Last year, a new and unusual species of rodent was discovered in Laos, called Laonastes aenigmamus, or kha-nyou. Photos of the skull and an 11 million year old fossil can be found in “Laonastes/Diatomys/kha-nyou/rat-squirrel”, on Pharyngula.
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This page contains a single entry by PZ Myers published on March 10, 2006 11:26 AM.
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This thing needs a better name. How would you like to go through life being named for two other species?
Let’s have some suggestions for names.
Bruce or if your Chinese …dinner :)
Losangelestes Fafarmanus IDioticus, commonly known as the “Larry Rat.” Never mind, that would be redundant.
This creature can’t possibly be related to Larry Farfromaman: it’s too cute.
Help please from anyone east of the pond - what is GCSE?
The BBC says: Creationism to be in GCSE papers
Also, what is “R.E.”? Journalists: Define your TLAs!
I think the Intelligent Designer decided that Laotians were missing out on a tasty treat for too long.
“R.E” stands for Religious Education. Not exactly sure what GCSE stands for, I’m sure a Brit will help us out. It’s a national standard curriculum for secondary education, apparently.
I didn’t know either and googled. This is what I found:
GCSE stands for General Certificate of Secondary Education. It is explained here.
The UK school system is as follows:
1) Primary school from age 5 to 11 - no important exams
2) Secondary school from 11 to 16, culminating in GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education). Most people take about 8 GCSEs iirc
3) Sixth form or college from 16 to 18, culminating in A-levels (Advanced Levels). Most people take about 4 A-levels.
4) University from 18 to whenever.
Just to shake things up, recently they’ve introduced a new set of exams at age 17, called A/S levels (Advanced Subsidiary Levels). Two A/S levels = one A-level. It’s all a bit confusing and generally results in kids being horribly over-examined.
Heh. I googled, too, but the first page of links led me to lots of pages that said “GCSE this!” or “GCSE that!” (lot of sites with study aids, etc) without spelling out the acronym!
Thanks …
I notice that this species isn’t called a “living fossil” as creationist orginisations usually like to put it. I’m positive over the next few days AIG will have an article on their website about this find presenting a problem for evolutionists. Have a look at their views on the Jurassic beaver story which was covered here a week or so ago.
RE. GCSE. When I was a teenager in the 1970’s they were called GCE’s then and there was no such thing as AS levels just O and A levels. A pass at O level then was a grade between 1-6 with 7,8 and U (ungraded) being fails. A level grades were A,B,C, O and F with A,B, and C being passes and F a fail. An O grade, while not being a pass was still useful because some third level courses required a subject to be studied to A level but did not necessarily ask for a pass. How times have changed.
I think my geology teacher would have been horrified, if he where still alive, at the thought of “flood geology” even being discussed in class. I’m sure he would have refused.
Which Bruce? Or are you suggesting Bruce is some species of marsupial? Although pouches are handy for carrying 6 packs of beer the extra ice required to keep them cold would become uncomfortable. Anyway Bruce is male.
Or is this some sort of extension of Phrenology applied to Bruce’s teeth. Perhaps a comparison of all Bruce’s (including those who participate here) might lead to a better understanding of the relationships within this group of organisms. Delta Pi Gamma (Scientia et Fermentum)
Whoa, that’s creepy. I took one look at that thing and said, “Oo, looks tasty.”
The name of this topic doesn’t fit too well in the “Recent Comments” box on the main page - that long string of nonblank characters causes it to run outside the box.
Re “or if your Chinese …dinner”
Does it taste like chicken? :)
From comment 85796: “ I’m positive over the next few days AIG will have an article on their website about this find”
These guys beat them to it
http://creationsafaris.com/crev200603.htm
Other than the oldtime YEC nutters, does anyone even pay any attention any more to what AiG or ICR say? About anything?
how about “scandentoid” (looks like a tree shrew)?
A couple of points about the journalism reporting this:
1. The species was not found in the fossil record 11 million years ago, other members of the “family” were. “Family” is a Linnean rank that has absolutely no objective significance whatsoever. It just means that the evolutionary group of which this species is a member had relatively close sister taxa that some biologist or paleontologist found similar enough to group that way.
2. Even if the same “species” were identified as being around 11 million years ago as the one found today, that doesn’t make it the same species. Let me explain. There is a problem identifying reproductively isolated species from fossil taxa because the biological properties that make one population isolated from another do not fossilise. It may very well be that the fossil form was a distinct biological species even if the two are similar enough to call the same “paleospecies” or “chronospecies”. Form is one indicator, but not a sufficiently rich one, to identify actual isolated reproductive pools.
Off to curmudgeon about something else now…
John WIlkins wrote
And here I thought the verb form of “curmudgeon” was “to curmudge”. Live and learn …
RBH
Hi guys!
re the GCSE, RE thing.
Some of us British Readers - inspired by the Panda’s Thumb have set up a ‘sister’ forum in the UK:
http://justscience.1.forumer.com/index.php?
Our ‘Science, Just Science’ group also has a website - although it’s still in early stage of development:
www.justscience.org.uk
GCSE’s are certificated examinations taken at age sixteen which are required to progress further in the education system. Two examination boards have opted to include discussion of evolution/creationism in a sort of ‘science and society’ module of science examinations. However our concern is that the tiny but growing number of state-sponsored evangelical schools in the UK will use this as further excuse to undermine teaching of evolution.
