A Naval Story

by

Astyages

First let me offer my apologies to my regular readers, who may have been expecting the next episode of ‘Virgil’s Aeneid’ to be posted last Friday; in fact although I have been trying to post this on Fridays, to keep up with WordPress’s ’Blog a Week’ challenge, there is no real ‘schedule’… Unforeseen circumstances kept me too busy last week, but I think I’m at least a couple of posts up on the ‘Blog a Week’ thingo, so I took a holiday; next episode will probably be this Friday, but don’t put your lifesavings on it!

In the meantime, I should let you all know that, as I come from a family with a long naval tradition (everyone in our family’s got navals!) here’s a Naval story my father told me, about the middle of last century… (or was it the one before?):

“I was steaming down the west coast of Africa,” my father said, “when we dropped anchor at a small coastal port; little more than a native village in a natural harbor, really… But when we went to the chief’s hut the place was a shambles; total destruction; their chief, so we were told, had just been killed in a terrible accident, so I asked the official I spoke to what had happened and he told me the whole story:

“Apparently, about a year earlier, of all people, there was a ‘Dunlopillow’ salesman travelling through the region. He had stopped at the village to show the chief his wares, and the chief had been most impressed, but the latter foresaw a few problems:

“‘Look here,’ he said, ‘you see how my hut is constructed: my throne of ivory and ebony weighs four and a half tons! The saplings which form the basic shell of my hut were grown around it specifically, until they reached the right height and were then brought together at the centre at the top and the walls were then thatched as per our usual custom… Now, while this gives me a magnificant hut and throne, it doesn’t leave a lot of spare room for the king-sized divan you showed me in your catalogue, no matter how much I’d love to purchase it…’

“But the salesman was a resourceful fellow and was not to be put off!

“‘Don’t you worry!’ He said, ‘White man’s magic can fix anything! You just sign this order form… I’ll accept payment in ivory, thank you… And I’ll deliver it as soon as possible; of course, you do realise it’ll take some time to have the bed shipped out from the UK?’

“Well, the chief knew a man of his word when he saw one and this salesman had an honest face, so the chief signed the order form and the salesman went away.

“True to his word, though, the salesman had come back to the village almost a year later to the day, bringing the most luxurious king-sized bed the chief – or anyone in the village – had ever seen. The chief was impressed, but still a little dubious, ‘Ah, my friend,’ he said, ‘it is every bit as wonderful as it looked in the catalogue! But have you solved the problem of where to put it?’

“‘What problem?’ he said, simply, ‘We’ll just put a block and tackle in the roof and, whenever you want to lounge around on your bed, or whenever you want to go to sleep, you simply pull the throne up into the rafters and you can lay on your be underneath it! When you need the throne for official functions, it can easily be let down again and you can stack the bed on its end against one of the walls…’

“Well, the chief was again most impressed with this solution, so he duly payed the balance on his account in elephants tusks and the salesman went away, having made enough on this one deal to keep him in luxury for the rest of his life…

“But as luck would have it, almost a year to the day afterwards… indeed, only a few days prior to our ship’s landing there, the chief was having a bit of a sing-song with a few of his old cronies that he wanted to impress, so he had the bed down and was lounging on in total luxury while his cronies supped their beer on the floor all around him. Then, all of a sudden, there was a loud, CRACK! and one of the rafters broke; the rest of the rafters could not bear the weight of the throne and four and a half tons of ebony and ivory came crashing down just like so many tons of bricks, squashing the chief flatter than you could squash a bug…

“But,” my father then said, “there’s a moral to this tale…”

“Oh,” I asked in my innocence, “What’s that?”

“People who live in grass houses,” said my father, “shouldn’t stow thrones!”

🙂

Siberian Wolf

Story by Warrigal Mirriyuula

You all know what a sucker I am for a good dog yarn; so when I came across some recent research regarding the genetic and morphological variation in domestic dogs I was immediately drawn to a study that articulates the human determined direction of domestic dog evolution over the past 10K years, and specially the effect of human selection in confirming Darwin’s theory. Human intervention has allowed dogs to follow their own evolutionary paths, dumping Darwin’s soundbite, ‘survival of the fittest’, and proving him right in the bargain. The study was conducted by biologists Chris Klingenberg, of The University of Manchester and Abby Drake, of the College of the Holy Cross in the US.

Published in The American Naturalist on January 20, 2010, the study compared the skull shapes of domestic dogs with those of different species across the order Carnivora, to which dogs belong along with cats, bears, weasels, civets and even seals and walruses.

African Wild Dog

It found that the skull shapes of domestic dogs varied as much as those of the whole order. It also showed that the extremes of diversity were farther apart in domestic dogs than in the rest of the order. This means, for instance, that a Collie has a skull shape that is more different from that of a Pekingese than the skull shape of the cat is from that of a walrus.

Dr Drake explains: “We usually think of evolution as a slow and gradual process, but the incredible amount of diversity in domestic dogs has originated through selective breeding in just the last few hundred years, and particularly after the modern purebred dog breeds were established in the last 150 years.”

Asian Wild Dog

By contrast, the order Carnivora dates back at least 60 million years. The massive diversity in the shapes of the dogs’ skulls emphatically proves that selection has a powerful role to play in evolution and the level of diversity that separates species and even families can be generated within a single species, in this case in dogs.

Much of the diversity of domestic dog skulls is outside the range of variation in the Carnivora, and thus represents skull shapes that are entirely novel.

Dr Klingenberg adds: “Domestic dogs are boldly going where no self respecting carnivore ever has gone before.

“Domestic dogs don’t live in the wild so they don’t have to run after things and kill them — their food comes out of a tin and the toughest thing they’ll ever have to chew is their owner’s slippers. So they can get away with a lot of variation that would affect functions such as breathing and chewing and would therefore lead to their extinction.

“Natural selection has been relaxed and replaced with artificial selection for various shapes that breeders favour.”

Dingo

Domestic dogs are a model species for studying longer term natural selection. Darwin studied them, as well as pigeons and other domesticated species.

Drake and Klingenberg compared the amazing amount of diversity in dogs to the entire order Carnivora. They measured the positions of 50 recognizable points on the skulls of dogs and their ‘cousins’ from the rest of the order Carnivora, and analyzed shape variation with newly developed methods.

The team divided the dog breeds into categories according to function, such as hunting, herding, guarding and companion dogs. They found the companion (or pet) dogs were more variable than all the other categories put together.

Pug

According to Drake, “Dogs are bred for their looks, not for doing a job so there is more scope for outlandish variations, which are then able to survive and reproduce.”

Dr Klingenberg concludes: “I think this example of head shape is characteristic of many others and is showing it so clearly, showing what happens when you consistently and over time apply selection.

“This study illustrates the power of Darwinian selection with so much variation produced in such a short period of time. The evidence is very strong.”

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by University of Manchester.

Journal Reference:

1. Chris Klingenberg and Abby Drake. Large-scale diversification of skull shape in domestic dogs: Disparity and modularity. The American Naturalist, January 20, 2010