I’ve had “Weird Science” by Oingo Boingo in my head since Sunday, and now that I’m done with this comic, I’ll be glad to put this terrible chapter of my life behind me. Since first appearing on Strip Search, my beard has garnered a fair amount of fan attention—perhaps even more than myself. Always one [...]
Hello new folks! Wow. Yesterday, Penny Arcade joined in the bean spilling about Strip Search, and at that point I’d have to say that the bean can has been fully emptied. There are beans everywhere. If you’ve landed here from PA, you have my humblest of welcomes. I hope you enjoy your stay. If you like [...]
On Friday we introduced the concept of “brood parasitism”, where one organism will leave its offspring to be raised by another. It’s a tactic meant to conserve the resources of the parent parasite, and in extreme cases where the invading brood kicks its foster siblings out of the nest, serves to lower the amount of [...]
You probably already know how this one goes. I’m a bit late on getting it out the door. If not, kudos. This is for you. Evolution is often simplified to be about predator vs prey. In order to survive, you must eat and avoid being eaten. But the reality is more complex than that. In the [...]
Evolution is a blind, aimless process. It can give rise to mind-boggling complexity from incredibly simple, chance beginnings but it can also appear to take steps backwards as far as ‘progress’* is concerned (if that’s the way you like to look at it). There is no real direction. Take for example average human** heights through [...]
If you rewind the tape of evolutionary history and then re-run it*, there are no guarantees things will turn out the same. You can thank healthy doses of random chance for that. Any given branch of life might just not show up. The same idea would apply to rewinding the Betamax of human history; small [...]
Ernst Haeckel made countless contributions to the burgeoning field of evolutionary biology. We looked at a few in the previous comics based around him and his relationship with Charles Darwin. But as was briefly mentioned in the first comic of the series, it wasn’t all peaches, roses, and scientific breakthroughs. Haeckel made some errors and even [...]
[Preface: I'm glad I could keep my German-speaking readers on their toes. I mentioned it in Facebook but forgot to copy the message here: Aside from adding a few weird sentences, I purposefully tried to make the German nonsense by running it through translators back and forth a few times. I figured making no sense whatsoever [...]
It’s an organic ballet we do here at Sci-ence. With one post gently nudging or inspiring the other*. We don’t really coordinate but also try not to step on each others toes (this is how ballet works, rite?). We seem to have strayed into a (developmental) biology sector for the last few posts, and since [...]
Before I go anywhere, I just have to note again that the embryos above are only approximately at developmental level (or Carnegie stages). I worked specifically from photos, and it was hard to pin down each one at a specific stage, which resulted in a game I’m not 100% happy with. The version of the [...]