showerless/warblerage
when i'm sick, all of my baser, more primitive primate habits get foregrounded. Like going for days without showering. Which is kind of funny since my only visual art practice at the moment consists of photographing the hair that's stuck to the tiles after i take a shower. Guess there'll be a little gap in the timeline there.
ok, enough about Miss Piggy. The spring migration has officially begun. Chicago birders are excited because an Audubon's Warbler has appeared at Jackson Park on the South side, which is not only a rarity but is, according to my favorite ornithologist, about to be declared a species.
This business of what gets to be called a species is kind of a cloudy issue for me. Darwin himself had a lot of trouble explaining what constitutes a species as opposed to a variant, and it seems that the line between variety and species within genera is rather...permeable. That is, when we look at birds, within the warblers group, they often move in and out of being species or not. Any ecologists or biologists out there have any thoughts on this one?
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2 Comments:
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Traditionally, species was defined based on if two individuals could mate and produce viable offspring. However, more and more people are raising questions about this definition. For example, how does one define species then for microorganisms that reproduce asexually, and/or experience what is called "horizontal gene transfer" (when a fragment of DNA is incorporated into the unicellular organism from the environment)? I'll email you an interesting article I found about the subject.
By
libbywiz, at 2:57 PM
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well i'm not a ecologist or a biologist, but I do understand the "days without showering" thing...I spend I great deal of time each day thinking to myself just how long i can keep this up and when, when has it become more of a neusance than laziness to lay around in my own sloth........usually when i've gotten that far, i jump for the zestfully clean commercial look and dance around in the water. haha.
By shellie, at 8:24 PM
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