Perspective

You've probably noticed something if you've bothered to look at the blogroll over on the left. It's over on the left in more ways than one. I'm not a conservative; I don't much like conservatism. (Some people might classify a lot of my economic views as 'right wing', but that just shows how essentially useless is the right/left paradigm. I'm a liberal and, I hope, a consistent one.) My blogroll doesn't feature many links to Right Blogistan. There's only one really barking mad Tory, and he has the charm and promise of youth (and I'm far from the only non-rightwinger to view him with affectionate ridicule). There's Abiola Lapite, but then Abiola isn't really a rightwinger: libertarian economics + irascibility ≠ conservative. And the remaining three surely number among every leftist's favourite rightwingers.

It's good thing to be reminded from time to time why that should be, and now Eugene Volokh has given us such a reminder.

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Emerging from seclusion?

Here's something we can all agree is good news. David Weman appears to be ending his long hiatus. Now if only Amity Wilczek and Charles Murtaugh would do the same....

Of other worlds

One small compensation for my frenetic travels last week was the chance to catch up on my Airport Book reading. Normally I go in for spy thrillers or police procedurals. This time, though, in a spasm of fair-mindedness, I opted for science fiction.

Once upon a time, in comments to a long-ago post by Brad DeLong, I was taken to task by Patrick Nielsen Hayden for snottiness towards 'genre' literature. Mr Hayden's criticisms were somewhat misplaced, I thought. But it's true that I generally dislike and avoid science fiction. So, I thought, why not dip into the genre, trying to approach the exercise with a fresh and unbiased mind.

The books I read (although 'read' is not, as we shall see, unqualifiedly accurate) were:

Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear;
Darwin's Children by the same;
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood; and
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

All these tales seem set in the immediate future. The first three have to do with genetic strangenesses. I could not tell you what the fourth is about.

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Mater et magistra

Over in America last week, I noticed that some Roman Catholic bishops are suggesting that catholic politicians who don't toe their church's line on abortion (most notably, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry) be refused the sacraments. Communion, so the reasoning goes, is for catholics in good standing, and 'good standing' isn't compatible with pro-choice views.

The political wisdom of the bishops' stance I leave for others to debate. Wise or not, though, it is surely the bishops' prerogative to lay down the rules for members of the church they run. Non-RCs like myself have no standing to comment on an internal matter of a private organisation to which we don't belong.

In a broader context, however, even non-catholics can fairly raise questions about what the RC hierarchy is doing. It's hardly a secret that the RC church strongly opposes abortion. But it also strongly opposes capital punishment. Many have asked why the American catholic hierarchy are bashing Kerry et al. with the crozier while welcoming to the altar catholic pols who support the death penalty.

That's a fair question, but I think it misses a larger and more important point. Namely: why is anybody, RC or not, taking seriously the claim of catholic prelates to speak with any moral authority whatever? These are the same shepherds, after all, that for decades knowingly fed the most defenceless of their lambs to clerical predators rather than risk 'scandal', i.e., any risk to their own power, property and prestige.

The spectacle of these mitred hypocrites posing as moral teachers is so grotesque as to be riotously funny. Or rather; it would be funny, if the gaping distance between their posturings and reality were not measured out in the ravaged rectums of little boys.

American catholic politicians facing clerical 'discipline' for being pro-choice would not, I think, be out of order in reminding their bishops of something some old book said about motes and beams. And, as long as the bishops are blowing the dust off that book, they might have a glance at Matthew 18:6 as well.

So nice, I have to say it twice

Greetings to you all from glorious Noo Yawk City! I have had to come here on short notice for some business thing (and I never did manage to link up with the Young Fogey), and now having a bit of spare time, of course I choose to hole up in front of a glowing screen far away from the city's milling streets. But no worries, I shall shortly immerse myself in the teeming throng in search of a bite to eat, for all that the city's entrepreneurial mayor now forbids me an innocent cigarette.

I have been away from New York long enough that I can now, at last, see why the thick carpet of skyscrapers so impresses visitors from the farm. It's so nice to be in a city where there is nothing out of the ordinary in being more than six storeys high. My hotel room on the 25th floor (i.e., the 24th, in the metric system) looks west, rather dramatically, directly upon the roof of the Roman Catholic cathedral; whose vestigial flying buttresses announce that its gothic form is an ironic postmodern joke and whose upper interior stonework, so I am told, is really of papier-mâché. To the left and a few blocks farther west is a building with a suspect resemblance to Frankfurt's MesseTurm. Hmmm... any chance Helmut Jahn once stayed in my room and looked west, sketchbook in hand?

