Once you read further you will realize that these photos are not the same scale
Unrelated News — the season of snow has begun
Today, in the afternoon we received our first “real snow” which,IN MY DEFINITION, is snow that actually lands on the ground and stays white. Just cold enough, 30F to stay for a bit — pretty and no need to shovel or anything of that sort. I put our Buffalo/Bison back outside as it performs the function of measuring fresh snow through the season.
Maybe a Buffalo, maybe a Bison. When people ask me why I don’t use an iPhone, I follow my own advice and pause and comtemplate my answer as many people just want confirmation bias. My lowly three year old Google Pixel phone has been rewarding me with pictures of the night sky and images like this well after the sun has set (2 hours ago). This is one of the myriad reasons I use a Google Pixel. This is a real first snow and I am glad that my phone lets me conquer the night for 3 full years while the competition has scrambled to provide the same.
When I began writing this Newsletter, I had grave doubts this was something I would follow through on. I wrote my first post, a rather disjointed discussion that made it pretty clear that I wasn’t sure what to write about. My early performance validated that feeling and I did not return to write ANYTHING until about two months later. What changed? I am not really sure but I credit some discussion with a creative writing group to motivate me to action and “just do it”. I also had traveled and had some great experiences that were fresh in my mind. That was a good start.
Tonight my topic is a recent thing that just amazed me. I, like so many, love to go to the zoo. Animals of all kinds are fascinating to me. I don’t think I really have a favorite although I sure like my dog a lot. One of my sons lives in Omaha, NE, which is home to a wonderful zoo and highly recommended as a fun day both indoors and outdoors. There is a large exposition of elephants at the zoo. In consideration of their largest benefactor, the name of the elephant bull is Warren. Warren Buffet, “the Oracle of Omaha” makes his home in Omaha, NE. What an absolutely majestic animal (the elephant, not Warren).
There is risk in writing about what interests you as one man’s trash is another’s treasure as the saying goes. Now that I have been at it for a while I have become a little bit more at peace with the topics I pick. I’ve had a few people unsubscribe and at first, took it kinda hard. My thinking is why should someone read what some dude in Minnesota chooses to write about and base subscribing on whether they ALWAYS like it? What is the point of that really? I just finished a wonderful book by Michael Lewis titled “The Fifth Risk”. I find almost everything he writes to be wonderful. What would have become of my enjoyment of this author if I concluded after reading one of his many books that I wasn’t interested in the topic and didn’t agree with him? I think that would just be my loss.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am CERTAINLY NOT comparing myself to Michael Lewis. I am trying to make a greater point about being open-minded and CHEERFUL when we disagree and willing to engage over the difference. I am not sure how we can ever solve any of our differences if we lose that prescriptive. I also accept the responsibility for avoiding topics that are contentious. For those that read my post frequently, you might observe that I really enjoy digging into a topic and learning something unexpected. For me, when facts can change my mind, that makes me happy. I must remember as I post that others may not be wired the same way.
All that said, I can see the value of avoiding some topics, especially politics and religion. The irony of that, for me, is that those are the very things we feel most strongly about so what is wrong with being comfortable with your beliefs despite conflicting opinions. Nevertheless, I will defer to the wisdom of the crowd.
Well back to the story. The photo at the top of today’s post is the foot of an elephant next to the foot of a human. Until I saw this photo, I KNOW that I never considered what the bone structure of an elephant’s foot might even be like. I think I have lived my life blissfully unaware of what I see as an AMAZING SIMILARITY between my foot and an elephant. I am no radiologist but I think we are looking at the inside of the ankle of the human with the visible large toe. That would make the smaller front bone the fibula and the larger bone which we can only see a bit of the tibia. From my interest in how our brains work, one thing I know FOR SURE is that one of the things our brains ARE REALLY GOOD at is pattern recognition. As a rank amateur, the way those lower leg bones connect at the ankle looks almost the very same in shape and orientation as it does on an elephant. We both also have that bone at the tail of our foot of the same shape and scale relative to the rest of our feet. I am afraid I will never think of an elephant the same way again. So now, to be clear, I am no expert and everything I know about anatomy I may have learned at a Holiday Inn Express last night. That being said, I KNOW that my brain in its pattern-recognition wonder tells me those feet look amazingly similar!
Well, I’m not sure it is enough to just have a sense of wonder about this “discovery” of mine. In an earlier post, I commented on going to a museum with my brother with a biology background and coming upon a chimpanzee skeleton. He just paused and commented that you simply cannot look at the skeleton and not see the amazing similarity to us. The photo at the top sent me headlong to learn a little bit more about feet. It was with some alarm (and amazement) that the first animal listed as having a VERY SIMILAR style and function foot to human is the dinosaur! The cool, “$5 word” for the kind of feet we have and the way we walk is plantigrade. The really great thing about this bit of learning is I already realize that there are animals that are even MORE SIMILAR than the elephant when it comes to our feet and legs.
