30 Years Ago Today

If you are following me you probably have already read multiple stories about this and already know what I am going to say. 30 years ago today was the eruption of Mount St. Helens. While I was not alive at the time of the eruption I am a geologist by training so this eruption is studies in depth because of all the data we got from it. We have learned not just about the eruption itself but, as National Geographic points out, we also learned how wildlife responds. Life returned to the area much faster than was expected and although some of the ecosystems were changed, see Spirit Lake.

My one personal antedote to add is that at the time of the eruption my parents were living in Laramie, Wyoming and they remember the ash coming down. While the ash was not as intense there as it was closer to the volcano they still had darker days and travel was severely restricted.

I'll leave you with an image from the eruption:

Why Dinosaurs are not just big lizards, Part 3

Part 1, Part 2

So last time I talked about the stance of dinosaurs and how that differs from that of lizards. Well I am sure that people were saying how do we know this, or humans just set them up to look this way. That leads to the next point:

Hip

So when we look at mammals, another group of animals that have their legs positioned under their body seen below in a specimen of a florida spectacled bear (Tremarctos floridanus) from the Florida Museum of Natural History (see story about my visit here).

photo by author

So this is a typical ball and socket joint that mammals evolved that allows us to position our legs under our bodies but it also allows some side to side (abduction and adduction) of our legs as well. This trait probably evolved to help us move over less than smooth terrain.

So I kind of implied that mammal hip bones differed from those of the dinosaurs and we will see why here in a minute but first lets look at the hip of a lizard:

Modified from here

So you can see that there is some similarity but the way the femur is formed it prevents the legs of the lizard from being able to sit directly under the body giving it a more sprawling posture (note to self: take more pictures of lizard skeletons).

So finally what did the dinosaur hips look like:

Modified from Holtz and Brett-Surman (1997)

So what is the first thing you probably notice about the dinosaur hips, hint there is a red arrow pointing to it? That's right there is a hole in the center of each one, called the acetabulum and in dinosaurs we say it is perforated. This takes a femur that has been modified from that of the earlier reptiles and actually puts the head of it inside of the hip itself. This characteristic allows them to position the legs directly under the body but unlike the way that mammals developed a more upright posture dinosaurs had less flexibility when it comes to the ability of them to move their legs side to side over uneven terrain.

Again but those aren't fossils alright lets look at some actual fossils:




And just to point out something not entirely unrelated check out the hip structure on this bird skeleton he clearly shares something with dinosaurs:


Part 1, Part 2

Source

Holtz, T.R., Jr., and M.K. Brett-Surman. 1997. The osteology of the dinosaurs. In J.O. Farlow and M.K. Brett-Surman (eds.), The Complete Dinosaur, pp. 78-106. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

The Pill for Men

So with the semester just ending I should have a little more time to blog, the next few weeks might be an exception since I will be out of town. It also means I will be busy doing research and spending most of the day locked away in the basement so there maybe many days I just need to get away from the computer so I am not going to make any promises right now. But enough about me lets get onto the post.

Apparently earlier this week was the 50th anniversary of The Pill. Yes the birth control one. Well that is a pretty major accomplishment and there is no doubt that the pill has changed the way that sex is viewed in most of the western world, for good or bad (I am not going to argue that point but you can probably guess how I feel). Well talk has been going for at least the last 10 years about working on a male version of the pill. Now as with all medicine the past versions have problems that are currently unacceptable to get it through but now they are saying one will be ready within the next decade.

Now as a guy myself I feel that a male version of contraceptive would be another huge leap forward. So you can imagine how I felt when I saw a headline that read A Birth Control Pill for Men? In Your Dreams, but I figured I would hear out what the author had to say.

She starts with a basic history of the pill and then goes on to say this:

"Probably most women would agree that the Pill heavily contributed to the achievement of that aim," Dr. Djerassi wrote, "but at the same time the convenience of the Pill and its wide acceptance by women gave many men the excuse to abandon their own responsibility." Only the threat of HIV/AIDS and other virulent STDs jolted men from their happy contraceptive slumber.

This is a good argument against giving men the pill. We [men] are not always thinking about what is right a lot of times with think with our penis and not with our heads. So this argument bases off of the rise of STDs after women first started using the pill. When it finally got into every one's head that maybe the spread of STDs were due to this unprotected sex and that not only can men give it but they can get it too. So it became beneficial for women to not admit that they were on the pill to help prevent the spread of STDs by still making the man put on a condom. There is a chance that women would say they aren't on the pill the guy would say, "That's alright I am!" Yes this is a good argument against it, too bad that isn't the way the author went. The very next sentence she says:

And yet, disease is not a pregnancy.

