Why not be a cladist

Title is the title of a (1978) paper by Leigh van Valen one of the late great maverick evolutionary theorists of the late 20thC. I am happy to bring this back into discourse and Hats Off to University of Oslo Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) for archiving the journal Evolutionary Theory. It was agreeably clattered out on a manual fixed-width-font typewriter with blank spaces left to paste in pictures and diagrams and presumably, like our own contemporaneous Carnivore Genetics Newsletter, taken to a print shop as camera-ready copy. You can still see the staple holes from when one copy was disassembled and scanned to PDF. Fig 1b [R] from Why Not Be a Cladist.

Q. So wtf is a cladist? 
A. One who trudges in the footsteps of Willi Hennig to accept Cladistics aka phylogenetic systematics as a useful [true?] explanation of biological diversity which so intrigues those who pay attention to the natural world. In the 1980s, cladistics was really annoying to traditional classifiers, taxonomists and namers-of-parts because it forced them to reconsider their certainties. Hennig and the Cladists [great name for a rock band] wanted to bring Evolution's "descent with modification" front and centre.  A Clade was / is all the descendant members of a single branch of the tree of life. In particular cladists frowned on paraphyletic groupings: those which shared some [superficial?] similarities. Or relicts ["waste-baskets"] of taxa which had been 'left behind' when some of their number underwent an adaptive radiation into endless forms most beautiful.

• Clades are fractal: Family Hominidae [Gorilla, Homo, Pan, Pongo] is a clade; Order Primates is a clade; Class Mammalia is a clade.
• When I was in school, one of the standard, agreed, mammalian orders was "Insectivora" which included small, scurrying, nocturnal mammals that ate insects. Mammals arose in the Jurassic 225mya as small, scurrying, nocturnal mammals that ate insects and managed to avoid getting stepped upon by dinosaurs. When the dinosaurs were Offed, mammals radiated spectacularly into the vacant niches and beyond. Those left behind doing the same-old same-old were not a clade because that would exclude co-descendant aardvarks, bats, camels, dogs, elephants.
• Order Artiodactyla [antelopes, bovines, camels, deer, llamas, pigs] ain't a clade either . . . unless you include whales and dolphins [Dan, Des, Prev]
• Class Reptilia [absolutely standard when I was in school] isn't a clade unless Class Aves [birbs] and Class Mammalia are included.
• Fish aren't a clade either because we-the-mammals [and sundry other non-fish] are descended from fish; but don't have scales and swim-bladders.

That ⬤ last bullet has attracted the most attention. Notably from the competitive-clever-clogs podcast No Such Thing as a Fish. For the past 12 years, the undoubtedly smart and articulate QI Elves have been riffing on the Interesting bits-n-bobs which a) they've uncovered in their extensive reading but which b) aren't Quite Interesting enough to make the to-be-broadcast cut. It's madly popular. 30 minutes of it [ever] is plenty.

A more valuable [profound? subtle?] take on the Fish idea is the love-story in Why Fish Don't Exist (2020) by Lulu Miller. Miller grew up in a Double Prof [♀ arts ♂ science] home in Newton, suburban Boston. Her father cut her no slack growing up: no tooth fairy; no Santa there. Instead a rather nihilistic assertion that Lulu [and the Dad, and we all] was a fleck of spittle destined to evaporate to nothingness through the heedless grinding of physical entropy. She took that message on board and tried to top herself [pills] as a teen. Thanks, Dad!

A bit later she came across a man, born in 1851, who seemed to have fought against the powers of darkness and chaos to shine an enduring light on the way the world was ordered. David Starr Jordan suffered desperate loss: his beloved older brother [typhus], his first wife [pneumonia] his 9 y.o. daughter [scarlatina] his life's work [twice: once by fire and once in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906]. Jordan concentrated on recording the diversity of fish which he collected, considered, labelled and catalogued in  quantity: Maybe 20% of all the species of fish known to science were described by Jordan and his students. Oh, and he was the founding President of Stanford University.

