For all the many years that have passed away

 

For all the many years that have passed away

Matthew Lee Knowles 2010/11  

 

 

(

 

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all the bracketed text extracted from f rom ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’ by Richard Dawkins

 

 

(and that is a myth too) (and in this context it always is man rather than woman) (although it baffles me why anybody regards this as an explanation for anything, given that the problem so swiftly regresses to the larger one of explaining the existence of the equally fine-tuned and improbable premeditator) (last long enough to make black holes, for instance) (though it often is) (the number of surviving species at the time of observation) (in the main a good book, so I shall not name and shame it) (a human species, probably ancestral to us) (boreal means northern) (and no less) (it is a intriguingly unfamiliar thought that there is always one such species) (including humans) (exactly in most cases, almost exactly in the rest) (it didn’t fossilise) (all but one of the other lineages went extinct) (quite a lot deeper into the past, and probably no longer longer in Africa) (most of) (or women)

 

 

(or more) (petrified gum from trees) (as they tediously do) (or sixteen) (or hexadecimal) (see the Elephant Bird’s Tale) (especially microfossils) (see plate one) (tree rings) (carbon fourteen) (uranium-thorium-lead) (potassium-argon) (which I can sing) (or blossom, depending depending upon your taste) (unless, as has been recently suggested, their knotted strings were used for language as well as for counting) (the next copying ‘generation’) (it is the French hard c in comme) (American children call it ‘telephone’) (no doubt sincerely) (with very minor variations in a few rare cases) (whether other genes or repetitive nonsense) (and controversial) (or at least slightly more likely than not) (strictly (stri ctly inherited the genes for growing it) (the family of mouse like rodents is called Muridae, and of squirrel-like rodents Scuridae) (plural genera) (plural phyla) (‘panther’)

 

 

(‘hunter’ can include fisher) (called ‘bushmen’) (called ‘Indians’ after a navigational error) (who prefer not to be called Eskimos) (the third chimpanzee) (a parasite is less concerned to prolong the life of its present host if it can easily find new victims to infect) (and often overexploit) (and presumably) (his favourites such as chow chows) (and wolves) (which it now seems should be called Simien Wolves) (golden, side-striped and black-backed jackals) (‘propensity to tameness’) (this terminological convention is worth remembering, remembering, by the way. An enzyme’s enzyme’s name will often be constructed by adding ‘-ase’ to the first part of the name of the substance on which it works) (and to a lesser extent, their traditional enemies the Hutu) (though, interestingly, not the sedentary branch of Fulani) (my father, as a young man fresh out of college, taught agriculture to peasant farmers in central Africa in the 1940’s, and he tells me that this was one of the hardest lessons to get across) (along with the grasses themselves) (and eventually lawnmowers) lawnmowers) (and very recently scientific hybridisation and genetically engineered engineered mutations) (or, in Asia, bamboo) (see plate two) (erectus)

 

 

(see plate one) (it happens to be a family name) (and necessarily yours, given that you are human enough to be reading this book) (in this case, the entire major group called  Afrotheria which we shall meet at Rendezvous Rendezvous thirteen, and which includes elephants and dugongs, hyraxes and Madagascan tenrecs) (shades of Nazi lamps) (base two) (of course they aren’t) (give or take alien abductions in flying saucers) (1890-1962) (1850-1943, Charles’ second youngest son) (Ed. 1983) (vol. 431, p. 562) (MRCAs) (‘locus’) (people) (overleaf) (i.e. haemophilia is ‘recessive’) (males never receive their X chromosome from their father) (females always receive their father’s only X chromosome) (strictly an allele) (though we cannot detect) (most recent common ancestor) (people or organism) (or even, as we shall see, in the same individual) (possibly mutated) (1904-1918) (Victoria) (‘people’) (say for eye colour) (Edward VII’s great-granddaughter) (Charles) (Rupert and Heinrich) (‘locus’) (as we shall see, even members of other species) (fewer when making sperm, more when making eggs; it is not known why) (non-combining portion of the) (although in this case it is not responsible for making the embryo develop as a female; males have mitochondria, it is just that they don’t pass them on) (and other genes) (creationists please refrain from deliberate misquotation)

 

 

