to detect social cheating. Leda Cosmides, a co-author mentioned:

“They were just as good as detecting cheating as highly educated students in the developed world”
“…people have developed an evolutionary strategy for determining when somebody has violated a tit-for-tat agreement. It appears to be buffered against cultural variation.”

I’ll not question the evolutionary slant absolutely unjustified by the type of study, but focus my outrage on the implicit suggestion that ‘dumb natives’ can perform as well as ‘us’. Why the fuck do you even have to study that? Isn’t it obvious; all humans live in social groups, why should studying renissance art theory make you smarter in dealing with other humans???!!! Maybe it’s just me, but there is an underlying cultural arrogance in the logic behind authoring such research that i find really offensive.

As I’ve discussed with my friend Katharina, sometime the space between objects, and focussing on ‘what is not there’ rather than what is, can greatly aid in an appreciation of ones surroundings. Katharina suggests that it also makes one more ‘creative’. From that perspective then, the recent analysis of a 500 year old Zen garden in Japan (see image above) should come as little surprise. The researchers used a medial axis analysis to determine the structural placement of the rocks from the point where one views the garden, and found that lines of symmetry, medially placed between the stones naturally converged to the viewing zone. Randomly placing the stones did not yield such a symmetry pattern. The pattern resembled a tree reaching out from viewing spot (the red point in the second image), and it is suggested that the mind picks up on such ‘structure’ in the space between the stones. This may be one reason why the garden has such a calming aesthetic. I am somewhat skeptical as to how far one can stretch this type of analysis to the experiential level of Zen mediatation. But nevertheless it is an elegant analysis of the structure in the space that goes someway to explaining its impact on us. This suggests that subconsciously we may focus on the space between objects in this type of environment, which gives up the experiential boost outlined above…

The gecko, that most aesthetic and beautiful of our cold-blooded brethren, is well known for its proficiency at climbing many surfaces. Having watched geckos walking smooth polished marble as if they they were horizontal rather than vertical, I always wondered how they can adhere to such a wide variety of surfaces. I was not the only one to have wondered this and the gecko has finally given us the secret to its abilities - van der Waals forces!:
bq. “Geckos have millions of setae—microscopic hairs on the bottom of their feet. These tiny setae are only as long as two diameters of a human hair. That’s 100 millionth of a meter long. Each seta ends with 1,000 even tinier pads at the tip. These tips, called spatulae, are only 200 billionths of a meter wide—below the wavelength of visible light.”
“‘Intermolecular forces come into play because the gecko foot hairs split and allow a billion spatulae to increase surface density and come into close contact with the surface. This creates a strong adhesive force’, says Autumn.” “A single seta can lift the weight of an ant. A million setae, which could easily fit onto the area of a dime, could lift a 45-pound child. If a gecko used all of its setae at the same time, it could support 280 pounds.”