Miller spent the next few years in the archives "as I flipped though thousands of pages, remnants of David’s skin entering my nostrils." reading books, pamphlets, diaries and papers by and about David Starr Jordan, his science and shenanigans. Somewhere along her journey of biographical discovery, Miller was introduced to Cladistics and uses this, anachronistically, to add the non-existence of "Fish" to the list of Jordan's losses. Her own journey of self-discovery, not without hardship and loss, comes out right in the end with less of the existential angst and more of the wife and two kids.

What I also admire, in the polarized, judgmental, self-righteous times in which we live, is that Miller considers Jordan warts-and-all. He made way above average contributions to science despite taking many tonks from an uncaring Universe; he is an Icon of Grit.

He was also a born-again evangelical eugenicist who campaigned far and wide, long and hard, to rid the world of people whom he and his white middle-class certainists deemed unfit. Miller makes a coherent case that this sort of thing is not only cruel and unjust, but also self-defeating in a Darwinian sense. We have no idea which people are going to be most useful during a proper-hard pandemic; or the zombie apocalypse; or an invasion from the Planet Zorg. It is vanishingly unlikely to be Stanford Admin, Multinational CEOs or mid-range financial traders. People are multi-faceted! People can be repellent in their habits and beliefs and still do good science, make great art, write like an angel.

~~~~~~~ 

PS. I finished the book, I was uplifted. I went back to my usual restless scanning of the internet. And whoa I found myself reading a series of essays about "Born Free & Equal" on the Scotus blog, by a Republican-leaning Law Professor. One essay is on Buck vs Bell which made it to the US Supreme Court in 1927 when eugenics was Hot. Carrie Buck was sterilized because some folk claimed she was 'feebleminded' and 'promiscuous' and . . . therefore her future children would be a threat to society. In 1927 SCJ Oliver Wendell Holmes famously quipped "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" before sealing her fate withn abdominal surgery. In 2026, Professor Calabresi counterquipped "Three generations of Holmes Lectures [at Harvard Law School] are enough." Yes yes very quippy and also very black &  white  unsubtle and Cancel Culture: unlike Lulu Miller. See also Skinner v Oklahoma for how eugenics reasoning will come for you next. Martin Niemöller: Zuerst kamen sie für die Kommunisten und ich sprach nicht . . . etc.

The day before, I'd been harking to a Mindscape Podcast [MultiPrev] in which poor Sean Carroll felt obliged again to hash out Free & Equal Free Will with Greg Caruso. [Free Will bloboprevs] For current purposes, you don't need to listen to 80 mins of clever philosophical jousting. Just click on the transcript and CTRL-F for 'felon' or '0:44:58.2 GC' to see how Punisher legislators and "three strikes and out" can force a man into a life-sentence for crimes that don't seem to be liable to cause wide-spread societal collapse . . . a bit of shop-lifting.

Apocalypse Ready

We live in interesting times. Not 'interesting' as in Ukraine, Venezuela, Yemen; but things could go sloppy quickly if [insert emergency here]. The Government of Ireland has just 

• thought through the list of things that could go wrong;
• done a risk assessment [seriousness of adverse situation x likelihood of it happening]
• decided how much infrastructure will remain
• made a list of citizen actions
• hired a design team [cute hat R]
• printed 500,000 copies 
• send one out to every home in the audience 

Don't have an Eircode? live in Ukraine? Your copy of the booklet here.

My sister lived for some years on Erraid, an island off an island (Mull) off the West coast of Scotland, as part of an intentional community affiliated with Findhorn. Erraid is owned by an increasingly extended family, all 200 ha. having been bought ca.1950 by two brothers from Nederland. It was their investment against an imagined Tanks rolling over the bridges of the Elbe emergency. It's 500km from Mühlhausen to Rotterdam: 2-3 days for a tank brigade. The brothers imagined that there would be a few days of sabre rattling when Albert Heijn was still open for hagel and transport infrastructure was in place. It's a schlepp. When we visited in 1996 we got a lift to DUB airport; flew to Prestwick; train to Glasgow; bus across the city; train to Oban; ferry to Craignure; bus to Fionnphort; open boat to Erraid . . . it took all day. But once there, it's pretty robust: well water, long-drop toilets; wood-burning stoves; flour in dustbins; spuds in the garden; fish in the sea.

In 2002, The Government of Ireland got super-specific in their emergency imagination and sent us all a packet of Iodine tablets. Which had zero utility against storms, floods, lines down, car bombs, plane crashes, coronarama ebolarama, cyber attacks. In 2026 the Govt advice is so non-specific as to be vague. I guess they didn't want to frighten the horses by doom-scrolling scenarios as I have just done.

The Government is i n c h i n g towards the integration of infrastructure. One page [/20] of the current advice is to write down five (5) 'Important EirCodes and five (5) 'Important contacts'. One other page "Emergency Ready Tip #5" advises Save a photo of your checklist on your phone. Which assumes electricity to charge the Device. Electricity? The Man expects us to know, note and/or remember our Meter Point Reference Number = MPRN. This is an 11-digit number!! When do they plan to dump all MPRNs and replace them with Eircodes - only 7 characters - which we have all internalized as we did our telephone number when there were only landlines. Prev Rant on the numerology of identity. Prev Skep on the actual utility of Eircodes. I've put the boot in on Eircodes but that train has gone: after 11 years it has some embedded utility - just more integration needed.

Exec.Summ: the checklist from the Be Emergency Ready booklet. Take home: emergencies can be managed but you'll need drinking water 3lt per person per day. In Apr 2024 I endured 10 days without tap water. Drinking rainwater like De Lord intended; and washing in a bucket.

My left boot

Four or five years ago, m'sister was visiting from England and we went to Red Mills for some mmmm good sheep-muesli and a bucket. I was between Lidl-special gumboots, and Sis mocked my cheapskatery until I purchased some top-range Bekina (Belgian) Wellingtons . . . because I was no longer an impoverished student and what else - go faster car [χ] cruise holiday [χ] silk undies] [χ] - was I going to spend my money on?

A couple of months later I was trimming back the hedge we planted in the 00s along the boundary with Toxic Neighbour. Happy out! Because I was not only winning a long, 3m wide strip of meadow for sheep food; but also saving a bunch of wrist-thick hazel Corylus avelanna and blackthorn Prunus spinosa branches. Walking sticks, shillelaghs, firewood, as you ask. For the pieces-of-twig-too-small-keep [see also string], I pushed the brash back into the hedge - for habitat. Regrettably, I channelled my inner kick-boxer and used my boots rather than a pitch fork for this task. Next time I used my spanking new wellies out in the rain, I came back with a sopping left sock. Duh genius had punctured the rubber with at least one blackthorn. I did try using those boots when it was dry, rotating them with cheaper, skiddier, crappier boots when wet out. Then last year, we seized an empty domestic bin opportunity and cleared out a bunch of beat-up, worn-out footware to create space in my tool-shed. From that holocaust, I salvaged a single water-proof left gumboot and I've been hirpling about the place like that. I'd rather look ridiculous than have wet socks, wouldn't you?

But that left boot, while hydrologically sound, is a tad too small and requires a hand to pull t'bugger on. Which is awkward if I'm running out the door with hands full of tools and devices. I was in Red Mills again last week to buy more sheep muesli [it's the season when they deserve a bit of dessert on a grass meal] and another molassed mineral lick bucket for micronutrients. I think it's really more like candy [molasses] for them, but I don't begrudge. And, while there, I stumped up for another pair of the same boot: as [L] flanked by the current mismatched pair. I'm going to leave the shop-tags on for while to remind me that these boots are made for walking not kicking brash or sawing wood.

