65 million years too late and how could you have stopped the comet anyway? I hear you cry. Their extinction is settled, but it is their reputation that is under assault from our thoughtless media.
Too often the word ‘dinosaur’ is used as an exemplar of obsolescence. Don’t be a dinosaur, one advert chid and advised an immediate upgrade of one’s company computer systems. A picture of an Apatosaurus skeleton looming over what must have been a large computer tower (certainly knee-high to an Apatosaurus) subliminally made the point. Buy our computers or you will go extinct like those lumbering small-brained failures the dinosaurs.
Advertising copywriters and creatives found guilty of this offence should be gored by Triceratops horridus (or better yet the subspecies T. reallyhorridus) for such misrepresentation. Dinosaurea were a superorder which dominated the land for 160 million years with such success that for many millenia ‘mammal’ meant ‘free range dinner’.
The inspiration for NSPOD is in the virtual pages of the British political journal the Spectator. A journal in the Conservative interest, its columnist Mr Clive Davis has tossed off two impressive paragraphs about those who use racist terms while disguised in white wine in BBC green rooms and their more vociferous supporters who ‘make fools of themselves in comment threads.’
They may rave, recite, and madden round the land, they may have stegosaurian brains the size of walnuts, they may have more brains in their hindquarters than in their heads but they are not dinosaurs.
If correspondents see any further co-option of these noble beasts in the service of mammon or mouth-frothers, please contact chazdarwin at googlemail dot com and we shall disembowel them, as with a Velociraptor’s claw (which of course could simply have been a climbing aid and not at all an evolutionary adaptation intended to inflict misery on corrupt men in cinematic presentations).
Esteemed Mr Darwin,
I write to you on behalf of 9 national museums – some of whom are in possession of your research specimens and ephemera.
You’ll be unsurprised to note that, like the rest of us, these museums are evolving.
They have now developed a new way arranging and displaying their collections, in what some people have called a ‘social network’.
I’m sure you’d be interested to note that artefacts bearing your name can be found at many of these museums. This new development aims to let curious minds collect and share their favourite items, for learning, sharing and creative inspiration.
Perhaps you yourself might be interested in having a look – http://nhm.nmolp.org/creativespaces/
With thanks
Dear Mr. Darwin & Mr. Dawkins
I cannot really understand today’s media hype on the 200 year celebration of Darwin’s birthday and the 150 year celebration of the publication of his “On the Origin of Species” (i.e., “the holy year 2009”).
After all, the ultimate goal of all these scientists of the early 19th century was to match the (then…) very high level of (Newtonian) Physics, and to bring Biology up to the high level of Physics.
That means: people like Auguste Comte (and Darwin himself) tried to find the essential physical laws underlying Sociology, History (including mad actions performed by human agents…), Evolution and even Biology.
I really look forward to a (hopefully) much more intelligent (“subtle”) time when biologists will not have to limp along with sloppy hypotheses and some “popular Evolutionary Psychology” any more, but will eventually find out that all their rather arbitrary hypotheses and anthropomorphic terms (including terms like “(aristocratic) genealogical trees”, “selection”, “evolution”, “costs”, “fitness landscapes”, “evolutionary stable strategies”, “genes”, “species”, “mutations”, etc.) will ultimately turn out to be just special cases of physical maps and physical terms — like “stability”, “stabilization processes”, “shifts” (“stochastic variability”, “theory of variation and variance”), “balance”, “free energy” (thermodynamic potentials!), “potential landscapes”, “attractor landscapes”, “permanently fluctuating stable equilibria within highly dynamical systems”, “thermodynamic and chemical potentials”, etc. (see here already Whitfield 2007 [http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0050142&ct=1]: “using the laws of thermodynamics to explain natural selection—and life itself”).
Hence, the whole problem of some “evolution” will — hopefully in a much subtler and more intelligent time and “society” than mine! — ultimately boil down to a mere problem of STABILITY (and shifts…) on all levels and time-scales:
from the stability of protein foldings & genomes up to the stability of population networks to the stability of individual bodies (“longevity”) to the stability of financial markets and the stability of (“learnt”) memories and maps themselves (including physical maps and theories or “memes”).
Besides, terms like “selection” have an age-old religious, anthropocentric, herd-breeding and intentional bias (see phrases like “God’s selected flock / God’s chosen people”) and should — like all terms with an “intentional” connotation and “anthropocentric biases” — therefore not be used by scientists at all…
But as I said: looking at the whole mass of all those superficial and ideological books and publications & papers & comments about some “evolution” this year, I will really still have to wait for a long time for a much “brighter” (!) time to “evolve”…