Pursuing praxis

So, I finally made it to the SF Zoo this weekend. My motivation was entirely bovidly, of course. They have greater kudu, which I had great trouble seeing well in the field, and Derby’s elands, which nowadays reside in countries I don’t care to visit (Sudan, DRC, and other central and west African gems).

This is a Derby’s eland bull. A.k.a. a giant eland, mainly because of its horns, which are a more stretched-out twist compared to common elands. Some authors say Derbies can be heavier than common eland, but it’s a really close call. This bull is pretty lightly built, although his horns are very nice. Derbies also tend to be a richer red-brown throughout life, and retain more stripes on the body (in male common elands, the stripes fade with maturity and age). The white spots low on the cheek are also key distinguishers of Derbies, and a dewlap that goes from chin to shoulder, but not down between the front legs. This guy doesn’t have much in the way of bangs; male elands often get that, and then they rub their bangs in the mud, in urine and feces and anything else that’s stinky. Either it attracts the ladies or repells competitors. Sometimes the males get grass or bushes wrapped around their horns, and end up with a bovid ‘fro.

There were also greater kudus, including one mellow bull and a few cows. The cows were rather variable in appearance, and I suspected some variation in age, although none was overtly juvenile. One was just fuzzier, had weaker stripes, and a bit of a pot belly. They do have very pretty eyes though.

In other bovid action, there were a few blackbuck ewes and one ram, though he looked a bit youngish, not be a very blackish buck. Blackbucks are from India. They’re they only living member of their genus (Antilope) and are the namesake of the whole subfamily Antilopinae. They’re rather bizarrely squat, for a gazelle (all their nearest African relatives are much narrower side to side), and don’t come up much higher than your hip. I don’t know as much about them, since I’m up to my eyeballs trying to get a handle on some 75 African bovids. There are a lot of them ranched in Texas though.

Next up, the scimitar-horned oryx. Normally I’d say these are desert animals, but they are apparently flexible enough to subsist at the zoo, which is about a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean. Males and females are virtually indistinguishable (unless you aren’t shy about peering for genitals, like I do). They’re not very tall, but they’re not midgets either. What can I say, the giraffe was in my way.

Oryxes are in the tribe Hippotragini, which in Greek means horse-goats, or something very close. Here you can see their horsey-ness: long tails, fairly even back, bit of a mane, and then kind of a goat-ish head with horns. They are my second-favorite tribe to tragelaphines.

The only other bovid I found was the yellow-backed duiker (rhymes with biker). Duikers are the most numerous African tribe, and most all are forest-dwellers. Since I haven’t been to the very forested parts of Africa, I’ve only seen the versatile common/bush/gray duiker. The yellow-backed duiker is among the largest, up to 80kg. Most are in the 10-20kg range. Proportionately, duikers are the brainiest bovids. They’re also the only ones that are habitually omnivorous; some actually hunt and eat birds! The smallest ones look kind of rabbity or rodenty, but that’s true of most ruminants under 20kg. The bigger duikers look a bit like pigs to me - arched backs, a wide wet nose, and a proclivity to eat some strange stuff.

Finally, to round out the ruminant branch of the mammalian family tree at the SF Zoo, we have the muntjac. It’s in the deer family (Cervidae), hence the antlers on its head. But, it’s quite small - probably not much taller than my knee - and it has very long, furry pedicles, from which the antlers grow annually.

This guy was on patrol most of the time, stalking the perimeter or stalking the does while they napped or got up to pee. Most ruminants males are obsessed with females’ urine; it’s how they tell if the female is in estrus or not, and so whether they get to have sex or not. It’s a pretty simple calculus, just not very appetizing to our tastes.

And I didn’t even get outside artiodactyla! Next up, the more mundane orders of carnivorans, primates and rodents, plus one very cool rhino.  

Revival of an old post, and a book I put down almost a year ago.

