Wet walk!

Workout notes I got in 13 miles (21 km) (about) of walking in about 3:04; I walked to the Boredom course via Bradley avenue and then turned off of the Boredom course on Harvard Avenue, though Springdale and on to the Riverplex via the paved bike path.

About 6 miles into it, it started to pour! I was as wet as I get when I swim. Fortunately I had my backpack which had a clean shirt and towel, so I wasn’t too much of a mess for yoga class.

Running

Quicksilver has an interesting running/walking blog. Today he posted photos of an 11 km (6.6) mile run in Malaysia. For those who love photos of “exotic” (to a U. S. runner) locations, this blog is for you!

One of the many photos of this race. Yes, those are Muslim women wearing head scarves. But that is not required of all women.

Evolution

Dan Quixote wrote a nice Daily Kos diary about the basic facts of evolution.

Professor Moran has a nice post that talks about species which have lots of variation; he talks about what people thought prior to a couple of papers which came out in 1966. What happened was:

Hubby and Lewontin (1966) discovered that there was a huge amount of genetic variation in fruit flies. Their data suggested that 50% of all loci had multiple alleles. This is difficult to reconcile with the balance theory and it was also a big surprise to those who supported the classic theory. It seemed unlikely that at any given point in the evolutionary history of a species that so many genes could be undergoing selection. Further work confirmed that other species contained a huge amount of variation.

The solution to this surprising observation was the recognition that most of the alleles were neutral. The variation is explained by fact that fixation by random genetic drift is much slower than fixation by natural selection. Thus, while the variation is transient in the sense that it is a snapshot of an ongoing process, the process is not selection but drift.

The neutral theory also asserts that most intraspecific variability at the molecular level (including DNA and protein polymorphisms) is selectively neutral, and is maintained in the species by the balance between mutational input and random extinction. In other words, the neutral theory regards protein and DNA polymorphisms as a transient phase of molecular evolution and rejects the notion that the majority of such polymorphisms are adaptive and actively maintained in the species by some form of balancing selection.

Human behavior A few weeks ago, I saw an episode on Animal Planet where some chimps trespassed into area claimed by a large clan of chimps. The clan sent out a party to drive the invading chimps off; they killed a few of them and ended up eating one of the invaders.

Well, this means that humans aren’t the only primates that practice cannibalism. Anthropology.net has a post about human cannibalism; evidently one group is apologizing to the descendants of those they cannibalized!

Films I just saw Letters From Iwo Jima; a couple of weeks ago I saw Flags of Our Fathers. In short, these are highly-non-sugar-coated films about the Battle for Iwo Jima; the former was from the Japanese point of view, the latter from the American.

I can highly recommend seeing both.

These are some of the free wall papers you can get at the respective websites.

War sucks.