(we met them in the graph at the end of the Handyman’s Tale) (or Paranthropus) (or Paranthropus or Zinjanthropus) (or Paranthropus) (gracile being the opposite of robust) (perhaps erroneously as is now suspected) (see below) (page seventy-six) (or ostrich or kangaroo, for that matter) (they were given something to hold on to) (I attribute this inspired way of expressing it to Steven Pinker) (the technical term for this kind of thing is pre-adaption argument is all about) (disconcerting because it seems to leave little time for bipedality to evolve) (as we shall see, many authorities had thought early hominid evolution confined to the east of the rift) (Hope of Life in the local Goran language) (lacking the protruding face of a chimpanzee or a gorilla) (the big hole through which the spinal chord passes) (perhaps rightly) (or some combination from among the four) (often good for a laugh in my experience) (like Lucy) (like ‘Dear Boy’) (very) (you have to eat raw fish guts) (or australopithecines, orrorins or sahelanthropes) (Pan paniscus) (Pan troglodytes) (or ‘phylogeny’) (marked by a numbered circle) (Pan troglodytes) (Pan paniscus) (knuckles) (1871) (a report by a missionary in Liberia in the 1843 issue of the Boston Journal of Natural History) (among others) (‘Toumai’) (genital-genital) ( genital-genital)

 

 

(Gorilla) (concestor one is marked on the branch with a dot at six million years ago) (Gorilla gorilla) (wrongly as Huxley showed) (1763) (American ‘checkers’) (1699)

 

 

(several species of the early ape genus Proconsul) (pongo) (Pongo pygmaeus) (see plate five) (by this criterion, as I have often remarked elsewhere, Darwin’s theory of natural selection may be the best theory of all time) (no migrations) (a first migration) (a second migration) (the most obvious difference between monkeys and apes, as we shall see, is that the monkeys retained their tails) [273] (Dryopithecus, Sivapithecus, etc.) (convergent evolution) (the black and white coding on the diagram) (or ancestor) (and Rendezvous four)

 

 

(Bunopithecus hoolock) (Hylobates agilis) (Symphalangus syndactylus) (Nomascus gabriellae) (Nomascus) (Symphalangus) (Hylobates) (Bunopithecus) (or at least allows) (from 3900 mya to origin of Earth at 4500 mya sometimes called Hadean) (www.stratigraphy.org) (Mya) (see page fifteen) (see page thirty-six) (see page seventy-six) (see page seventy-seven) (see page 173) (see page 119) (castor fiber) (see page 198) (the other is the pygmy hippo, Hexaprotodon liberiensis) (see page 203) (sirenia) [119] (see page 209) (Mirovriga leonina) (see page 214) (Elephantlus edwardii) (see page 224) (see page 228) (pronounced koxix) (or a very short tail) (present twice) (see the Fruit Fly’s Tale) (Megaladapis) (a group consisting of a single species, commonly known as the hoolock) (six species, of which the best-known is the white-handed gibbon Hylobates lar) (the siamang) (four species of ‘crested’ gibbons) (though that will change later in the tale) (an unrooted cladogram in this case) (dichotomies) (trichotomies) (polytomies) (the ‘root’) (Tree A, on page 129) (3 x 2 - 5) (4 x 2 - 5) (5 x 2 - 5) (n x 2 - 5) (usually accidental duplicates of real genes) (or near-identical) (see Rendezvous Rendezvous sixteen) (birds and mammals) (see opposite page) (although not all its members realise it) {British Library plus Egerton} {Christ Church plus Hengwrt} {Christ Church plus Egerton} (note that it is an unrooted tree) (Greek phylon = race/tribe/class) (and now here is the point) (remembering to include branch lengths) (Christ Church) (Hengwrt) (Egerton) (British Library) (Caxton’s preface) (the numbers on the lines) [100] [246] (and thus different parts of an organism) (called SRY) (or the smaller the population size)

 

 

(if somewhat arbitrary) (see the Orang Utan’s Tale) (it’s the feature that gives the catarrhines their name) (Mandrillus sphinx) (Cercopithecus ascanius) (Nasalis larvatus) (Colobus angolensis) (Colobina) (Presbytina) (Cercopithecina) (Papionina) (technically ‘prophylactic’) ‘prophylactic’)

