"After the lapse of time, under changing conditions of life, if any part comes to be injurious, it will be modified; or if it be not so, the being will become extinct, as myriads have become extinct." Charles Darwin, Origin of Species 1st edition (on Kindle)
One of my favorite graphs from geology texts are those that show lineages like this:
And ask questions like "what the hell happened to the placoderms?" And there are, of course, many other groups that have come and gone. Darwin gives us a nice hypothesis here. Testable? I'd have to think about it (I need to be thinking about understory insectivorous birds of the tropics) but one should see if those groups had attributes that made then injurious unto themselves. For dinosaurs, I've heard the body size hypothesis but there were many many small dinosaurs. Interesting stuff.
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Son gets in tonight. Haven't seen him in a year so I'm really happy. The downer is that his flight to Detroit was delayed (assuming it would even go) so they're diverting him to Atlanta and he gets into Allentown at 1030. There will be a trip to the Hickory Run Starbucks. In the meantime... letters of recommendation for students and thinking about birds and some laundry.
Oh, by the way, met this guy in NYC the other day.
"After the lapse of time, under changing conditions of life, if any part comes to be injurious, it will be modified; or if it be not so, the being will become extinct, as myriads have become extinct." Charles Darwin, Origin of Species 1st edition (on Kindle)
One of my favorite graphs from geology texts are those that show lineages like this:
And ask questions like "what the hell happened to the placoderms?" And there are, of course, many other groups that have come and gone. Darwin gives us a nice hypothesis here. Testable? I'd have to think about it (I need to be thinking about understory insectivorous birds of the tropics) but one should see if those groups had attributes that made then injurious unto themselves. For dinosaurs, I've heard the body size hypothesis but there were many many small dinosaurs. Interesting stuff.
________________________________________________________________________
Son gets in tonight. Haven't seen him in a year so I'm really happy. The downer is that his flight to Detroit was delayed (assuming it would even go) so they're diverting him to Atlanta and he gets into Allentown at 1030. There will be a trip to the Hickory Run Starbucks. In the meantime... letters of recommendation for students and thinking about birds and some laundry.
Oh, by the way, met this guy in NYC the other day.
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