—- 

I’ve been learning a bit about Newton recently. Not having as natural a facility with physics as biology, and so having less immediate motivation to study it, I know very little about Newton compared to, say, Lamarck, Cuvier, Geoffroy St. Hillaire, Darwin, Owen, and other dons of biology. Nonetheless, because major advances in physics generally preceded those in biology, the methodologies and ruminations of great physicists (and the philosophic and cultural contributions of people influenced by these scientists) necessarily provide the relevant backdrop to advances in biological theory.

But really this is a post of cool quotes and tidbits in yet another riff on the awesomeness of reason, and people who live by reason, and heroes throughout the ages. I never get tired of those kinds of stories.  

From Andrew Bernstein’s The Capitalist Manifesto (pg. 42-46, 2005):

"[T]he essence of the Enlightenment, and of its influence on the new nation [America], was its uncompromising commitment to man’s faculty of reason. For this, the 19th century philosophes owed much to Newton. It is not merely the birth of the principle of individual rights during this period that is important. As will be seen, capitalism rests fundamentally upon the reverence for the reasoning mind that is the hallmark of Enlightenment thought and culture."

Said Newton (quoted from Bernstein, pg. 42): "If the character of so intangible a thing as light could be discovered by playing with a prism, if, by looking through a telescope and doing a sum in mathematics, the force which held the planets could be identified with the force that made an apple fall to the ground, there seemed to be no end to what might be definitely known about the universe."

Voltaire called Newton the "greatest man who ever lived," and wrote "If true greatness consists of having been endowed by heaven with powerful genius, and of using it to enlighten both oneself and others, then a man like M. Newton (we scarcely find one like him in ten centuries) is truly the great man, and those politicians and conquerors…are generally nothing but celebrated villains."

Among my favorites: Alexander Pope the poet wrot,

Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night.
God said, Let Newton be!
and All was Light.

Edmond Halley (of Halley’s Comet fame, and who played a vital role in publishing Newton’s Principia) said "It is not lawful for mortals to approach divinity nearer than this." 

And Thomas Jefferson hung Newton’s portrait in his study (as did many intellectuals of the day), along with ones of Sir Francis Bacon (perhaps the first philosopher of science - a man of applied reason) and John Locke (political philosopher).  

On an early giant in my own field, Bernstein writes: "The spirit and achievements of the Enlightenment are perhaps best represented in the work of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). The ough of nobel birth and made Comte de Buffon by Louis XV, his life was devoted to science, not to politics. ‘The thirty-six volumtes of Buffon’s Histoire Natuelle  (1749-1785), which appeared during his lifetime, supplemented by eight volumes published (1788-1804) after his death, covered every subject in nuatre from man and birds to cetaceans, fishes and minerals." . . . Though a practicing Catholic, he sought natural causes for the world of nature he dearly loved. Buffon was tactful in dealing with the Church, but nevertheless claimed that the earth was vastly older than the religious belief of his day allowed and argued for a constantly-and-slowly-changing earth. Nature, he claimed, was not a finished product, but underwent caseleess processes of change, an idea that helped pave the way for the theory of evolution in the next century.

"Though fluent in Latin, Buffon wrote his empirical, encyclopedic work in French, seeking successfully to bring knowledge of natural facts and of scientific method to the literate common man. "For the first time in publishing history, books of popular science were best sellers." In the spirit of the age, Buffon not only immensely advanced the cause of scientific inquiry, he did so with the explicit conviction that knowledge was power, that it was not reserved for the aristocratic elite, but that it would bring practical benefit to mankind."

Ah, scientists. They’re eminently quotable, and their limbic effluxes give me fodder for a sometimes-ebbing blog.

To a first-year grad student on switching from engineering to a biomechanics PhD program: "Your work matters less, but you’ll be happier."

"Contextualize this."  

"Ha! I win! I’ve caught you in a web of lies!"

"Turns out hyenas aren’t the only species where you have to be careful of the adult females."
"You mean Homo sapiens?"
"Let’s just say she hasn’t been very happy since one of the hyenas bit her thumb off."

"Did I miss as much as I wanted to?"
"More."
"Awesome."