 

 

(when the first monkey fossils appear in South America) (Rendezvous six) (say porcupines) (say mole rats) (Leontopithecus rosalia) (Aotus trivirgatus) (Saimiri sciureus) (Alouatta caraya) (Pithecia monachus) (Pitheciinae) (Atelinae) (Cebinae) (Aotinae) (Callitrichinae) (carnivores) (rodents) (xenarthrans) (marsupials) (‘dichromatic’) (‘trichromatic’) (‘tetrachromatic’) (it has also been demonstrated in wallabies) (but not American) (often pale green, sometimes even red) (some radio waves) (gamma rays) (say) (at least) (to them) (or in some cases the ultraviolet) (violet, green and yellow) (and rods) (the sex chromosome of which females have two copies and males only one) (in our case it is chromosome seven) (some lemurs have it too, by the way, and not all New World monkeys do - for example, nocturnal owl monkeys have monochromatic vision) (plus the blue which again goes without saying) (homozygotes) (heterozygotes) (say) (the suffering is not great, but it is still a nuisance and they presumably are deprived of aesthetic experiences enjoyed by the rest of us) (affecting about eight per cent of males) (retitled The Cooperative Gene in America) (or higher) (or even pentachromatic, if her red genes also differ) (entire-genome duplication is common in plants, and is postulated to have happened at least twice in our ancestry, during the origination of the vertebrates)

 

 

(Aegothelidae) (Tarsiidae) (Tarsius syrichta) (literally twisted nose) (simple nose; our nostrils are each just a simple hole) (see ‘The Great Cretaceous Catastrophe’) (Loridae) (Daubentoniidae) (Lemuriidae) (Indriidae) (Megaladapidae) (Heirogalediae) (now Malawi) (in the evening) (which was often, because he was extremely agile and a terrific leaper) (thirty or so species) (eighteen species) (Microcebus myoxinus) (Lepilemur ruficaudatus) (Indri indri) (Eulemur fulvous albifrons) (Daubentonia madagascariensis) (Lori tardigradus) (who later went on to become their party leader) (see page 290) (which presumably flew in) (except it is in the fourth finger instead of the third) (Dactylopsila) (we shall return to the aye-aye and the other lemurs at the end of this tale) (see plate six) (Rendezvous eight at sixty-three Mya) (165 Mya) (eighty-eight Mya) (the great northern continent which was once isolated from its southern counterpart, Gondwana)

 

 

(the ‘Deccan Traps’) (see the Geological Timescale in the General Prologue) (mammal-like) (protozoa in tiny shells which fossilise in enormous numbers and are therefore much used by geologists as indicator species) (now there’s a political problem)

 

 

(Latin scandere, to climb) (Tupaiidae) (Cynocephalidae) (see the Colugo’s Tale) (Cynocephalus variegatus) (Tupaia belangeri) (usually single) (‘polytomies’: see the Gibbon’s Tale) (Rendezvous eleven to thirteen) (Rendezvous twenty-two) (Rendezvous thirteen) (Rendezvous nineteen) (Rendezvous twenty-eight and twenty-nine) (apart from a single Rendezvous, number thirty-seven, where the order is so unsure that even the experts are not willing to hazard a guess) (but relatively few, I hope)

 

 

(two-thirds of which are in the mouse family) (Hydrochaeris hydrochaeris) (Georychus capensis) (Hystrix africaeaustralis) (Sciurus vulgaris) (Muscardinus avellanarius) (Pedetes capensis) (castor fiber) (Clethrionomys glareolus) (Sicista betulina) (Lepus arcticus) (Ochotona princeps) (Ochotonidae) (Leporidae) (Dipodidae) (Muridae) (Castoridae) (Geomyidae) (Heteromyidae) (Pedetidae) (Anomaluridae) (Gliridae) (Aplodontidae) (Sciuridae) (Ctenodactylidae) (Hystricidae) (Phiomorpha) (Caviomorpha) (traditionally, but now controversially, the Black Death may also have been the bubonic plague) (gundis, gerbils) (marmots, chinchillas) (squirrels, including flying squirrels) (water voles, beavers, capybaras) (agoutis) (maras, springhares) (lemmings) (gnaws?) (Read Only memory) (and there imitated im itated equivalents on Windows Machines) (that very similarity famously became the subject of litigation) (some of a book’s most vocal critics are content to read the book by title only) (and lakes) (see plate seven)