I had a similar experience ~15 years ago when I bought a pair of Lidl middle-aisle walking boots. I used them while digging over the garden and destroyed them in about 2 weeks of footing a spade. The next pair served me about 6 years going to work with occasional yomps up the hill. Even €100 boots [HiTek looking at you!] can be kinda crappy. Update: €35 of repair work by Grumpty the Cobbler started to fail only 8 weeks later. Luckily I have two pairs of Columbia brand walking boots which are holding up well.:

English as she is spoke

At the very end of last year, we were exchanging books in the Local Local Library LLL [see L]. The same building hosts a Community Hub meeting room outside of which there was a scrappy timetable indicating which aspects of 'community' were hubbing in town. I wasn't pushed about cross-stitch Wedneesday but was interested in the local chapter of Fáilte Isteach: which is a community project involving predominantly older volunteers welcoming migrants through conversational English classes. I am told it started in Co Meath but has now spread nationwide. I sent them an e-mail:

Dear Fáilte Isteach,
I'm retired from teaching science in The Institute and wondered if Conversational English needs another body on the fluent side of the table in the LLL?
Regardless, I think you're doing a fine thing for the community.
Bob 

275 days later, I got a reply ". . . Sorry, I haven't logged into this email address in quite a while! But Yes we are always glad of an extra person to assist, particularly as winter evenings approach". And two evenings later, I shovelled down some dinner, and arrived at LLL on the dot [protestant!] of 19°°hrs. There was one old chap there, whom I know slightly, and eventually two Ukrainian women rocked up for 'class'. They were, apparently, part of a rolling group of 8 or 10 refugees who are regulars matched with 4 or 5 'natives.

I guess there has to be some structure to 'conversation class'; there was for the couple of years of Conversational Portuguese I did in the 1980s before we left England. Our mentor then was a qualified evening-class instructor and we read some newspapers, did a bit of rôle-play [you be the pharmacist, I'll start talking about blisters], a tiny bit of grammar, and some colloquialisms.  But we'd all reached a basic level [some of us very basic] level of fluency. It was good fun and we came to like each other's company.

I was a little taken aback when xerox sheets were handed out with the suggestion "Tonight we'll do adverbs". It was like, on a Buddhist retreat in a meditation session, we were invited to relax the pancreas. There is a word in Russian наречие [nareecheh] and Ukrainian прислівник [presuinik?]. I am the tail-end of the generations who learned 'grammar' in English class at school in the 1960s. But really no anglophone under the age of, say, 55 could tell you the difference between adverbs & adjectives / conjunctions & prepositions although they use words in both categories every day in normal speech and writing. I've forgotten pretty much all the formal grammar I learnt in school 60 years ago but I still speak and write grammatical English. And I'm happy to tell long-dead Mr Evers my English teacher that split infinitives are fine if it sounds okay - caring about not splitting them is a silly pedantic hang-over from Latin where all infinitives are a single unsplittable word. 

Anyway, Adverbs. Not all adverbs end in -ly, although at lot of the are formed from adjectives by adding that suffix: To boldly go where people split infinitives.  There are a whole clatter of common adverbs of place which qualify / describe where such a thing happens. We had a useful discussion on synonyms and 'nearonyms' without using the word synonym under = below; indoors = inside = within. All can be used when buildings are the container; but you can't be indoors a dustbin or a cupboard.

Then there are adverbs of time / frequency. Given the real basic level of last Thursday's learners, I forebore to suggest an exercise in ordering a bunch of similar adverbs of time. Great idea though to nail the nuance of language and I'd bet that there would be disagreement among native English speakers.  Go on: order this list from most to least frequent: always -- eventually -- infrequently -- never -- often -- rarely -- regularly -- seldom -- sometimes -- usually.

