And Slaters Go Plop

This year I’m growing swan plants in an effort to attract Monarch Butterfly caterpillars. There’s a problem though: the butterflies have managed to find my plants well before they are mature enough to support the voracious eating habits of just one (let alone a dozen) hungry caterpillars. I discovered a single, minute caterpillar along with about four tiny eggs and was faced with the dilemma of having to ‘abort’ the eggs and murder the caterpillar in an attempt to let the plants grow so as to be able to support more of them in the future.

It got me thinking about the environment we humans live in. We live on a ball suspended in space and our resources are limited. Aided by our dominance of our environment we are now multiplying too fast and have consumption habits that our planet can’t sustain.

Lots of species have gone the way of the dinosaur. Some through catastrophe, some through predation and others have gone extinct because they got too far ahead in the race and plundered the resources they relied on. Are we the next species in line for extinction for the crime of being too smart for our own good? Or are we going to start to control our urges to breed and consume everything in sight?

If you live in a village somewhere in Africa and you know you can only grow enough food to support 100 people is it unethical for a family to have a family of 10 children when your village already has 130 people in it? Will the same thing happen on this planet? Will having large families become unethical in the future?

We only have ourselves watching over us. No one is going to make the decision for us. It’s probably something we should be talking about.

And the fate of the eggs and the itty bitty caterpillar? I had a brief moment of silence and squashed the lot of them. Perhaps the next batch will thank me for it.

Tonight I set myself a challenge to redesign the look and feel of this blog without using any images. Lots of grey, lots of white space and all typography. And if you are viewing this on Linux it’s likely you’ll be treated to an eyeful of Deja Vu Sans+Serif Condensed - the sweetest open source font IMHO. Windows and Mac users get Helvetica, Arial and Trebuchet.

If you have direct access to your database you can change the number of recent comments that are displayed on your homepage in WordPress. I use phpMyAdmin to manage my database. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to the wp_options table in your database
2. Browse the data in this table and find the option with the name ‘widget_recent_comments’
3. Edit this option and change the last number (it should be ‘5′ by default) to the number of recent comments you would like to display: a:2:{s:5:"title";s:0:"";s:6:"number";i:5;}

Of course, it’s quite likely that there is a setting for this in the admin panel that I’ve overlooked - I was unable to find it.

A recent post on another blog raised a topic that I’ve been mulling on for quite some time now. The way we currently ‘do’ morals is to try to find what we all agree to be common goals and try to protect them. It’s nicely summed up in the phrase “Live and let live”.

The problem is that it’s completely constrained to our current world view and doesn’t come anywhere near covering all the potential issues that are ahead of us (or even many existing issues like abortion, war, stem cells, euthanasia and so on).

Here’s my initial stab at a theory for discussion (read my meme post if you are unfamiliar with the term):

“Morality is the degree to which an expressed meme will affect the survival of the host’s memes and genes.”

I’ve played with lots of different variations and I suspect this one has holes in it too but I’m putting it out there for critique.

I’ve included the meme because non-living objects and organisms that are unable to share ideas are only really directly responding to their environment and so can really do no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. One could argue that we only ever respond to our environments but in a more complex way in which case you would probably have to throw out the concept of morality altogether (or perhaps introduce the meme of morality to further influence how we respond?).

I’ve treated the issue as a matter of survival of memes and genes in much the same way that Dawkins treated our bodies as if they were “lumbering robots” that exist to make more copies of genes.

Please, feel free to pick this apart or even come up with your own all-encompassing theory.

[edit:] I’m becoming less and less satisfied with this hypothesis; it doesn’t cover the ‘wrongness’ we feel when people torture animals (or perhaps it does if the actions that are tied to harming animals are also tied to harming people). Also, we can see that morality evolves (slavery, animal welfare, capital punishment, etc) so it may well be that any definition of morals has to evolve as well?

I’ve been HTML-ing and CSS-ing for years now and had never come across this before: To make the content within a div tag (or any other block tag) scrollable all you need to do is fix the width and/or height and add overflow:scroll; to the style for the tag.

You can also set individual scrollbars with overflow-x:scroll; or overflow-x:hidden; and overflow-y:scroll; or overflow-y:hidden;.

I can’t believe I missed out on this one. Perhaps I need to go back to the CSS specification and work through each attribute one by one.

Genes

Living things are made of lots of cells and cells have DNA in them. DNA are long, double strands of molecules made from just four different kinds of molecule that provide a kind of a blueprint for the organism it belongs to. A gene is one of many small regions of DNA that is able to be read (or be ‘expressed’) and contain specific instructions on how to build living structures. If DNA were a blueprint, genes would be the details like “the door handle goes here” or “use concrete for the floor”.

When living things reproduce they are really just making duplicates of themselves. Asexual reproduction means making a direct copy of the DNA and sexual reproduction means mixing up two sets of DNA to come up with a slightly different version. Sexual reproduction has been very successful because each time you mix up the blueprints to make a new organism you have a chance at making a slightly better version than the original which can then go on to make more copies of itself when it reproduces. If, in the mixing process, one of the genes gets changed a tiny bit to say “make the legs bigger” and the creature is born into a world where bigger legs are an advantage the chances are that it’s going to have more offspring than others.

(more…)

TV One in New Zealand is showing a documentary about the life and ideas of Lloyd Geering who was tried by the Presbyterian Church for heresy in 1969. I’ve never read any of Geering’s work but he appears to have some unconventional views and the documentary should be fairly interesting.

Lloyd is still alive and well at the age of 89 and, by all accounts, as sharp as a tack.

It’s showing at 9.45pm on Saturday 12 January on TV One and again the next morning at 9.30am for those who missed it.

Sal and I have recently returned from our ten-day tour of the South Island and while we were travelling around I got to thinking about the Matagouri that’s so prevalent there.

Matagouri is a shrub that’s endemic to New Zealand and it’s fairly common on the river plains of the South Island. It’s got big thorns protecting small leaves and they are generally not taller than head-high. Before humans arrived in New Zealand there were no land mammals other than a native bat.

What piqued my interest so much about the Matagouri is that, evolutionarily speaking, it’s wasting its time growing these big spikes and if evolutionary theory is correct there should be some purpose for this. The spikes are about 5cm long which makes them fairly ineffective against normal-sized birds but would be perfect for warding off cattle and sheep-sized herbivorous animals. The thing is, we know that there were none of these types of animals in New Zealand for long enough for the Matagouri to have evolved a defence against grazing.

Or do we?

There is a large, flightless, plant-eating bird native to New Zealand that’s now extinct called the Moa. They are thought to have gone extinct around 500 years ago but we have plenty of skeletal remains. Perhaps the Moa and the Matagouri evolved together and this relationship accounts for the defensive spines on the Matagouri?

This hypothesis fits well with the fact that most Moa remains are found in the same regions that Matagouri flourish and there don’t seem to be any other likely candidates that would account for the Matagouri’s wasteful spines.

I wonder whether we’d be able to find a living species with no obvious reason for particular features and predict a co-evolved but now extinct species? If we’d never been aware of the Moa would someone have looked at the Matagouri and predicted that there must have also been a large, leaf-eating animal that grazed on it for a sufficient period of time?

If anyone reading this knows more about Matagouri, Moas and other potential reason for the Matagouri’s large spines I’d be interested to hear from you. Also, if anyone can think of any other living species that appears to have unexplainable wasteful features please let me know.