Mind-boggling Mangrove Mystery

Life on the beautiful Western Pacific island of Yap, one of the Federated States of Micronesia, brings fringe benefits in the form of a plentitude of fresh seafood. Specifically, among this bounty, succulent spiny lobsters and sweet mangrove crab (Scylla serrata), sometimes also referred to as the mud crab.

While picking my teeth in the aftermath of a delicious meal (a large female man­grove crab that our friend Fillmed caught for us earlier the same day) together with my wife, I took a closer look at some of the leftovers. As I have been interested in genetics and evolution for quite some time, pon­dering deep mysteries such as “explosive radiation,” “punctuated equilibrium,” and “converg­ent evolution,” what I saw truly boggled my mind… (Note: steaming the crab turned its color into a bright red—its life­time color is a shiny deep dark blue-green)

Mangrove crab cheliped (actual size ~10 cm)

Note the “hammers and anvil” crusher “molars,” and especially the faked “tooth separations” and different color “gum line”! The first larger “incisor” in the upper row, with its partner in the lower row, looks very much like my own vestigial canines! There are even lines along the “gum line” indicating where the teeth “grows” (which they—of course—do not: these false teeth are all part of a single chitinuous structure, recreated (and growing) with each molting the crab goes through)!

These forms have been brought forth by some six hundred million years of natural selection, working on the results of random mutations... But somehow, these digital (undoctored original) images seem to be saying some­­thing different: Why would natural selection favor “false teeth” separations and gum lining, in an already fierce looking claw?

And how could a multitude of mindless germ line DNA mutations and gene replication errors eventually produce exact copies of mammal molars, cutting teeth, and canines (that pointed "tooth" looks very much like a “vestigial canine”), when simple serrations and solid “molars” (without faked gum lines and tooth separations) would have done the job just as well, and maybe better? I mean, what are the odds?

Why would evolution "go through the trouble" of producing such an uncanny likeness to real, growing, mammal teeth? By what mechanism would random evolution even “know” what mammal teeth look like? And why would that likeness even include false tooth separations and false gum lines?

I can see the utility of the "gripping" and "crushing" constructs, but what is the added survival value of these fake teeth (and of their fake separation lines)—when much simpler structures would have done the job (of providing intimidating, crushing, and gripping tools) just as well? Why would natural selection favor crab individuals equipped with fake mammalian teeth?

Here is the same mudcrab pincer, viewed from the opposite side:

Mangrove crab cheliped (left view)

To me, these “fake teeth” represent an awesome and beautiful mystery! What could possibly be the explanation? What is the link—that surely seems to exist—between the evolution of mangrove crab chelipeds and land predator/vegetable chewer jaws, two current and incredibly similar results out of two dramatically different evolutionary pathways?

Could it be that something else is at play here? Could it be that what drives evolution—in addition to random mutations and germ line DNA replication errors—is an altogether different mechanism? Could evolution somehow use “templates,” that can be adapted to whatever the environ­ment happens to be where Life casts its nets and establishes footholds? And if so, how would these templates be stored and accessed? (And, please note that I do not consider interference from a "good omnipotent designer" to be a viable option!)

Many questions, no answers... Does anybody have a clue, or even an opinion?

Having scoured the Internet and libraries for clues for quite some time now—searching left, right, and center using all keywords I could come up with: I’m rather surprised to find that there seems to be a total absence of references to these attri­butes of the mangrove crab pincers on the web!

If you know anything at all about this, that might help me better understand what’s going on, please drop me a line!

Henry Norman
Email: henry.ko.norman at gmail.com

Platitude Attitudes

I hear them on CNN (and on CBS, and on ABC, and on younameit), seven twenty-four, multiple times daily, and at the end of the day they are the ultimate in annoyance: overused clichés, redundantly connected together. One would think that (supposedly?) well educated reporters should know better, that these people if any should have a better than average grasp of the English language, but no.

Seven-twenty-four is heard around the clock, at all times, 24 hours per day, as in “we bring you the news, 7/24.” But this is only mildly annoying. The hands down winner of all overused BS is “at the end of the day…”—oftentimes I find myself thinking “If I hear this one more time, I’ll scream and destroy something.” What happened to variety? With so many other overused trite expressions to choose from, like “when all is said and done,” or “when push comes to shove,” or “when the chips are down,” or how about the distinct and to the point “after all”? After all, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, it is boring to hear the same old tired platitude redundantly repeated again and again, 7/24…

Then we have the gloom and doom interjection “it could have been much worse!” This is the ultimate of pointing out the obvious… No matter what the news subject is—if it is bad, it could have been worse. Is this supposed to make us feel better? Of course things could have been worse: with the ultimate exception of the event of being sucked into a black hole, this platitude is always true!