Later on Conversation example sheets were handed out. Talking about tire- and oil-changes with the mechanic in a garage fell a bit flat <pfffff!> because neither of our Ukrainian guests could drive. "Talking to the pharmacist" was quite a bit better because one of the women had served 40 years as a nurse in the radiology department of a Ukrainian Fever Hospital. We had an engaged if vocab-inhibited discussion about X-rays, antibiotics and tomography. The word for vitamin is the same вітамін, who knew? I thought it would be OTT to share my hilarious anecdote about how colon dwukropek got confused in Polish/English translation when I was teaching Human Physiology.

That was a week ago. Tomorrow evening, Fáilte Isteach is having open house again [as usual]. I intend to go; hoping for a rollicking good time with the Present Continuous [not!].

 

Climb every mountain

It's 152 years (to the day) since Sir Paweł Edmund Strzelecki died, in the fullness of his years, in London. He'd come a long way. He has been claimed as a Hero of Poland. In this case, quite literally as his remains were repatriated to Poznan in 1997 from Kensal Green Cemetery. Polish Wikipedia describes him as "geograf, podróżnik, badacz Australii" i.e. geographer, traveller [not tourist!] and Australian bad-ass. Poland surely vies with Ireland as being MOPE = Most Oppressed People Ever. We moan on about the six-counties, the border-poll, Lloyd-George's finesse of Collins & Griffiths in 1921. 100 years later, Drumcree reminds us that we-the-collective are polarized, intransigent and self-righteous.

The irony is that Strzelecki was born just outside of Poznań two years after the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had >!Poof!< ceased to exist in the final chapter of The Partitions of Poland (1772 -1795). Before I became a scientist, I had a year at school pretending to study history. I was much more fully engaged being disengaged: sitting in the lee of a hedge writing mopey love-letters and pretentious poetry. But in History we spent a while considering the rapacious acquisition of Polish castles & whole provinces by Prussia, Russia and the Hapsburgs. If 'one' was more awake, parallels could have been drawn between late 18thC Poland and the 1930s [Rhineland, Anschluß, Sudetenland, Czecho-remains . . . Poland!]. Not forgetting <ahem!> that Poland helped herself to a 800 sq.km chunk of Czechoslovakia in the 1938 dismemberment of that adjacent Republic.

Anyway . . . Strzelecki, like Joseph Conrad [Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski] 60 years later, left Poland, learned English and travelled far. Along the way Strzelecki taught himself the rudiments of geology and mineralogy and spent several years prospecting in the Americas - Chile, California, Canada, Cuba and that's just the Cs. He moved on to Australia in 1839 with a bit of rock.cred to his name. Along one of his Oz prospecting expeditions he summited the highest [2230m = 7300ft] peak on the Australian mainland and named it Mount Kosciuszko [see L & licence] after Tadeusz Kościuszko the dishy dashing doomed leader of the Polish independence movement in the years before his own birth.

Strzelecki is in the news this week because he is being memorialized in Glenties Co Donegal with a plaque commemorating his climbing a metaphorical mountain by feeding Irish children during An Gorta Mór in the 1840s. He started as the 'neutral' [i.e. not obvs British oppressor] representative of BRA = British Relief Association which fussed about trying chink the gaps in the environmental catastrophe into which the Central UK Government was unwilling to pour money. 

Strzelecki spent about 3 years in The West in various capacities. Key insight was to mobilise one element of infrastructure - schools - to relieve the pressure on another element - the workhouse - which was ill- equipped and under-resourced to deal with such widespread poverty, famine and pestilence [horses]. He contrived to distribute hunks of rye-bread to 200,000 children in schools across Connacht. Some readers in Mayo, Sligo and Donegal, and across the diaspora, are alive today because their ancestor developed a taste for pumpernickel like they too had been born in Poland ! The Polish Embassy in Dublin hosted a tribute exhibition in 2018.  He has a whole list of peaks, peeks, creeks & tracks named after him.

