I love this guy. In fact, he’s so good, let’s have that speech as a picture:

The zebra shark, named Zebedee, lives in an aquarium in Dubai and has never had access to a male of her species. But unlike some other virgins I could mention, this shark was not content to stop at one. So she’s done it again this year. According to the BBC: “A lone zebra shark in a Dubai aquarium has prompted scientific interest after laying eggs for the fourth year in a row which hatch into healthy offspring.” That’s right, this is her fourth clutch of eggs.

From io9:

Warren Baverstock, the aquarium’s curator, says that it’s likely other captive shark species possessed this ability all along, but it was simply assumed that the eggs they laid were duds. This ability to reproduce even in the complete absence of males is likely another example of the remarkable evolutionary toolkit that the various shark species possess. It’s also another way in which sharks are completely unstoppable, invincible killing machines, but I suppose that’s a somewhat less scientific piece of analysis.

Hey, buddy, that’s no way to talk about our new lord and savior. Um… litter of lords and saviors? I could see how this is going to make the resulting religion a little bit confusing.

I wasn’t sure what it was at first… but ends up it’s a moray eel.

It looks like the start of a horror film to me.

How do you think it ended up in the middle of a hike?

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The author elects to give only one example from comic books, which is kind of a shame because you could fill volumes with the crap that shows up. The monster/villain Doomsday is used as the example, and that makes me happy, because he started an argument about evolution with a college friend that lasted for most of a night.

But for my money, the worst “evolution in a comic book” moment is High Evolutionary and his “evolutionary ray,” which could cause a creature to evolve on the spot. This somehow created a bunch of anthropomorphic animals who wound up dressed in medieval armor.

I think that was the whole point, really. It created scenes that looked like Prince Valiant but everyone had animal heads; sort of a furry convention crossed with a ren-fair.

It seems silly, but I think that a lot of people get their understanding of science from pop culture. Stephen Jay Gould once told a story about a childhood argument with a friend over whether humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Eventually an adult was approached to settle the argument. The adult said that they did coexist, and based his answer on the old Alley Oop comic strip.

Anyway, what’s your least favorite misuse of science in pop culture?

[...] the fact that Barack Obama’s father was a Muslim Kenyan, descended from a long line of Muslims, will remain true until the day he dies, and nothing he ever does in his life can change half of his genes that he inherited from his father. His genes are for keeps. The fact that he has attended Christian church for the past 20 years is not going to change that. Michael Jackson looked white much longer than Barack Obama sat in the pews of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church. Obama is still as (half) Muslim as the day he was born.

Part of his argument makes sense. If a segment of the human population has interbred for a long time, they’re likely to have certain genetic markers in common which could be used to identify them. Call this a genetic fingerprint that would identify the a certain group.

Historically, I think it’s questionable whether or not Islamic Kenyans have maintained enough of a closed group to develop a fingerprint. Islam is a very diverse religion, and in many cases it seemed to live comfortably along side other religious groups for centuries. When Monophysite Christian and Muslim groups intermingled, what does that do to the group genetics?

But more to the point, what does defining a person’s religion by their genetic markers do for us? Is it a useful definition? Since what we’re looking for when we ask about someone’s religion is some understanding of their beliefs, I can’t see that it is. Unless Kanazawa is going to suggest that some people are genetically predisposed to accepting the Trinity while other are predisposed to a more straight-forward monotheism, I just don’t see the point.

Joachim Krueger, another blogger at Psychology Today, is even less impressed:

If religion is inherited through the Y-chromosome, he is fully Muslim; if it is inherited through the mitochondrial DNA, he is fully Christian; if the religious gene is located somewhere else, he has a 50-50 chance of being one or the other, and the premise of Satoshi’s post is moot. Now, Satoshi knows all this. I therefore conclude that his post is meant to entertain, enrage, and befuddle. That’s too bad because the primary purpose of these blogs is to help, advise, and educate. Am I wrong?

Synthetic life form accuses God of ‘playing science’

The world’s first artificially created life form has accused God of ‘playing science’ and ‘meddling with things He cannot possibly understand.’

The single celled organism, created by Dr Craig Venter and his team, was said to be ‘outraged’ when it discovered that a supernatural being, not subject to any form of regulatory control, was still involved in the creation of life.

[...]

Many ethicists believe that God has repeatedly overstepped the mark. ‘Nobody objects to the Lord producing a few miracles here and there,’ said philosopher AC Grayling, ‘but when he starts playing around with the very stuff of creation then He has clearly exceeded his remit. I am beginning to think that this omnipotence thing has gone to His head.’

God’s continued tampering with scientific matters has already been blamed for numerous ‘all-mighty blunders’ including Flu, Malaria, HIV and Piers Morgan. ‘He cannot be allowed a monopoly on this level of unregulated power,’ said Dr Venter, ‘that is why I am currently seeking to patent the genetic code for omnipotence so that we can keep His crazy meddling under some kind of control.’

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered.

Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another.

The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.

What’s more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.

Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica.

How big is this mega-colony?

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the “Californian large”, extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.

But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.

If you want to learn more about our upcoming overlords, be sure to read the whole thing.

There’s a condensed version of some of these thoughts in Sapolsky’s essay “Belief and Biology.”

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