 

 

(non-marsupial) (xenarthra) (see Rendezvous thirteen) (approximately thirty species of sloths, anteaters and armadillos) (Euphracus sexinctus) (odd-toed ungulates) (even-toed ungulates) (true cats) (though not the very largest of them) (which are also now common in North America) (confined to the Andes) (which, strangely enough, seems to have emigrated back to South America from Australia) (from the position of the nose bones)

 

 

(also known as sea elephants or sea cows) (see plate eleven) (Elephantulus edwardii) (Eremitalpa granti) (Orycteropus after) (Trichechus manatus) (Loxodonta africana) (Procavia capensis) (Hyracoidea) (Proboscidea) (Sirenia) (Tubulidentata) (Afrosoricida) (Macroscelidea) (although, as always, that cannot be ruled out) (of a serious nature I own) (see plate twelve) (Leviticus 11:5 and the very similar passage in Deuteronomy 14:7) (‘The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and the rocks for the conies’) (‘The conies are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks’)

 

 

(a map of approximately this period is shown in plate nineteen) (geologically) (monotremes) (marsupials) (including ourselves) (Macropus rufus) (Sarcophilius harrisii) (Notorcytes typhlops) (Macrotis lagotis) (Didelphis virginiana) (Didelphimorphia) (Paucituberculata) (Peramelemorphia) (Notoryctemorphia) (Dasyuromorphia) (Microbiotheria) (Diprotodontia) (for it serves to remove wastes from the foetus as well as to feed it) (but deep) (more especially Tasmania) (specifically New Guinea) (presumably island-hopping) (in trading canoes, we must suppose) (and monotremes) (the rest are all American, mostly opossums plus a few other species such as the enigmatic Dromiciops, the monito del monte) (give or take a few depending on whether we are lumpers or splitters) (family Talpidae) (family Chrysochloridae) (a group of extinct placental mammals) (or plants) (talpid) (or in some golden moles three) (it’s what marsupial MEANS) (by placental standards) (better called marsupial shrews because they eat insects) i nsects) (Petaurus breviceps) (Petaurus gracilis) (cuscuses ( cuscuses and brush tail possums) (or rather a small wallaby)

 

 

(Ornithorhynchus anatinus) (Tachyglossus aculeatus) (Tachyglidae) (Ornithorhynchidae) (the leaf form shown is that of modern ginkgos; the leaves of Jurassic ginkgos would have been more finely divided) (because they aren’t joking) (primitive, remember, precisely means ‘resembling the ancestor’) (and perhaps to them on land) [222] (see plate fourteen) (so far they t hey have found no brain cells that respond to electrical sensors only) (and incidentally the bang becomes a rumble because of echoes) [181] (see plate fifteen) (similar to the Dudley Bug, Calymene, which features on the coat of arms of the town of Dudley) (interesting in itself, given the versatility of the arthropods) (not a true eel but another South American freshwater gymnotoid) (sinusoidal in some species, pulsed in others) (unless you count the toxic saliva of solenodons and some shrews that make their bites slightly venomous) (as in bees) (as in snakes) (101 questions your dog would would ask its vet) (Dr Tatiana’s sex advice to all creation) (for tentacle eleven) (most of the other tentacles) (at least) [41] (using echoes) (and nobody knows in my red is the same as yours) (blue)

 

 

(Mya) [260] (e.g. crocodiles) (birds) (turtles) (except birds) (bony fish such as trout and pike) (and coelacanths are even closer cousins to humans than trout are) (and all mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians) (which unites us to birds and dinosaurs) (see plate sixteen) (as discussed at Rendezvous Rendezvous fift fifteen) een)

 

 

(see plate nineteen) (still with Madagascar Madagascar attached) (with the exception of the t he kiwi and, in an interesting sense which I shall come to, the ostrich) (again using the word in its geological sense of ‘give or take a few million years’) (eighty-two million years) (now submerged) (1880-1930) (I am sorry to say, because democracy is no way to establish a truth) (though they are sometimes called rises rather than ridges) (that is, contour lines of equal age) (see plate twenty) (tyres couldn’t stand the pressure) (solidified lava) (at this latitude) [296] (the asthenosphere) (they have the same date as each other, of course, because they were liquid at the same time when they gushed together out of the ridge)

