As attentive readers of the New York Times are aware, science bloggers are all about being noisy and shouting at people we don't like. As most of us have liberal leanings, that means we can be obnoxious towards people on the political right. And this week we've got great fodder, in the shape of a paper about Sarah Palin.
Sarah Palin addressing the Republican National Convention. Go on, wave back
tags: bpr3.org/?p=52, evolution, avian flight, ornithology, birds, avian, researchblogging
For more than 150 years, the evolution of flight in birds has one of the most controversial topics that one can discuss at a professional meeting because this topic splits evolutionary biologists into one of two camps; the "ground up" people who think that birds evolved from dinosaurs that ran along the ground and flapped their wings, either to collect food or to escape predators, and the "trees down" people who think that ancestral birds evolved directly from reptiles that escaped predators by falling out of trees and gliding to safety. But both hypotheses suggest that birds would first need to establish a wide range of wing movement in order to become airborne.
This is an experiment by Grrlscientist and Bob O'Hara. it may work. It may not. But we should really clean the place up.