Pasture grass -seed

 I was on about discarding olde tomes: one in particular Freams Elements of Agriculture (1918) which gives an inviting view of the state of the art of modern Ag 100 years ago. hint: the are no fuck-off big tractors status symbols / icons of conspicuous consumption, diesel division. Carbon hoof-print of a pair of clydesdale plough-horses is much less than our Yaris run-about. Gotta add, though, that when a tractor is not working it is inert, while horses need calories 24/7/52 whether they are working or not.

A bonus in this copy of Fream's Elt Agri is hand-written notes by the owner in the 1930s.

"Hold heads horizontally and dose slowly", indeed. For this purpose, rain water is fit for purpose, and a mix of copper and nicotine is supposed to be an effective anthelminthic.

Student of Fream 1930s also records a suitable mix for re-seeding to permanent pasture.

Then as now, Lolium perenne is recognised and the queen of pasture grass, but an ecosystem of other species is thrown into the mix

• Perennial ryegrass Lolium perenne 14lb
• Italian ryegrass Lolium multiflorum 6lb
• Cocksfoot Dactylis glomerata 4lb
• Meadow fescue  Lolium [was Festuca] pratensis 4lb
• Crested dogtail Cynosurus cristatus 2lb
• English cowgrass Trifolium pratensis1lb
• Late red clover Trifolium pratensis 1lb
• Trefoil Trifolium ? prolly repens1lb
• Wild white clover Trifolium repens ½lb

Curiously the ratio lb/kg = 0.45 is close enough to the ratio acre/hectare = 0.40. 

As part of the current government funded Agri-Environment Scheme, Teagaschas been herding  Knowledge Transfer Groups KTG across the country. Farmers I know [!not all farmers!] are a) conservative, b) work 24/7 at least for some weeks during the farming year c) get very little money for their efforts. KTG would never reach a quorum without some sort of douc€ur to pay for the time and diesel. So the hierarchy of outcomes for a typical meeting are a) got to hang-out with peers and discuss mart-prices > b) got a chunk of ready money >>> c) learnt something new.

We hosted KTG two years ago to show off our traditional haymeadow. The participants spent the whole time in the nearest corner of the meadow chatting - quite possibly slaggin' us off for hosting a lot of "dirt" the tech.term for anything not perennial ryegrass. We were too busy showing the Teagasc-peeps the orchids and bedstraws to ear-wig on the neighbours. For sure the high point of the visit was the home-made brack;  a slab of flapjacks and an enormous kettle of builder's tea which I laid on in the yard after the visit to the meadow.

Last Thursday we went on an outing with the KTG to the extreme other side of our [tiny] county. The agenda was a) weaned grass-fed calves b) a newly re-seeded pasture c) a new slatted shed d) something something climate change. We went for the climate change but that never happened. After an introduction to mistakes made when designing slatted sheds, we strode out across the pasture towards the fenced of section that was home to ~50 calves. One of our neighbours could be heard criticizing the pasture for being right bocketty: we could feel the clods and divots under our boots. "A nightmare to cut" concluded Neighbour. The calves were curious and not too frisky. "Not like my basstids" commented one of the visitors. It was clear that our host had had a terrible year: the extended drought nearly killed is nursery pasture, the calves had picked up lung-worm from somewhere and some were still coughing, That's what it's like farming: shit happens and you just have to suck it up and/or go bust.

But there was some interesting talk about Best seed mix for (as in that location) heavy soil. The choices seemed to be a smidge of clover Trifolium repens and a selection of varieties of ryegrass Lolium perenne! No other grasses need apply. There is a list of available L.perenne varieties as long as your arm but all the native species sold and used in the 1930s - they're all gone with haywains and scythes. Here's one widely available mix: Aberchoice? Meiduno? they're all ryegrass!