 

 

(the name that unites mammals mam mals with reptiles and birds) (and toads: the distinction is not a zoologically helpful one) (and newts, which are those species that return to the water to breed) (moist, legless burrowers or swimmers, with a superficial resemblance to earthworms or snakes) (up to 250, compared to twelve in frogs) f rogs) (Ensatina eschscholtzii eschscholtzii) (Dendrobates azureus) (Ichthyophis sp.) (Gymnophiona) (Anura) (Urodela) (except in secondarily evolved cases such as whales, dugongs and ichtyosaurs) (various species of the genus gastrotheca) (closely related and presumably descended from a single colonising ancestor) (Litoria nasuta) (Conraua goliath) (showing that ‘legs’ originally evolved for movement in water, not on land) (see plate twenty-one) (which is the very blotched one that we previously called Ensatina klauberi when we were considering it to be a different species) (and when, by implication, abortion should be regarded as tantamount to murder) (especially, I hope I’ll be forgiven for adding, in non-scientific subjects) (see lower picture) (from the point of view of the essentialist) (and most would say a different genus) (or him: let’s take a female and a male at alternate stops) (quite a tall order) (necessary for some purposes) (sometimes confused with Gastrophryne) (two seconds) (a very different kind of food) (sea urchins, starfish, sea cucumbers, brittle stars) (well an adult frog cell!) (it has been suggested that this first-ever experimental cloning of a vertebrate deserves a Nobel prize) (or it may even have been a sudden change) (‘progenesis’) (‘neoteny’) (Shades of Romer) (or an increase in sensitivity to the existing thyroxine)

 

 

(see the Elephant Bird’s Tale and the Dodo’s Tale) (see plate twenty-two) (Neoceratodus forsteri) (Dipnoi) (the coelacanth) (not a crab at all, but its own thing, superficially resembling a large trilobite) (familiar fish, such as trout or perch) (and presumably to ancient ancestors) (see the Gibbon’s Tale) [324] (vanity cannot help whispering)

 

 

(see plate twenty-three) (coelacanthiformes) (of which there are two living species known) (Latimeria chalumnae) (Pleuronectes platessa) (Astronesthes niger) (Esox lucius) (Serrasalmus nattereri) (Engraulis mordax) (Gymnothorax prasinus) (Lepisosteus platyrhincus) (Acipenser baeri) (Acipenseriformes) (Polypteriformes) (Semionotiformes) (Amiiformes) (Osteoglossomorpha) (Elopomorpha) (Clupeomorpha) (Ostariophysi) (Protacanthoptergii) (Stenoptergii) (Acanthopterygii) (Paracanthoptergii) (see plate twenty-four) (see pelecanoides) plate twenty-five) of thedown genus Fucus) (Nemichthyidae) (Eurypharynx (usually(perhaps by squeezing the cork in the neck of the bottle) (in inverse proportions, following Boyle’s law) (now less fashionable) (arm) (pronounced, ‘sick-lid’) (‘exponential’) (Lates niloticus) (or very few) (see the Polypifer’s Tale) (named after one of Africa’s great leaders, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania) (or some equivalent) (Oxford English Dictionary) (although purist geneticists would not) (see plate twenty-six) (amphibious) (the largest one) (see the colour key at bottom right of the diagram) (all red circles) (all blue) (a cluster of small lakes close to each other and to the west of Lake Victoria) (these two small and neighbouring lakes are united for purposes of the count) (it now has twenty-six species, including fifteen endemic haplochromines) (a pressure-related sense organ far beyond our empathy but deeply meaningful to fish) (also known as A. fasciatus) (or disorder or ‘mixed-upness’) (or it may be more than an analogy) (or the small minority of states) (whatever that might mean!) (ask any dolphin) (e.g. plaice) (e.g. turbot and flounder) (see plate twenty-seve twenty-seven) n)

 

 

