My Cardinal Prediction Comes True

Way back in 2010, when I first started this blog, I wrote a post about a news report on the phenomenon of gynandromorphism (a condition in which half the body is male and the other half female) in chickens.  In that post, I engaged in some speculation:

 I am wondering—is this kind of gynandromorphy unique to chickens, or does it occur in other birds? It would be barely noticeable in many species, but obvious in sexually dimorphic birds like woodpeckers and certain songbirds. When a half-male, half-female Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) shows up at the bird feeder, that would attract some attention.

  And now it turns out that a gynandromorphous Northern Cardinal has been observed, and is the subject of this video that was posted on the online magazine Slate in January.  

I am not an expert in bird genetics, but I do notice one significant error in the video: it shows sex as determined by the X and Y chromosomes (as occurs in humans), but birds have the ZW chromosomal system for sex determination, in which males are ZZ and females are ZW. 

Things That Are Stupid

I don't normally like to blog about anything even remotely serious. And I also don't normally like to blog about my alma mater, Yale University. But I am making an exception because of a story that gained a fair amount of traction on the internet a few weeks ago (I always come in late in my blogging), and which is way too stupid to be allowed to pass without comment.

The story in question appears in the Telegraph under the title "The Plot to Create Britain's Super Race". And in general it appears to have been accepted uncritically.

The Yale Herald's blog described the story as "very unsettling and creepy" and "disturbing stuff". (I used to write for the Yale Herald, but that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.)

The story consists of two facts:

1. During World War II, members of the Yale faculty invited 125 children of Oxford faculty members to live in New Haven.

2. Many member of the Yale faculty at the time were interested in eugenics.

Supposedly these facts mean that there was a secret plot in place in which the Oxford children would return to England after the war and form the basis for a new, intellectually superior population. There is, however, absolutely no evidence presented to link Fact 1 and Fact 2, only wild speculation. Nor is there any indication of how 125 individuals could make any difference in the hereditary characteristics of a nation of millions of people. This entire idea of a secret eugenics plot is completely unsupported, yet it was published in a major British newspaper, and believed in its entirety at Yale, where people are supposed to be smart.

Maybe if someone had succeeded in creating a super race, those superbeings would have been able to understand how ridiculous this story is.

Trolls and Elves and Hobbits and Sheens

He's lean. He's mean. He's Charlie Sheen.

Every so often a series of unrelated things will come to my attention, and join together in my mind in a way that seems to make sense, if only to me. The most recent occurrence of this phenomenon stems, as does much of our modern discourse, from the strange saga of Charlie Sheen.

We start with John Cryer admitting that he is a troll . . .

. . . at the same time as this discussion of a rare genetic disorder that makes people look like elves . . .

. . . briefly calling to mind Homo floresiensis, an extinct hominid sometimes known as a hobbit . . .

. . . and finally leading us to the theory that The Lord of the Rings may have been based on a true story.