Tirlán Permanent Pasture Formulation:

• 3.0 Kgs Aberchoice
• 3.0 Kgs Meiduno (T)
• 2.0 Kgs Glenfield (T)
• 2.9 Kgs Astonking
• 0.6 Kgs Med Leaf white Clover

The icing on the cake of day [note: there was no cake, not even a rich tea biscuit, and no tea: like I said it had been a bleak year] was a view of our hill ⬇ as others see it from afar. Yes, yes, I agree it's hard to tell where the hill ends and the clouds begin - but that's our Satori.

Holy bumblebee, Robin

My correspondent P keeps up with general science much better than me. At the end of September, she flagged up a Nature press release about the latest submission from the Bat1k Project. Bats are important and diverse: 20% of all mammalian species are members of Order Chiroptera. Only rodents are more 'speciose' (25% of the ~5,000 known species). There is a whiff of marmite about both taxa: most people are squikked out by bats or rats or both but enthusiasts are really enthusiastic. Take Gdau.II, for example: she's 10 and mad about Capybaras Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris the largest rodent known to science, but she survives by keeping 2 surrogate guinea-pigs Cavia porcellus in a pen in a corner of the living-room at home. Cavies (1kg) and capybaras (50kg) are in the same family, who knew?

Another example is Emma Teeling, a zoology Professor at UCD, who is making it her life's work to get more attention and more money for research into bats.

Teeling is the Last=Lead author on a recent chunky report in Nature "Reference genomes and fossils revise bat family phylogeny and biogeography". She has had to herd 130+ researchers from 100+ institutions in 60+ countries to generate new genome sequence data + share existing ditto + put it in a digital hopper with the [sparse, patchy] fossil record and a good dash of location location, ecology, and geographic distribution for each species. Shake that hopper! This September 2026 paper has assembled and cross-referenced more or less complete genome data for ~100 bat species. Which is some way short of Bat1k's goal of 1,000 species: which would be just about all the bats still flying, breathing and giving up their DNA for science. That's terabytes of data for which appropriate analytical and statistical software has to be written, borrowed, debugged, tweaked and applied. The computers laboured and brought forth . . . results: . "CASTER analyses of mHR neutral windows recovered (T2; bootstrap = 89.9%, q1 = 34), but neutral window analyses of both bat-reference MULTIZ alignments (mRM and mRR bootstrap = 100 and 99%; q1 = 35 and 34, respectively)(Fig. 3j) and analyses of neutral dark SNPs (mHR, mRM and mRR bootstrap = 96.4, 100 and 100%; q1 = 0.383, 0.428 and 0.393, respectively; Fig. 3k) optimally supported T1". Nope?! I don't know what that means either, and I spent 20 years hewing at the coal-face of genomic analysis.

Journalists across the globe - CBC - Guardian - Mefi! - have done their best to abstract A Story from the technical findings. Their almost universal Exec.Summ. has been "Latest! Bats originated in Europe 65 million years ago". As I hint above, the fossil record for bats is kinda crappy, so it's been hard to find hard <tok> <tok> evidence at all, let alone the earliest credible example: a case has been made previously for Africa, but also for N.America. I don't have the smarts or the tool-kit to critically evaluate the Eurobats origin hypothesis which the press has latched on to. 

But I did notice that only one bat family (out of 21) achieved 100% coverage in this 10% preview to the Bat1k Project. Clip from Fig.1 NE quadrant.

That's because family Craseonycteridae contains a single genus and a single species Craseonycteris thonglongyai aka Kitti's hog-nosed bat aka bumble bee bat, BBB. This is the smallest bat (wt 2g len 30mm) known to science and one of the most recently discovered . . . in 1974 by Kitti Thonglongya, a zoologist in Thailand. He died suddenly shortly afterwards: hence the memorial eponym. It's hard to credit that a creature which would comfortably lie on a postage-stamp [the wing-span is bigger] can catch and digest enough food to survive the night given the high surface to volume ratio that comes from being small and which haemorrhages heat.