(see plate twenty-eight) (Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos) (Callorhynchusmilii) (Holocephali) (Squalea) (Galea) (see (whole head) (the age of dinosaurs on land)

 

(Manta birostris) plate twenty-nine)

 

(Eptatretus cirrhatus) (Petromyzon marinus) (Cephalaspidomorphi) (Myxini) (recent evidence suggests not) (school history books never fail to remind us that he died of a surfeit of them) (this stiffening rod, running the length of the back, is in most vertebrates present only in the embryo) (named, somewhat freely, after J. A. Moy-Thomas) (although they may belong to the same species) (literally everybody else) (snails, limpets, squids, etc) (all) (all) (including vertebrates) (runs the back) (runs amino along the belly) (further (rope) (each a chain of 141 amino (each along a chain of 146 acids) branchings gave rise toacids) the non-functional pseudogenes pseudogenes I mentioned)

 

 

(well, mostly burned in sand, actually) (where there is also an eye spot) (see the Epilogue to the Velvet Worm’s Tale) (formerly Amphioxus) (Cephalochordata) (see plate thirty) (1868-1949) (contemporary with, or identical to, at least one elephant ancestor, swift ancestor, octopus ancestor etc)

 

 

(see plate thirty-one) (or whatever is to be its adult resting place) (Urochordata) (in humans, remnants of this rod linger as the discs between our vertebrae) (of which there are about 2,000 described species) (Rhopalaea crassa)

 

 

(Enteropneusta and Pterobranchia) (Pseudo-colochirus violaceus) (Echinus esculentus) (Asterias rubens) (Ophiothnx sp.) (Cenometra bella) (Enteropneusta) (Xenoturbellida) (Pterobranchia) (Enteropneusta) (Crinoidea) (Ophiuroidea) (Asteroidea) (Echinoidea) (Holothuroidea) (Octopuses, squids and cuttlefish) (or, in a few cases, some larger number) (usually) (like our spinal cord) (as in worms and all arthropods) (or however many arms there are) (singular pedicellaria)

 

 

to which the vertebrates belong) (a slander I would protest more vigorously if the name sounded less of a compliment than it does) (‘rendezvous’) (or rather the genes that make them) (by carefully choosing our clock genes, and avoiding species such as rodents with exceptional rates of mutation) (see the Redwood’s Tale) (birds, crocodiles, snakes, etc) (which enters into our calibration calculation) (I am not one of them, as I have already made clear)

 

 

(about 320 described species) (ten described species) (Nemertodermatida) (Acoela) (or lots of anuses) (unicellular algae) (by disappearing into the sand) (sea anemones, corals, jellyfish etc) (comb jellies) (see anemones and their kind) (quite) (three layers of cells) (two) (‘ectoderm’ and ‘endoderm’) (they add ‘mesoderm’ in the middle)

 

 

(the c is silent) (some were once even confused with plants) (or sometimes nematocysts, but this is strictly just one variety of cnidocyte) (osmotic pressure, if you want the details) (they joined us along with almost everybody else at Rendezvous twenty-six) (jellyfishes, corals, sea anemones and the like) (comb jellies) (or sometimes both) (see text) (Urticina lofotensis) (Aequorea sp.) (Medusozoa) (Anthozoa) (which are, of course, members of the clone) (see plate thirty-nine) (an American colony in the I dare not through think is fish more than coincidence) (see plate forty)western (twice) Pacific) (much of(which it having passes guts) (after his travel book on the Voyage of the Beagle) (while rising in other places, as he vividly knew from finding marine fossils high in i n the Andes) (see plate fforty-two) orty-two) (see the Mixotrich’s Tale)

 

 

(disputably) (Ctenophora) (see plate forty-three) (or strictly biradially) (represented by its single species, Trichoplax) (Placozoa) (who, incidentally, retained anti-Darwinian sympathies long after he should have known better) (see Taq’s Tale) (sponges)

 

 

(some authors also except Trichoplax, the little animal we met at Rendezvous thirty) (like a cilium, only larger) (Porifera) (‘metazoans’) (though Trichoplax may have diverged even earlier) (Aplysina fistularis) (and there’s more to it, as we shall see in the Sponge’s Tale) (that’s what makes bath sponges spongy) (see plate forty-four) (metazoans) (protozoan ( protozoans) s)

