Steve Steve and the Pirates and Philosophers of the Prairie
Hello, everybody! It's been a long time since I wrote to the Panda's Thumb about my adventures, but I've been extremely busy, and have only now had time to update my journal, after visits to Minnesota, Iowa, Alaska, and Georgia. There's much to catch up on! In my first stop, I visited a small liberal arts university on the western Minnesota prairies, which you'd think would be a quiet place, but appearances can be deceiving…especially when you are a small plush bear with an active fantasy life.
I arrived in Minnesota just in time to hear of a dreadful case of Darwin abuse by the unscrupulous forces of Unintelligent Design. How dare they torment stuffed figures like that! Only cowards practice torture on the helpless, and to do so with such an elderly and harmless man…
I leapt into action. Strangely, despite being thousands of miles from any ocean, Minnesota was experiencing an infestation of pirates. While creationists may daydream about being medieval torturers, we evolutionists are bold, romantic swashbucklers at heart, so it was child's play to fight my way clear and rescue the beleaguered scientist.
It also helps that, when fighting creationists, you are mostly wrestling with insubstantial and evasive targets. Puncture them, and you discover that they are mostly puffed up with stale air.
On our return, we got together with a few other 19th century philosophers vilified by the ID gang. Here's Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin, the one member of the trio whose scientific ideas have seen a greater flowering in modern times. He was very gratified to learn that his mistaken ideas about genetics have been superceded, and have led to an even greater strengthening of the core concepts of evolution. I was in very distinguished company.
As long as I was visiting a developmental biologist, I also had to pay a call on a few of his experimental animals. Here I am saying hello to a tank full of adult zebrafish. These are marvelous beasties, a new model system for studying vertebrate development and genetics.
Dr Myers' adult colony live happy lives, producing hundreds of babies every day. The embryos are the real experimental subjects here, so I thought I'd crawl into the incubator with them. They're tiny 1mm diameter dots living in the beakers; I'm the happy panda enjoying the tropical warmth.
Dr Myers also keeps a few Xenopus around. They're a classic system for studying development.
Before I left Morris, Charles (he lets me call him "Charles" now) and I posed with a few representatives of other phyla. Here we are with an echinoderm, a mollusc, and a chordate. Also, Charles was telling me all about barnacles, of the phylum Arthropoda, as we were getting our picture taken, so hooray for biological diversity!
Next stop: Iowa. The midwest is a surprising place, who knows what I'll find there!