More on Emma Teeling [bloboprev, also as cailleach] who is a great Irish ambassador to Big Science. 25 years ago, in 2001she co-authored "Resolution of the early placental mammal radiation using Bayesian phylogenetics " - the definitive determination of the relationships among Mammalian Orders (aardvark, bats, carnivores, elephants and 2 dozen other fundamentally different ways of being a mammal). Lay summary by Elizabeth Pennisi. When I was in school, it looked like representatives of all the mammalian orders appeared >!shazzam!< in the fossil record fully differentiated and very widely distributed. In the same eye-blink dinosaurs were swept into the dustbin of history. In the fossil record (all we had back then) it was super abrupt. That 2001 Bayesian phylogenetics paper (and a couple of almost right earlier efforts) was based on the alignment of concatenated protein-coding gene sequences - lots of them; in lots of species. It gave the granularity to show that some Orders were closer to each other than others and shook down into four blocs of species [bloboprev] with shared ancestry and so peculiar commonalities. Sidelining the [patchy, crappy] fossils won evolution millions of extra years to generate the wonderful, peculiar, particular diversity we see in caves, jungles, plains and oceans today - from whales to Kitti's teeny bat.

Who said whales? In 1994, Dan Graur and Des Higgins showed that, from their DNA sequences, they are a subset of Artiodactyls (cows, camels and . . . hippos). After millennia stomping around in lagoons, slobs and mudflats, one mother protowhale decided she couldn't be arsed to get back to dry land to drop the sprog

20 years after sorting out the broad-brush phylogeny of mammals, Teeling was a founder enthusiast for the Zoonomia Project to fill in the details. A comparative genomics multitool for scientific discovery and conservation is another Big Data endeavour. looking at "the genomics of shared and specialized traits in eutherian mammals." What can carefully compared megabases, gigabases of ATCGs tell us about the core similarities [homeothermy, hair, four chambered heart, calcium, lactation, 2 sexes not three etc.] that we share with other mammals? AND expose the basis of shared oddities: 

• Afrotheria - one of the four great mammalian Superorders are a) based in Africa b) tend to extravagant noses (aardvark, elephants, elephant shrews, dugongs, otter-shrews); 
• Bats . . . fly, not all of them echolocate; 
• Cows chew cud
• Dormice come out at night
• Equids run on a single toe-nail (well, four - one at each corner): cows run on two. 

Those are kinda obvious and we probably don't need genomic analysis to crack the why? and how? But what about the immune system: is a species' complement of anti-microbial peptides due to evolutionary inertia, random accident or as a response to species-specific microbial assault. And how is it that bats tolerate so many pathological viruses about their person with not a bother on them? WTF that whales and dolphins don't need anti-microbial peptides?: there are plenty bacteria in the sea.

And placentas: they are the defining feature of [eutherian] mammals, you'd think they were all the same but they are structurally, functionally, wildly different across Orders. What is the genetic basis for these different solutions? It's not IL-17: these are functionally important for placental development but, all eutherian mammals have a full complement of genes for the IL-17 family of cytokines.

Someone (SFI Taighde Éireann? James 'FF' Lawless, the current Minsiter?) should give Emma Teeling a medal for Services in Infrastructural Support To Evolutionary Research SISTER! Because, as well as 

• teaching [which was a full-time full-on job for me in The Institute);
• mentoring [bloboprev on what that involves]
• dealing with the fallout of institutional misogyny
• managing her own research group [which is managing a small business with a turn-over of €500,000 a year];
• making batty discoveries of her own out in the field cave; 

Professor Teeling has also put in years of small-p politics and negotiation; channeled the pride and ambition of alpha-dicks; held the wayward to agreed deadlines: in order to glue consortia which created platforms and tools for everyone else to make their own great leaps forward in shedding light on The Tangled Bank.
All The Blob can do is to induct her into the Women of Science hall of fame.