 

 

(Choanoflagellata) (which the great man found irksome) (he sardonically called God a ‘gaseous vertebrate’) (adult) (which happens to be green) (we shall meet them at rendezvous thirty-seven) (which some of them have to this day) (a ‘syncitium’) (or should we stick our necks out and call them choanocytes) (or, as some would prefer, acellular - having a body not divided into constituent cells)

 

 

(that’s putting it mildly) (can you spot the difference?) (Mesomycetozoea) (so collapsing Rendezvous thirty-two and thirty-three into one) (not fish at all, of course, but crustaceans)

 

 

(about 40,000 described species) (about 22,000) (Morchella esculenta) (Phallus impudicus) (Glomus sp.) (Hyacinthoides nonscripta) (Mucor sp.) (Microsporidia) (Chytridiomycota) (Zygomycota one, including Mucorales) (Zygomycota two, including Mortierella) (Glomeromycota) (Basidiomycota) (Ascomycota) (mushrooms, or any of dozens of species of related fungi) (we met other syncitia in the early development of Drosophilia, and in Hadzi’s theory of the origin of the Metazoa) (or yeast cells) (in theyeasts) case of fungi) (in to thesuffer casefrom of cheese-making fungi) (in the case of wine-making (if soil he happens athlete’s foot) (see plate forty-five) (or ( or toadstool, or bracket) (Ascomycota) (Basidiomycota) (uselessly and even counterproductively) counterproductively) (thrush) (pronounced (pronounced LIE-kins) (see the Beaver’s Tale)

 

 

(much smaller) (in British English) (in American English) (plus another unrelated group of ‘slime moulds’, the acrasids, which will join us at Rendezvous thirty-seven) (Amoebozoa) (the front end as defined by its it s crawling direction) (or pre-enactments)

 

 

(single-celled algae, with chloroplasts whose morphology is very similar to free-living cyanobacteria) (see Rendezvous thirty-seven) (Rhodymenia palmata) (Volvox aurelia) (Sequoiadendron giganteum) (Glaucophyta) (Viridiplantae) (Rhodophyta) (ultimately) (solid and compact) (high surface area, hence straggly and unwieldy) (including green algae) (enable Java in your browser) (brain mass simply proportional to body mass brain area proportional to body mass) (Kcal/h; log scale) (cold-blooded (g; log scale) (the Handyman’s organisms) Tale spells out(warm-blooded the rationale for organisms) log-log plots) (‘large’ here means anything heavier than about a millionth of a gram!) (mammals and birds) (¾) (i.e. the size of the transport system) (except I doubt that it’s allowed, nor should it be) (see plate forty-seven) (the first note is ignored because obviously, it can be neither up nor down) (calling it ‘Danny Boy’ - the name by which Americans know it because of some twentieth-century words that were set to it) (around which the Earth spins) (by rather different process, pale magnetism be observed in sedimentary rock, too) a(see pages 531-536) (a metaphor to help uscan understand their real behaviour, which is much stranger) (and thirty neutrons) (and 118 neutrons) (arbitrarily designated positive) (i.e. chemical) (acting via the electrons) (since the mass of electrons is negligible and a neutron weighs approximately the same as a proton) (one proton and one neutron) (one proton and two neutrons) (corresponding to the two protons lost) (with ninety-two protons and 146 neutrons) (with ninety protons and 144 neutrons) (atomic nineteen) (atomic number happens, which turn changesnumber into zirconium ninety) (a gas) (halfeighteen) of a half)(as (4.5it billions years) (i.e.in most probable) (plants are only ‘interested’ in chemistry, not the nuclear properties of atoms)

 

 

(1870-1953) (1897) (Chromalveolates) (Rhizana) (Discicristates) (indicated by the dotted arrows) (see text) (Heterokonts) (Globigenna sp.) (Ecklonia radiata) [13] (see its tale) (see page 460) (see page 481) (see page 483) (see page 484) (Labroides dimidiatus) (Parupeneus rubescens) (see page 488) (Cestum veneris) (see page 493) (see page 500) (see page 512) (the network of white threads) (see page 521) (see page 526) (see page 589) (see page 601) (pinhole eye) (Phacops, of calcite lenses - some of these compound can be seen in position incompound the top eye part made of the eye) (Simulium damnosum, eye) (Sparisoma viride, fish eye) (Bubo virginianus, corneal eyes) (see page 603) (helped by the majority of their siblings who are destined to be sterile) (i.e. more cockroach-like) (without oxygen) (with oxygen) (singular ‘flagellum’ and, unlike cilia, they often are) (the distance between wave-crests) (b) (br) (s) [49] (surprisingly)