American television is pure abysmal and the native voices, let us tell the truth and shame the devil, are ugly syllable-swallowing things. Yet any country may wear such minor flaws with equanimity that can boast such a glory as New York. I must return to Frankfurt tomorrow, and I don't mind telling you that it'll be a bit of a task to tear myself away.

10 kv

Some time in the past hour or two, T6I (Mk II) received its 10,000th visit. I imagine that, say, Crooked Timber* see that much traffic in a day, but given T6I's much more modest scope, I am tickled nonetheless.

All the greater my sorrow, then, to have to tell you that you will not see me for a few days. I'm off to London where I will be closeted in conference rooms. With any luck, though, I'll have a bit of time free to meet the Young Fogey and judge his taste in waistcoats for myself.

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Yet another 100 books

That book-list thing really seems to be making the rounds. Even those of us complaining about it seem compelled to do it, though Frank McGahon, perhaps wisely, demurs. Down in the comments to my previous post, Des von Desbladet links to a second list over at the Grauniad (with a fair amount of overlap with the bloggish list). Meanwhile, over at Pharyngula I see a new list, all ready to be copied, pasted and boldfaced.

In hope of turning this 'meme' into a metameme, below the fold I give you yet another list. It's mostly prose fiction, though I've been far from doctrinaire in my selection. Some of the entries are included on some of the other lists. (So sue me.) I make no claim as to whether or where the listed works fit into the Official Canon of Literary Greatitude. I do not even represent that I have read them all.

But go ahead, have a crack at it - how many of them have you read? And what does that tell you about your literariness? (Hint: precious little.) More importantly, put together your own list and post it on your site. If everybody would do this, we'd all have a lot less time for war and accounting fraud and deliberately spreading typhoid infections, and the world would be a better place.

[UPDATE: Richard of Castrovalva is the first to take up my challenge with this mighty fine list of his own. You should all strive to be more like Richard. Get cracking on those lists - you can't be the first, but you might be the next! (By the way, I once saw a woman wearing a t-shirt with that slogan on it. Whether it referred to the composition of DIY book-lists, I cannot say.) ]

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Shiny, new and beautiful

Tobias Schwarz, a true Meister of all that HTML/CSS/etc stuff that is so much Greek to me, has given A Fistful of Euros a thorough makeover. Check it out, and note in particular the pictures; you'll see a new one every time you visit (or hit 'refresh'). The danger here, of course, is that visitors will be so enrapt by the new format that they'll just stare at the page for hours without reading the incisive articles.

You should note, by the way, that the cool kids apparently now refer to 'AFOE' as 'afoe'. So don't let an inadvertent use of capital letters mark you as so very 26th April.

Call yourself 'literate', do you?

Alas, with very short notice I must be off once more to Bielefeld, that Athens of Eastern Westphalia. But there's one thing I'll vent from my spleen afore I go.

I've seen this on a few blogs now (though it seems to originate here), and it bothers me a bit. I'll talk about what bothers me down below. But first, in a spirit of fairness, I'll play. (Text from the source; boldface my own.)

This is going to be SO humiliating

Highlight the ones you've read (as seen everywhere else.)

Author - Title

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

There; the glaring lacunae in my painfully cobbled-together and slipshod cultural literacy exposed for all the world to see.

Now, what bothers me about this list is this: what the *%§$&! is it supposed to prove? Granted, these are all works ranging from the pretty-well-known-and-respected to the classics-by-any-sane-definition. I'd expect that any reasonably cultured person in the anglophone world (there are non-anglo works in the list, but there is a definite slant towards English-language and especially American titles) would have read a good selection of them.

Still, it's a pretty random sampling, isn't it? Given the list's anglophone bias, I won't quibble at not finding Holzfällen or Les faux-monnayeurs. But where is The Waste Land? Where is Tristram Shandy? Where are In Memoriam, Gawain and the Green Knight, Sailing to Byzantium? And where, for all love, are the Aubrey/Maturin novels?

Note too the odd choices from some authors' works. Godot is listed (as well it should be), but why not the Trilogy? Joyce's Portrait makes the list; it's my own favourite among his novels, as it happens, but surely Ulysses is the one to include if you're only including one. And why ask whether people have read Animal Farm (worthy though it be) when it is in his essays that Orwell's genius truly reached its pinnacle?

Now, you'll say, 'But Mrs Tilton, surely your gripes about this or that omission merely reflect your own prejudices and preferences.' And you're right; surely they do. Any list this short is bound to be highly arbitrary. But that's my point. At bottom this list-game isn't worth much for diagnosing how well-read one is. Really it's nothing more than one of those internet 'memes' thrown out in hope it will replicate. And of course, for all my complaining about it, I've just helped it do so, haven't I?

Would Rosaceae by any other name smell as sweet?

The Panda's Thumb spends most of its time swatting down creationism, especially in its shiny new guise of 'Intelligent Design Theory'. But the truly interesting stuff is real biology, and the Thumb takes time to discuss this as well.

The other day I talked in a very simple way about some of the implication of naming a species. Today, TPT's John Wilkins goes a lot farther, recounting the history of Linnaean classification and talking about a proposed replacement, Phylocode, that would cleave far more closely to phylogenetic history. It's all fascinating stuff, and highly illuminating in pondering whether our classifications of organisms relect some kind of 'reality', or are simply so many names.

More blogs about spiders and webs

If lizards as a substitute for spiders just don't do it for you, or if you simply can't get enough of the little beasts, check out Dinesh Rao's Spiderblog. It's like having an aggregator of all things spidery.

Saturday lizard blogging; or, Woah, oh, what I want to know is, are you (the same) kind?

Those of you who stopped by yesterday for your usual Friday spider fix will have been disappointed, I fear. The curse of earning my bread kept me from my customary spider blogging, for which I am (if possible) even sorrier than you are. But then lizards are in so many ways so very nearly indistinguishable from spiders (eukaryotic; bilaterally symmetrical; really cool) that they may readily serve in the same role. And Saturday is Friday in the base-6 calendar system, or something. So this week it is Saturday Lizard Blogging you shall have.

As I hinted in my first post after returning from Formentera, you can't spend much time on the island before you notice that it is home to a lot of lizards. And I mean a lot. These things are all over the place. By 'these things', I mean Podarcis pityusenis, and here is one of them:

The Formentera lizard has become practically a trademark of the island, and rightly so. Not only ubiquitous, they are attractive, and cheeky as sparrows. Those who live near the open-air beach restaurants will dart under your table to gather crumbs, and with a few minutes' patience you can coax even those living in the parts of the island rarely visited by humans to eat out of your hand (a small piece of apple or banana will do nicely).

But I don't merely want to show you a picture of a good-looking lizard. The Formentera lizard also gives us a good excuse for thinking about something most of us never give much thought to. That is, what do we mean when we say 'species'?

Continue reading "Saturday lizard blogging; or, Woah, oh, what I want to know is, are you (the same) kind?"

A stroll along the Tangled Bank

Another of PZ Myers's splendid ideas has come to fruition. He has innaugurated The Tangled Bank. The Bank is... well, why don't I just quote Prof. Myers:

In cooperation with several other of us geeky science types, I am pleased to announce our own version of the "Carnival of the Vanities". A Carnival is a weekly showcase of good weblog writing, selected by the authors themselves (that's the vanity part). Each week, one of our crew will highlight a collection of interesting weblog articles in one convenient place, making it easy for everyone to find the good stuff.

Two things will distinguish us from the original "Carnival of the Vanities": 1) we are specifically restricting ourselves to articles in the field of science and medicine, very broadly defined, and 2) we've got a different name.

Tangled Bank is not so much a blog as a sort of floating metablog, a collection of commented links to posts contributors have made on their own blogs. The idea is that the reader will find, conveniently collected in one easy-to-use place, a variety of articles on all manner of things, united only by that very broad definition (and its breadth is important!) of 'science- or medicine-related'.

There is, nonetheless, a Tangled Bank mother-ship website. There you will learn more about the project, including how to contribute; you'll also find an index of who's hosting the Bank when, with links to their websites.

Full disclosure: Prof. Myers was kind enough to include one of my spider posts in the first round. I say this not to blow my own horn (though I am dead chuffed) but to underscore the ethos of the project. You needn't be a professional scientist to participate. Certainly there are pros taking part; but even then, what they post is not the passive-voice-only stuff you'd find in a peer-reviewed journal. As it says on the 'home' website:

Anyone can submit an entry. Even if you don't routinely write about medicine or biology, if you just happen to have written about your gall bladder surgery that week or the pileated woodpecker that has taken to waking you every morning, if you think you've said something interesting and insightful, send it in.

We beseech Thee, O Lord, to fill this little bottle...

Just back from Bielefeld, that buzzin' buzzin' town, where I had to stay longer than I liked (well; even one day would have been longer than I liked). More of the usual boring business stuff, interspersed with short rounds of sleep at the boring business hotel (and a decidedly third-rate one, at that).

But what wasn't boring was my fellow guests at the hotel. As it happens, this hotel was HQ for a big conference and bean-fest of the - I swear I am not making this up - International Institute for the Empirical Study of Theology. (And the empirical theologians were packing the bar as I got back from the meetings late last night.)

What the (if you will pardon the contextually improper intensifier) hell is that about? Theology, as its name implies, is the study of God. Theists and atheists disagree about his existence, but surely they are as one that God is something outside observable nature (either because he's supernatural, or because he simply isn't there). So how, one would love to know, are these theologians studying him empirically? I mean, they must have instruments that neutrino-hunters would love to get their hands on.

Now, it's easy to see how there could be an empirical study of religion (and that's exactly what a number of sociologists and anthropologists do). But that, of course, is another kettle of fish altogether. And no, these guys were not devotees of some earthly idol that one might weigh and measure in the lab. So far as I can tell they were all mainstream Christians. I wish I'd had the chance to ask one of them how he goes about his empirical studies of the Almighty.

The obvious explanation, I suppose, is that the International Institute does not empirically study God so much as theology itself; they are as it were not theologians but theologilogians. Still, they had a definite religious tone about them; it is not as though they were sociologists of religion (who might as easily be unbelievers as believers, and whose belief or unbelief would, in the professional context, be irrelevant). Perhaps they do not, for example, hook up wires to the wafer during a communion service; perhaps they are merely engaged in the study of their own profession rather than its professed object. But surely, for professing Christians (and theologians no less!), that is somewhat, erm, inward looking, isn't it?

Back from the storm-riven Med

We are home once again, having spent two very enjoyable weeks on Formentera. True, the weather was not always all that it could have been. Half our days were lovely; the other half overcast and windy, and two of them quite rainy. Still, we had not gone there to sunbathe and even the grey days were well-suited to rambling and biking along the camins verds. And there was something charmingly surreal about sitting in ca'n Blayet with a glass of wine while the rain poured down on the ordinarily sun-baked Mola. The only nerve-wracking moment was on the day before our departure, when Angel the Ceramicist told us the ferries had been unable to sail that day and tomorrow looked to be more of the same. And to be perfectly honest, the thought of being indefinitely stranded on the island wasn't really so very nerve-wracking at all.

I was reminded, though, of a woman I once saw in a pub in Glencolmcille. A local, she said she had once tired of the incessant showers and clouds of the Donegal coast and packed the family off for two weeks in the Canarias - where it rained every day.

You may have noticed that I am a big fan of Formentera, even when it rains. It's not a holiday destination everybody would enjoy, but for those who like that sort of thing it is addictive. I will be quite busy this week and at the end of it must go for a day or two to Bielefeld (not a holiday destination anybody would enjoy), but I will try to tell you a bit about the island in the next couple of posts - about watchtowers and fishing coves, two kinds of lizard and goat's-cheesecake with mint. Perhaps, if you're lucky, you'll find yourself there one day.

Friday arachnid blogging in absentia; or, Early Monday morning is losing its appeal

As you read this I will be finishing packing up. We are taking the brood off for two weeks' holiday in the Illes Baleares. Specifically, we are headed to Formentera, a small island just south of Ibiza but virtually devoid of the discos etc. that make Ibiza so nice a place to get off a plane and onto a ferry.

So there'll be no posting, and therefore no Friday arachnids, till after the middle of April. Now I know there are millions of you who turn faithfully to this site every Friday for your spider fix. To keep you from jonesing too badly, I've stuck not one but two spiders below the fold; and a couple of pictures of each. Both are spiders I collected on Formentera in 2001; both are a bit unusual.