TV weather predictors keep talking of hot or cold temperatures, and though I’m quite sure that what they actually meant to say was “weather” (or “air”) rather than “temperatures,” they never correct themselves! Temperature is a measure of heat (dictionary definition “degree of hot- or coldness of a body or an environment”). Temperature does not (cannot) in itself contain any heat, so to speak of “hot temperatures” makes no sense at all. So high temperatures, fahcrissakes, not hot! Temperatures have no temperature, OK?

Along similar lines, CNN reporters keep talking of faster or slower speeds (read: velocities), as if “speed” is an object moving through space. Ludicrous. Speed, being a measurement of velocity—distance over time—can be high or low, the measure of an object’s velocity relative to some other object’s velocity. Speed doesn’t move, OK?

Another contemporary commentator favorite, especially political dittos, is “the devil is in the details.” What the devil does this mean? And how about “caveat”? Originally Latin caveat emptor (roughly: buyer beware), this has now become a term in its own right: Watch out, there’s a caveat!

Then we hear “prices are cheap”—what’s going on here? Cheap prices? Is someone selling prices? Isn’t price the measure of cost? Of course it is. Prices, like temperatures, and speeds, can be high or low, go up or down, or stay the same. They cannot, however, be cheap or expensive (well, I guess that a price-tag made from gold would be expensive, but that would be the tag, not the price). Price is cost. One could even say that “prices are priceless.” Price has no cost, OK?

We also have these current fashion favorites: “multiple” and “ultimate” (some intentionally inserted examples above). Do these people believe that they somehow come across as more “sophisticated,” by saying (for example) “the victim died from multiple gunshots.”? Or how about “he was run over by multiple cars”? Multiple cars? To my ears it only sounds stupid—are these guys trying to make themselves sound more “professional” by using more “complicated” words? Hello? What’s wrong with the word “several,” or more to the point, “many”? An example of proper usage is—or should be—“any value evenly divisible by 3, for example 333, is a multiple of 3.” Saying “333 contains multiple threes” sounds stupid. The usage adjective that comes to mind is pretentious…

The same goes for “ultimate,” which is, by the way, misused almost every time: Behold the statement “x is the ultimate y” (as exampled by “bunjee jumping is the ultimate thrill”). This would mean, quite literally, the absolutely last word in x, that nothing better will ever come along, that topping or improving x is impossible. This is, of course, not true at all. Who knows what the future will bring? Examples of “proper” usage would be “death is the ultimate in living,” and “black holes are the ultimate suckers.” What “they” usually meant to say was “the latest in x,” which is not even coming close to being the same thing. So learn a word’s meaning before using it, OK?

Another annoying TV news reporter habit is to say “for more details, logon to x dot com!” The problem is that—in most cases—no logon (or log on procedure) is present on the suggested web site x—there is nothing to “log on” to! (In the case of CNN, where you hear this “logon” stuff all the time, simply point your favorite browser to the web address www.cnn.com, hit return, and that’s it! No logon necessary, because there is nothing to logon to! Do they believe that it is somehow more “computer literate” to use the word “logon”—which by the way has a very distinct meaning, namely to present a user name and a password to a verification procedure—which may or may not grant access—than to simply say “for more details, visit x dot com!”? Well, here’s news for you guys: using words that you clearly do not know the meaning of does not make you sound more professional: on the contrary, the practice makes you sound stupid and ignorant! Get a clue!

And don’t even get me started on “massive”… Sheesh!

To round this off, as one of the most often seen and heard grammatical errors, here are the definitions of a few commonly used words: connect (join, fasten together), join (put together, make continuous, form a unit), fuse (mix or unite by melting together). Note the implied meaning they all share: the word together! So please, stop saying “connect together” or “join together” or “fuse together” or “bond together” already, in these contexts the word “together” is tautological! Redundant! Superfluous! Carries no additional information! Marks y’all as verbal dunces!

Is it all part of some kind of “dumbing down” conspiracy? Or is it just ignorance, plain and simple? Can we expect to see—or rather, hear—a change? Not anytime soon. The desire some of us have, to expect reasonably proper English usage in public media, to hear network reporters act as “linguistic role models,” is most likely written off as nitpicking (“another complaint from the non-celebrity vulgar mob… by Jove, if I finally have managed to learn a couple of new and impressive words, then I’m going to use them! Never mind that I thereby show the world that I haven’t bothered to learn what the words actually mean!”).

Denial is a river in Egypt… Duuh?