 

 

(nucleated) (in plants) (ultimately from plants) (different) (and nothing else) (including Archaea) (apart from lightning strikes and human industrial chemists) (singular ‘stoma’) (originally solar) (undulipodia) (or, rather, up for research in the next couple of years) (liking it very hot indeed) (see the Great Historic Rendezvous) (then called Archaebacteria)

 

 

(see the Gibbon’s Tale) (cross A) (e.g. cross B) (proteobacteria) (planctobacteria) (Sphingobacteria) (Eobacteria) (high G and C Gram positive) (Firmicutes (low G and C Gram positive)) (bats) (the Duckbill’s Tale) (the Beaver’s Tale) (limpets) (some snakes) (wasps, snakes and scorpions) (cnidarians) (squids) (fossilised solar energy) (or other smooth, hard surface) (virtual) (not to mention nerves) (or protozoan) (Type Three Secretory System) (if not Darwin’s) (it is by far the most abundant gas in our (as blue-green from atmosphere) DNA genes) (ultimately) (leaves)algae) [113] (or Eu-) (themselves transcribed

 

 

(‘bone to his bone’ - such wonderful economy of language) (emphasis added) (and in my view rightly) (and I stress relatively) (in another letter to Hooker) (and oh! What a big if!) (following Aristotle in this as in so much else) (literally) (compounds of carbon) (or equivalent) (methane, ammonia, water vapour and hydrogen) (‘lightning’) (metaboliser) (replicator) (and in my view mistaken) (from the cells point of view) (building blocks of DNA and RNA) (twenty of them are building blocks of natural proteins) (m RNA) RNA) (codon) (AATE) (‘letter’) analysis) (see The Selfish Gene) (no relation to Mark, except as(testablished by Y-chromosome (waterfleas) (practice is a different matter, and formidably difficult) (see plate forty-eight) (the ‘Watson-Crick pairing rules’ discovered by those two inspired young men) (phage for short) (completely different) (and population, by the way, is exactly the right word even though we are talking about free-floating molecules, not viruses or organisms of any kind) (or hopes, we might rather say) (so far is natural selection from being a process of blind chance) (hence their blood-red colour)

 

 

(they’d break under the weight) (and to various ‘false sabretooths’ among the placental carnivores) (see plate forty-nine) (see plate fifty) (for better resolution of detail than low-pitched) (accuracy is improved because early parts of each echo are distinguishable from late parts by their pitch) (subconscious) (and some blind human individuals have learned it) (injecting poison hypodermically through a sharp-pointed tube) (cone shells) (stingrays) (stonefish) (male platypus) (stinging nettles) (I would) (obviously!) (caustic and boiling hot) (moths, attracted by the fake sexual scent of a female moth, which the spider synthesises) (or bola) (much thinner) (but not the chameleon’s) (silk is the universal solution to any spider problem) (reprinted in  A Devil’s Chaplain) (two legs on one side, one leg on the other) (spiracles) (eleven times independently!) (written proceedings of the House of Commons) (and prey and hosts) (pronounced design-oid, not dezzig-noid)

 

 

(as opposed to a ‘skyhook’: the analogy is to the man-made lifting machine, not the bird) (and I would bet the only cranes there have ever been, or ever will be, in the universe) (evolution on the grand scale of millions of years) (evolution on the scale of individual lifetimes) (although the universality of Hox genes argues for some sort of fore and aft serial organisation as a predecessor) (worm-like amphibians) (at least) (compare a lobster with a centipede) (leaves and flowers are modules) (‘genes’) (especially the final chapter, ‘Rediscovering the Organism’, of The Extended Phenotype) (germ-line cells) (somatic cells) (though the very meaning of species is in doubt for bacteria)