Tag: Matthew Cobb

Happy Easter — Aussie style

April 15, 2009 • 12:57 pm

I’m back, with lots to say, but lots of catching up to do on the day job. Let me first thank Matthew Cobb for a terrific job of filling in. His students get the benefit of his omnivorous readings in the form of a Z (zoology)-letter he sends out weekly, detailing all sorts of interesting animal stuff.

For today, until I shovel myself out from under, I post something for a belated Happy Easter. In WEIT I describe the convergences between marsupial and placental mammals, resemblances that imply that some niches antedate the animals who have evolved to fill them. Although the Australian bilby looks like a rabbit, it isn’t really herbivorous but omnivorous, although it does burrow. There used to be two species, the greater and the lesser bilby (the word “bilby” is aboriginal), but the lesser appears to be extinct. The greater bilby, Macrotis lagotis, is highly endangered due to habitat loss and predation by, among other species, feral cats; you can read about its precarious status here. Only a few hundred remain in the wild. To save the animal, extensive efforts are underway; these include widespread annual sale of chocolate Easter bilbies, which provide revenues for conservation. (In WEIT I mistakenly say “Each spring, chocolate bilbies fill the shelves of Australian supermakets. . .”, and was roundly taken to task by Aussies who pointed out, rightly, that the Australian Easter occurs in the fall.)

So, belatedly, here are some baby bilbies from down under, and the chocolate replicas that are helping save them:

Chocolate bilbies (buy them here):

easter_bilby_dl_3

NB: Goofed again. I am informed that in Australia the penultimate season is called “autumn,” not fall.

Introducing the vacation blogger

April 5, 2009 • 6:59 am

This is Matthew Cobb, from the University of Manchester.  He will be posting on this website for about ten days while I’m on a trip.  Matthew is a behavioral biologist working on the neurobiology and behavior of Drosophila.  He’s published two books,  The Egg and Sperm Race, about the early history of reproduction, and a new one about the French Resistance during WW2 (!), soon to appear.  I’ve known him for twenty years, first meeting him as when he was doing a postdoctoral fellowship in France.  Matthew is married, with two daughters and two cats.  The picture below shows him with one of them, Ollie.

matthew-cobb-and-ollie

On re-reading The Origin

February 13, 2009 • 6:44 am

The journal Current Biology asked a group of us to re-read Darwin’s great book and write a few paragraphs of response; the collection, which is quite intriguing, is here. Besides my take (which is, as I’ve already mentioned, a defense of the term “Darwinism”), there are pieces by Bob May, Matt Ridley, Peter Lawrence, Matthew Cobb, Christine Nüsslein-Volhard, Mark Ptashne, Simon Conway Morris, Marlene Zuk, Andrew Berry, and Hopi Hoekstra.

It’s particularly interesting to contrast the ending of Matthew Cobb’s piece (he is an evolutionary biologist at Manchester) with that of Conway Morris’s (he is a paleontologist at Cambridge). Conway Morris, who is of course religious, contends that the human mind is not explainable by evolution, while Cobb thinks that our minds are on an evolutionary continnum with those of animals. (This of course parallels a famous disagreement between Darwin and Wallace, who had the views of Cobb and Conway Morris respectively).

Conway Morris of course wrote Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, a very large book which, by presenting hundreds of pages of examples of evolutionary convergence (a worthwhile task, with lots of good stuff), argued that the evolution of humans was inevitable. I have argued against this view, asserting that our complex intelligence arose only once, and so is neither an example of evolutionary convergence nor inevitable.