Actually, if you do a search you will find that there are lots of non-humorous papers on the evolution of humor, in the variational sense not the transformational one, as used here.
Biology, anthropology, computational science, and networks in phylogenetic analysis
Showing posts with label Cartoons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cartoons. Show all posts
Monday, May 11, 2015
The evolution of humor
Actually, if you do a search you will find that there are lots of non-humorous papers on the evolution of humor, in the variational sense not the transformational one, as used here.
Monday, September 1, 2014
Monday, August 25, 2014
The evolution of statistical phylogenetics
For those of you who do not understand the notation:
Homo apriorius ponders the probability of a specified hypothesis, while Homo pragamiticus is interested by the probability of observing particular data. Homo frequentistus wishes to estimate the probability of observing the data given the specified hypothesis, whereas Homo sapiens is interested in the joint probability of both the data and the hypothesis. Homo bayesianis estimates the probability of the specified hypothesis given the observed data.
Monday, August 18, 2014
Bioinformaticians' nightmares
These illustrations are from Alper Uzun's Biocomicals web site.
Bioinformaticians' dream
Bioinformaticians' reality
Monday, January 20, 2014
Faux phylogenies II
It is possible to produce a phylogeny of any group of objects that vary in their intrinsic characteristics, and where those characteristics can be inferred to vary through time. I have previously reported some examples of a Tree of LIfe where "life" has been interpreted very broadly, to include legendary figures, cartoon animals, pokémon, and dragons (see Faux phylogenies). Here, I broaden the scope even further.
Phylogeny of taste
This first example comes from the July-August 1998 edition of the Annals of Improbable Research (vol. 4, no. 4), in which Joe Staton published an article entitled Tastes like chicken? It contains the following tetrapod phylogeny onto which has been mapped what they taste like. Note that Homo sapiens is included.
Phylogeny of breakfast
Following the taste theme, Nash Turley works on community phylogenetics, and this has lead him to contemplate the phylogenetics of his own breakfast. This vegetarian feast contains 15 species in 11 families.
Insect blog phylogenetics
Moving on to cultural evolution, Morgan Jackson has investigated how insect blogs are related to each other. His phylogenetic analysis of entomology blogs was based on blog morphology, physiology, geography, ecology and behaviour. It produced the following tree, onto which has been plotted the insect families concerned.
Evolution blog phylogenetics
In a similar vein, when the blogger known as Psi Wavefunction hosted the 20th Carnival of Evolution, this was summarized as a phylogenetic tree. The tree was produced by the simple expedient of aligning the URL addresses of the Carnival submissions and performing a parsimony analysis, based on treating the letters as amino acid codes. I can't believe that it worked.
Android bubble shooter games
Finally, Megafouna Software has produced a phylogeny of Android bubble shooter games, based on a small set of their features.
Monday, October 21, 2013
Phylogenetics with SpongeBob
Some time ago I published a blog post on Faux phylogenies in which I included a phylogeny of cartoon animals by Mike Keesey. In this phylogeny, SpongeBob SquarePants was the outgroup. However, SpongeBob goes much further than this.
Importantly, the main characters in the cartoon have representative members of several phyla (notably, except the Cnidaria). Indeed, the List of SpongeBob SquarePants characters at Wikipedia makes this very clear. This opens up the possibility that they could be a means of using modern culture to introduce phylogenetics. This idea has been independently discovered at least twice.
Perhaps the best known usage is by Paul Arriola, produced for his freshman biology students, as shown in the first figure.
This has been reproduced in several places on the web, including Pinterest (e.g. here and here), Facebook (e.g. here and here), and academia (here).
Another, apparently independent, usage is by Rita Chen of the sister artists known as The Hurricanes.
Note that a few "extra" characters have been added (the planarian, ragworm and roundworm), and that the names are not all quite correct.
By the way, did you know that there is a species of sponge-like fungus (in the Boletaceae) called Spongiforma squarepantsii, and named after the character? If not, then see Wikipedia.
Importantly, the main characters in the cartoon have representative members of several phyla (notably, except the Cnidaria). Indeed, the List of SpongeBob SquarePants characters at Wikipedia makes this very clear. This opens up the possibility that they could be a means of using modern culture to introduce phylogenetics. This idea has been independently discovered at least twice.
Perhaps the best known usage is by Paul Arriola, produced for his freshman biology students, as shown in the first figure.
This has been reproduced in several places on the web, including Pinterest (e.g. here and here), Facebook (e.g. here and here), and academia (here).
Another, apparently independent, usage is by Rita Chen of the sister artists known as The Hurricanes.
Note that a few "extra" characters have been added (the planarian, ragworm and roundworm), and that the names are not all quite correct.
By the way, did you know that there is a species of sponge-like fungus (in the Boletaceae) called Spongiforma squarepantsii, and named after the character? If not, then see Wikipedia.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Faux phylogenies
It is, of course, possible to produce a phylogeny of any group of objects that vary in their intrinsic characteristics, and where those characteristics can be inferred to vary through time. One popular subject is the Tree of Life, but where "life" is defined in rather a loose fashion. Here are a few examples of what I mean.
Note: there is a follow-up post (Faux phylogenies II), as well.
Legendary figures
This first one is reproduced from pages 90-91 of Bart Simpson's Guide to Life (1993, Harper Collins). It includes a series of somewhat legendary figures; and newts apparently evolved twice.
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| Bart Simpson's Tree of Life © Matt Groening |
Cartoon animals
Mike Keesey, from the Three-Pound Monkey Brain blog, has an example of his own, in which he took a stab at a phylogeny of cartoon animals (it is the third phylogeny on that blog page, or click the image below).
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| Mike Keesey's phylogeny of cartoon animals |
Kalle Anka
In 1993, the cartoonist Don Rosa produced a genealogy of Donald Duck and his family, intended to resolve decades of contradictions among the comic-book stories.
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| Don Rosa's Donald Duck genealogy characters © Disney |
There are many other versions of this genealogy, most of which are linked at this page. The first one on that page is the most detailed and complete version of the family tree.
Monstrasinu
The July-August 2012 edition of the Annals of Improbable Research (vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 15-17) contained an article by Matan Shelomi, Andrew Richards, Ivana Li and Yukinari Okido called "A phylogeny and evolutionary history of the Pokémon". Below is a low-resolution image, but a much higher resolution version of the phylogeny (2.9 MB) can be found here.
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| Pokémon phylogeny characters © Nintendo |
Asian lóng and Eurasian dragons
At the same time, Rob Colautti produced a t-shirt design from his phylogeny of dragon-like organisms, which is based on a neighbor-joining analysis of 27 distinct traits for 76 pieces of historical artwork.
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| Rob Colautti's dragon phylogeny |
According to his Facebook page, he is intending to publish this phylogenetic analysis in the afore-mentioned Annals of Improbable Research, and to make the dataset available online, as well.
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