Yeah you are right I would so rather have HIV/AIDS and die young than to get a woman pregnant. And then to wrap it up she ends it like this:

And if it does, as promised, finally finally make it to market? If we finally convinced Big Pharma to invest and the FDA to approve, would women even trust men to take it while the consequence of forgetting remains our bodies that get pregnant? With just a handful of particularly fertile exceptions, men can't gestate babies. Until they can, it's hard to imagine women handing that responsibility over to a man, who might forget to take his Pill or change his patch. Shudder.

Seriously the argument that you choose to use is that you don't trust men to take their pill on time. Yes not all men are responsible but you want to know how best to take that worry out of your mind? Simple stay on the pill yourself! As is most Doctors recommend that you don't rely on the pill or the patch but you also use a condom. What harm would a third level of protection do? Look I am all for a woman's right to choose but why not a men's right to choose. If a pill for men came out and I could get even closer to shoulder even the amount of the contraceptive control that my significant other shoulders than how does that harm her right as a woman to choose.

Now normally I don't discuss what people say in the comments but I saw a lot of arguments similar to this one:

I have to agree on a few points. A birth control pill for men is just asking for trouble. Imagine, a rapist male, he buys this. What happens next? Should be obvious. A birth control pill for males is an invitation. Not a good one. Some males would disagree but it is a bad thing to have something like that around. Some would take advantage of it and the results, less about actually love and just "what chick can I nail next." I don't like to say this since I'm a male, but, Most guys think about sex alot, and some get in a relationship for that reason. A pill like this like I've said is an invatation that's not wanted or good natured.

Your concern is for a rapist using the pill and then raping someone. It does not seem to me that rapist care now. They could care less if the woman they rape has a kid or gets an STD and I doubt a pill for men would prevent DNA tests from being useful in finding the rapist. The next comment about what chick can I nail next pleads a bigger question. You think guys don't do that now? Go to any bar or party near a major college in the US and I think you will find that same mentality in "some males."

I don't know let me know how off base I am if you think I am wrong/crazy.

Book Review #4

I have been working on this book for probably about 6 months now and finally decided that if I was ever going to finish another book I wanted to read it was going to have to be by reading a chapter or so a night right before I go to bed. The book that I read for this review was Why Darwin Matters by Dr. Michael Shermer.

This book is very much a dismantling of the intelligent design community saying that what they practice is science, the fact that the subtitle is "The case against Intelligent Design" should have been a dead give away for that. While many people have written books about it (see Only a Theory here). Dr Shermer takes on ID by not just showing what they believe is a religion and how all of their main claims are wrong, but he also shows how evolution is the correct theory. The back cover reads:

In Why Darwin Matters, Michael Shermer, the bestselling author of Why People Believe Weird Things and the publisher of Skeptic magazine, decodes the facts of evolution and shows how natural selection achieves the elegant design of life. Shermer, once an evangelical Christian and a creationist, argues that Intelligent Design proponents invoke a combination of bad, science, political antipathy, and flawed theology in their new brand of creationism. He refutes their pseudoscientific arguments and then demonstrates why conservatives and people of faith can and should embrace evolution. Why Darwin Matters is an incisive examination of what is at stake in the debate over evolution.

I really did enjoy this book it was an easy read and when I set myself too it I got through it very quickly. The data he presents is well supported and he handles the situation including the victory in Dover very humbly. He also shows why those who present themselves as Christians and Conservatives should really accept evolution. The book tends to strive away from the technical and lays out the case in a way everyone should be able to understand it.

Dr. Shermer is a very strong Atheist but it did not come off in this book. In fact if you were just a casual reader you might even be inclined to think that he is a Christian, although this might come from his devout Christian up bringing. I would recommend this book to anyone who might be questioning evolution, I only limit because those devoutly religious who already outright deny evolution probably won't read this at all. Read it see why science is important, the real questions in evolutionary theory currently (and how they are being solved), and how science and religion tackle very separate questions.

Book Citation
Shermer, Michael. Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. 2006. Holt: New York

Book review page

Dinosaur blood and polystrate trees

So Potholer54debunks (a subsidiary of Potholer54) has a new video out in which he debunks the common creationist claims about dinosaur blood found in fossils and polystrate trees, trees that "cut through multiple sedimentary layers."



As always this is another good video by him and he makes a good point. If you hear a scientific claim in the common press, or from your creationist friends, go to the actual source. Google has this thing called Google Scholar it is good for finding scientific papers. I recently blogged about why it was important to read the original source, wow I don't know how to phrase that sentence so I don't sound like an arrogant ass.