I am just amazed by how much great information there is now at our fingertips. Being able to quickly explore almost any topic from your iPad or computer while walking on a treadmill is so easy. How cool that someone like me can learn more about almost any topic with almost no friction. We are no longer at the mercy of “I heard it somewhere” if we are inquisitive enough to actually care to know more. We live in amazing times. Coupled with Ockham’s razor (the simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions is usually best) learning about almost anything can be fun! Against that backdrop, it is interesting to read about what a lot of us believe about different topics. There is a relatively recent Gallup poll that reports that 40% of Americans believe that the world and modern humans were created sometime within the last 10,000 years. Adherence of that sort makes a lot of other discussions uncomfortable. Because I am not an expert, I will be cautious here. It seems to me that broadly there are three different schools of thought about how we ended up with feet structurally similar to elephants and dinosaurs. There is (1) an old creation thesis layered with intelligent design, there is a (2) new creation thesis that embraces everything happening very recently and there is an (3) evolutionary explanation. I have reached a conundrum in this continued discussion I am afraid, at least for 40% of us, that (2) hits home for many people. Regardless of what you believe about how all this came to be, there is IMPLICIT wonder in the durability and repeatability in what feet look like and to me that is cool. For me, it is amazing how similar my feet are to an elephant and my natural next step is to be interested in why that is.
I think that one of the challenges of (3) for people is patience. As a sixty-year-old man I have already begun to shift to a mindset of just wanting to know how things turn out. I am so thrilled as my children’s lives unfold and want to be a witness to as much of it as I can. I think with good behavior and fortune we can live with quality into our 90s. I happen to believe that part of the reason evolution seeds our brain with discomfort is its time scale. It just takes a long time for changes to become embedded in our DNA and hence replicated going forward. Darwin leaves us with the challenge that these changes (like our feet) that we can plainly see just take a lot of time. That is unfortunate for a being that abhors delayed gratification.
Most of what we know about mutation and the pace of evolution comes from the study of the lowly fruit fly. Back when we were toying with the idea as a society of sequencing human DNA, the fruit fly was one of our first subjects. Why the fruit fly? Their big advantage is they don’t live very long. Therefore, if you want to study what happens after 10 or 100 or 1000 generations, a human is not the best place to look since we live about 80 years. I WILL NOT bore anyone with mathematics but 2000 generations is a pretty good compromise estimate for how long it takes for a superior mutation to take hold in a species. Assuming the recent delay in ages for first children of around 30 years, we need 30 X 2000 (60000 years) to see small changes in our DNA reflected as a new dominant feature. Too much patience is required to learn anything for a species that expects to get their food within two minutes after they place it at the drive-thru. Fruit flies and some of their close cousins measure their lifetimes in days so that makes it a lot easier to study them scientifically. A creature, in the extreme like a mayfly which only lives for a day lets us measure mutation durability and stability in a bit under 6 years. That makes study and the scientific method possible. While it may make some uncomfortable, all living animals do contain DNA and that is not disputed. It is not a great leap to assume it might behave similarly in other creatures that share it.
So where did I end up as a result of being inspired by the photo at the top of this post during my morning jaunt going nowhere on my treadmill? It sent me spinning to learn about stuff I never considered. At the end of my 45 minutes on the treadmill (it was windy that day), I ended up learning all sorts of cool stuff. It seems that no matter the animal, there really are only three kinds of legs. Here is a cool diagram that was very interesting to me.
I will never think of asian black bears the same after seeing this diagram. Compliments of http://mammals-locomotion.com/walking.html
So it turns out that there are quite a few animals that have foot bone structures similar to ours and even share our other leg joints to some extent. This means their whole legs are pretty similar to ours. Dig into the topic if you are interested. I certainly did.
fifty years ago — I’m old…
The world is large enough if we are tolerant of all points of view. Making light of someone else’s beliefs or passions rather than focusing on self seems a fool’s errand (spoken by someone who has taken a few). I end the post tonight with what I consider the triumph of the human spirit to explore and understand. It also leads to a song so why not finish up there. As a child, I would watch Lost in Space and there was a rather lame robot. Many years later I took my sons to an engineering presentation at the University of Minnesota to see a robot in action called Asimo. You can find a lot of content on YouTube about Asimo and much of it is quite entertaining.
This robot thing is just amazing to me. At this unique time in history we are now emulating nature and are right at the cusp of trying to improve on it. It will be interesting to watch for robots that don’t seem to follow the three nature-inspired leg formats. I for one would welcome a knee that could overrotate (swivel).
Now, only fifteen years later we get a great song with inspired dancing. I am trying to figure out if that is plantigrade, digitigrade, or ungulate-inspired. Whatever it is, nature is inspiring. The next time you see a robot, pay attention to how it seems to move its “feet”. Here is the pace of change of the five most prominent robot walkers in a great video. This video is PERFECT for those of you who hop on a treadmill frequently as the weather changes. It is about 20 minutes in length. Hope to see you tomorrow.