Our science teaching is in general terms dictated by the ‘national curriculum’ (like your federal standards for those in the US) which state this about the teaching of evolution:
Not much - but it doesn’t mandate the teaching of ID or Creationism. However we know certain schools don’t interpret this statement that way and don’t restrict the teaching of creationism to RE (Religious Education) lessons. Of course we have no church/state seperation in the UK - but by and large we are a sensible lot - and most people have not time for ‘god-botherers’.
Can someone please discover a weasel so we can name it after Dembski?
More on this development in the UK from the Guardian:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/gcs[…]8236,00.html
Sorry I should also have pointed out that the UK National Curriculum for Sciencealso has the following general requirement:
which are quite laudable educational aims - but are sadly being abused in schools which hve been taken over by evangelicals. Of course we know there is no’empirical evidence’ for creationism or ID - but that doesn’t stop them from pretending that there is. Less this sounds to alarmist we are probably talking about a handful of schools in the UK - but with the predicted rise of ‘faith schools’ favoured by Tony Blair - which also include Islamic Schools - we are worried that these are on the increase.
Sorry to hijack this thread again - anyone found a new kind of polecat we could name after Bill?
Re John’s comment 85874. I was going to say something similar but not having done biology I decided to refrain from doing so.
I’ve read a number of articles that basically say the same thing John i.e. that the so called term “living fossil”,that creationists often use to describe a discovery such as this, is really a misleading one. For instance the fossilised coelacanths (another example) were an entirely different species to the ones that were discovered alive a few decades ago. I wonder how many creationist followers realise this ?
Dean, The Guardian piece you link to and the coverage of this story in the media in general has been pretty useless. It seems to boil down to people being unable to tell the difference between teaching Creationism and teaching history of science.
Here is the actual syllabus that sparked the story http://www.gcse-science.com/file_do[…]s_245_10.pdf
The relevant bits are pp.34-35. It covers things like debunking Lamarckism and examining the reception Darwin got at the time. All very handy stuff. The exam board itself is very clear: Creationism and ‘intelligent design’ are not regarded by OCR as scientific theories. They are beliefs that do not lie within scientific understanding.
http://www.ocr.org.uk/OCR/WebSite/d[…]mp;oid=27616”
I’m a bit concerned that people are going off half-cock over this and that it may lead to them being taken less seriously when they address real threats like the Vardy Schools.
I tend to agree with you Flitcraft - but you can understand that people are sceptical when this story broke just one day after this (ambiguous) parliamentary answer:
http://www.humanism.org.uk/site/cms[…]article=2157
and people do have concerns about this ‘confusing’ pupils as to what science is, and of course being misused by the evangos. I think at that age (16) getting kids to understand how evolution works is an achievement.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspa[…]8747,00.html
- I really think we are being unfair to the poor old Rat Squirrel thingy - any chance of starting a ‘News from the UK thread’?
Flitcraft - I’ve read through the syllabus you mentioned and it seems fine to me.
In fact it’s better than the old one which specifically mentions creationism (as a historical position)
I’m confused to see how this story got started - and the OCR have given a pretty clear clarification:
OCR rejection of Creationism and Intelligent Design
Dean - It seems to have broken in the Murdoch press a day earlier than everywhere else: in ‘The Times’ and ‘The Sun’ of March 9th (those are the dates given for those stories on Google News). Looks like a straightforward case of bad reporting there, followed by lazy reporting as the rest of the media followed suit. They were probably trying to dig something up in the wake of the Jacqui Smith statement, and ended up manufacturing a story to fit.
My apologies to the rat-squirrel, since he has such a big chewing muscle, perhaps he should be called Chewie? Then obviously he would be the Chewbacca squirrel.
“R2, I suggest a different tactic - let the squirrel win!”
Laonastes aenigmamus, the Laotian rock rat, is the only known survivor of a morphologically distinctive family of rodents; check out the distinctive jaw. It is thought to be nocturnal, and no one knows how many of them there are. “Family” is a keyword here. As John points out, this is not the same species that existed many millions of years ago. Wiki already has it covered, along with many other species, but amazingly they missed Gracilidris pombero. Wiki also covers term like “Lazarus taxon” and “living fossil”.
I doubt they’d care; creationists respond to more or less every observed modern example of evolution ever with “But they’re still [x]!” Until it sprouts wings and a two-foot tusk, a coelacanth’s a coelacanth, right?
I didn’t realize that googling is an art until reading of numerous peoples’ search failures.
Try google gcse acronym
Some credit is due to Flitcraft for linking to the source material here
Some other relevant comments follow the one above in the same thread.
Apologies.
Posted #85996 on wrong thread, so, please ignore.
I notice that this species isn’t called a “living fossil” as creationist orginisations usually like to put it. I’m positive over the next few days AIG will have an article on their website about this find presenting a problem for evolutionists.
That got me to wondering… What are creation scientists doing these days as far as field research? What kind of thing(s) are they looking for? How are they going about examining the evidences of nature to confirm or dis-confirm their theories on the mechanisms of biological diversity? Where are they conducting their research? How successful (or not) have they been? Do they publish their findings? If so, where? Who funds their research?
this is a little late in response to Gorbe. Here are the answers to his questions. Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nowhere, They don’t care, No, Nowhere, What research? I hope I’ve been helpful. TPFD.
Update