#3887: Michael Snider — 06/29  at  06:18 PM
A short one from Garstang:

The Ancestry of Vertebrates

Gill-slits, Tongue-bars, Synapticulae,
Endostyle and Notochord: all these you will agree
Mark the Protochordate from the fishes in the sea,
And tells alike for them and us our lowly pedigree.

Thyroid, Thymus, Subnotochordal Rod:
These we share with Lampreys, the Dogfish and the Cod,—
Relics of the food-trap that served our early meals,
And of Tongue-bars that multiplied the primal water-wheels.

#3888: Ophelia Benson — 06/29  at  06:42 PM
And there's Lucretius, though I don't recall that he does really gross-out stuff. But he's not all pretty-pretty Fotherington-Thomas hello clouds stuff, either.

"Poets need to look at the movies to get an idea of what people really want. They want wisecracks punctuated with a kick to the 'nads. They want exploding automobiles. They want gratuitous scenes set in a strip club. They want giant mutant hamsters eating Poughkeepsie."

Er - you seem to have people confused with men, there, PZ. At least, if I'm a representative sample of the other thing you do. I don't want none of those things. (Though, perversely, I also don't want touchy-feely stuff, or Nora Ephron characters bursting into tears at the very mention of some infinitely sappy maudlin chick flick of yore, or bilge like Notting Hill or Bridget Jones.) (Oops, off topic.)

#3890: PZ Myers — 06/29  at  06:57 PM
Actually, I don't want those things either. I'm mocking the monied mass-market bilge.

Well, except for the giant mutant hamsters. That was serious.



Michael: I'm going to have to find a copy of Garstang. This is the same familiar old embryologist, Walter Garstang? Wow. You learn something new every day. The kids are never going to forgive you if I start reciting paleobiological poetry at them on long road trips—it may be even more painful than accordion music.

#3892: Courtney Ostaff — 06/29  at  07:22 PM
You need to read more Shakespeare. Baudy (a bow to Baudelaire) and violent. And really descriptive.

#3898: — 06/29  at  09:52 PM
Re: post 25. Ha! Found this on the internet:
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

Erasmus Darwin. The Temple of Nature. 1802.

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Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was one of the leading intellectuals of eighteenth century England, a man with a remarkable array of interests and pursuits. Erasmus Darwin was a respected physician, a well known poet, philosopher, botanist, and naturalist.
As a naturalist, he formulated one of the first formal theories on evolution in Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794-1796). He also presented his evolutionary ideas in verse, in particular in the posthumously published poem The Temple of Nature. Although he did not come up with natural selection, he did discuss ideas that his grandson elaborated on sixty years later, such as how life evolved from a single common ancestor, forming "one living filament". He wrestled with the question of how one species could evolve into another.

Still don't see any evidence of the "good stuff" in the poem, though.

PS: I still like the Frost poem about the spider.

#4001: Ophelia Benson — 06/30  at  04:10 PM
Erasmus Darwin was very cool. He was one of the lunar men - the radical free-thinking pro-reason pro-science guys like Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood.