crates | May 7, 2012
Central America is the site of contending crustal plates–notably the Cocos Plate in the Pacific Ocean which is being subducted beneath the Caribbean Plate right off the western coast of central america at a rate of 72-81 mm/yr. It’s this area where the Central America Volcanic Arc exists which forms the volcanoes of Guatemala, [...]
crates | May 6, 2012
It was 3 am and my bleary eyes found it hard to see through the beating of my windshield wipers, but the tiny object in my headlights appeared to be something other than a small twig. As I got out of the car and picked it up, I realized it was a salamander quite different [...]
crates | August 31, 2009
I was recently watching this TV program on black holes. As usual when I contemplate such things, I became slightly depressed. When a star which is about three times or more the mass of our sun reaches the end of its life, it collapses and in the process blows out a great mass of matter [...]
crates | March 23, 2009
I came across a reference to camel eyes while reading a work by David King (Skeletons on the Zahara), who wrote about the crew of an American ship who were shipwrecked on the African Sahara in the early nineteenth century. Since the eyelid is very thin, the camel often closes this eyelid in sandstorms and [...]
crates | February 19, 2009
“Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny” a quote ascribed to Ernest Haeckel basically means that Ontogeny, the development of the individual from the fertilized egg to maturity, recapitulates the phylogeny or evolutionary history of the species. The strict interpretation of this statement that embryos go back through every stage of their evolutionary past is rejected today, but [...]
crates | February 18, 2009
“When on board HMS Beagle as naturalist, I was struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to throw some light on the origin of species-that mystery of mysteries.” So [...]
crates | February 17, 2009
I just saw a very instructive two hour program by NOVA. It had to do with the recent events (2004) in a town in Dover, PA where a couple of individuals on the school board pushed through a requirement that Intelligent Design be taught in biology classrooms as a viable alternative to the modern theory of evolution. They also required that [...]
crates | January 31, 2009
Plutarch tells a story, perhaps apocryphal, about Julius Caesar and his party as they passed through a small Alpine village. His friends jokingly asked whether even in such an isolated and poor setting men still strived and scrabbled for power and office. Caesar very seriously declared that he would rather be the foremost man [...]
crates | June 27, 2008
DNA studies seem to suggest that Neandertals and modern humans are cousins, and that Neandertals are not direct ancestors to modern Homo sapiens. But were they human in the sense that they shared common characteristics with us that we consider typically human? I have summarized some observations here from The Neandertal Enigma written by James [...]
crates | June 26, 2008
Why do fish, dolphins, whales, penguins, seals and other aquatic creatures have a smooth streamlined shape, with fins or some similar means of ensuring stability, and some sort of propulsive structure such as tails? Also, looking into the fossil record, one can find the various aquatic reptiles such as the Ichthyosaur which looks amazingly like [...]