Continue reading "Friday arachnid blogging in absentia; or, Early Monday morning is losing its appeal"

More evidence that I will never be as good as Matthew Turner at this sort of thing

Peter Cuthbertson experiences an altogether Damascene conversion.

News of the day

Interesting developments on a number of fronts...

- Shaken by election results, Jacques Chirac announces plans for a thorough review of French trade policy and calls into question the wisdom of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy.

- FC Bayern Munich president Franz Beckenbauer decries 'mercenary football' and promises that, in future, at least half the squad will be local Bavarian talent.

- Steven den Beste posts an insightful and nuanced analysis of the proper use of US military force.

De minimis curat lex

In an eminently sensible piece, Slate's William Saletan seeks to dispel worries about an act just passed by the US Congress prescribing criminal penalties for killing or injuring a foetus in the course of a criminal act against the mother. This is the thin edge of an anti-choice wedge, think some. Saletan argues that it is not. (Among other things, the law specifically exempts abortion from its remit.) He argues further (and, I would say, argues well) against those who oppose this law out of mere reactive fear of anything that asserts a foetus to be more than 'just a blob of protoplasm'.

The new law defines 'children in utero' as 'members of the species Homo sapiens', as though that had ever been at issue. But then again, who knows? The religious right certainly have some odd notions about science; perhaps some of them think that ontogeny literally recapitulates phylogeny and that early embryos are in fact amphibians. We can all be thankful to Congress for clearing this up.

I shouldn't be surprised, though, if many of the legislators who voted for this thing were concerned less with proper taxonomy than with striking a (perhaps symbolic) blow for the sanctity of unborn life etc. And I don't doubt many of them would, if only they could, strip women of their right to determine whether they will bear a pregnancy to term. There is every reason to distrust the motives of many of these legislators. But there is no reason to reject as illegitimate the concept that, as a general matter, the protection of the law should extend to 'children in utero' even if one specifically believes that the law should also recognise a woman's right to choose whether or not to bear a child.

As Saletan writes:

"If a state can put someone in jail for life because they took the life of an unborn child, then we're clearly saying there is something very valuable there," [Senator] Feinstein warned Thursday. She wasn't endorsing that conclusion. She was reading aloud, with disapproval and alarm, the words of a Nebraska state senator. Guess what: There is something very valuable there. And if you can't see it, we can't hear you.

Again: there is something very valuable there. To assert women's reproductive rights does not require that one pretend a foetus is a hangnail.

At the core of the right to choose is the recognition that a woman's interest in what happens in her own body trumps competing interests, whether these be the interest of society in seeing children born or for that matter the interest of the foetus in being born. Not all of these competing interests are illegitimate (though to be sure some are); it's simply that the woman's interest, as she herself discerns it, takes precedence.

The new law does not disregard this precedence. A woman may have the right to end her pregnancy if she sees fit. Nobody else has the right to end it for her. The foetus's interest in being uninjured is trumped by its mother's interest in her body. Surely one can assert this, and also assert that the foetus's interest trumps that of an assailant who injures it.

I will admit that I am made extremely uneasy by the thought of aborting a child. But then, my uneasiness is neither here nor there to any woman's decision about her own pregnancy. I should hope that every pregnant woman would decide to have her child. But it would be a grave moral wrong to force her to do so against her will. For that reason I oppose all legal restrictions on abortion. But surely the pro-choice cause is not well served by denying that a foetus is what it is - a human being.

NB: readers are welcome as always to comment on the specific idea presented in this post. But if only for the sake of shalom ha-bayit, this is not an invitation for a general debate on whether or not abortion should be legal. If that's what you want to talk about, take it to talk.abortion.

Friday arachnid blogging, and what's in a name

After last week's grand-guignol, here's a more pastoral scene altogether:

The orangey spider tucked in among the purple petals is one of the 'running spiders' or, more properly, philodromid crab spiders. She is very likely Philodromus rufus though, as she is a juvenile, it is extremely difficult to identify her precisely.

The name 'running spider' might seem odd. After all, most spiders (at least those that do not spend their entire lives on a web) run. But in this case the popular name derives from the Linnaean name Philodromus, 'one who loves to run', and they are quick little things indeed. What is really interesting here is the term 'philodromid crab spider'. They are so called to distinguish them from the thomisid crab spiders. Remember that terminal -d, by the way, because it's going to be important.

Continue reading "Friday arachnid blogging, and what's in a name"