Different isolated Giraffe populations are not species, they are races. Theoretically, maintaining different Giraffe races could be an advantage if some new virus crashes one race to a much greater extent than a different race. On the other hand, Giraffes are rarely eaten by us. Despite being from a Scriptural perspective pure, ruminant even-toed ungulates. So I wouldn't know how much money is justified to be spent on this. Compared with say, cows or chickens?
Hilariously, it seems they mainly differ by skin pattern. Of course that's just me using my lying eyes but it would seem like there are other species which the calipers might differentiate more easily and on more spectra.
Commenting from NZ, I do find myself feeling some sympathy for the plight of the the northerner, with its smaller population and its greater challenges to survival. Having Its meager population scattered in isolated pockets.
And finally, in passing, one wonders if Hybrid-American will ever come into fashion (capitalized of course).
I was out walking this morning my dog and noticed the complete absence of pterodactyls in the sky. No saber-tooth tigers or brontosauri either.
Haven’t we been losing and gaining species for eons? Why is the current mix the mix we should fight to preserve?
There are clearly a number of folks who think earth would be better-off with a lot less humans. Should humans be permitted to put the brakes on evolution? If so, why apply them today?
During my years in Africa I saw lions munching on dead giraffes once or twice. A giraffe makes a large meal, more than can be eaten at a single seating. Lions seem comfortable munching on rotting leftovers for days. You don’t want to be downwind. The smell is memorable.
I'd respond the way Michael Crichton did in "Jurassic Park"--there's a difference between species dying out naturally, due to a variety of factors (yes, even a meteor strike), and due to human actions or intervention.
Human biodiversity exists. However, the claim that humans have clearly defined categories of race or sub-race is not true. I do not know of any biologists that make such a claim. Interbreeding has made such taxonomy complicated. On the other hand, I have read about efforts (conspiracies) which seek to eliminate the White race through interbreeding with dark races, on the premise that the White race is destructive. My reaction to such a crazy plot is the thought that if the White race is eliminated, where will colored people go for free stuff?
A public TV series about all the NC state parks went on and on praising each one for its abundant biodiversity. Rather tiresome. No one is planning to clear-cut them like Nazis.
Ah, the dreadfully scandalized Scientific Racism article. I consulted that a few years ago, in connection with a post on another website about Aldous Huxley’s 1934 book Beyond the Mexique Bay. It certainly had nothing to add, not that Huxley’s mention of the “Precipitin-Test” had been dispositive in any way. Anyway, I see two readers had liked my suggestion that Wikipedia needs mouseover tooltips that display “I’m literally shaking” and “I can’t even”.
As for giraffes and their narratives (I can’t even believe that a biologist said four-legged animals had those), I am put in mind of something else I came across in other researches for that other website. I’d had the idea that Vasco da Gama and Zheng He may have brushed by each other on the east African coast. Nope: finally cracking open Os Lusiadas and also reading more about China’s deepwater navy, I learned these guys were active at opposite ends of the fifteenth century. However, they may have both visited the same place, Malindi, in what is now Kenya. At least in Camões’s mythology, da Gama used it as his jumping-off point for Calicut in India; but what Zheng He did there was accept the gift of a giraffe, which he managed to bring home alive. I fear that if it had a story to tell, this wasn’t in Chinese.
Anyway, it’s fun to review what I learned. One historian said that had it not been for his very impressive voyages, Zheng He would have been “just another eunuch.” Seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all. I was likewise amused by his finding Mogadishu so destitute it had no wood. That sounds comical, as if the fleet went so far it found a country that had no air. Whoa, we better go home NOW! But the commander commanded and the sailors sailed, and the giraffe was their prize.
The person who wrote "pseudo-disciplines" is clearly stupid. I try not to judge strangers on the internet on a small number of data points, but this is beyond doubt.
"that do not interbreed much since diverging from a common ancestor about 280,000 years ago." Is it because it doesn't work or because they don't live near each other?
Whenever Giraffes (or cervical vertebrae) come up I am compelled--in my capacity as a dork--to mention that almost all mammals, including giraffes, have 7 cervical vertebrae. Then I ask the audience if they can name any of the exceptions.
Haha. The words are the same. The uterine cervix is the neck of the uterus I guess...although either the head or the shoulders of the uterus are missing.
"Scientific racism misapplies, misconstrues, or distorts anthropology..." What's up with this sentence construction? X verb, verb, verb Y. It's such a signature of leftist texts: ubiquitous there, rare elsewhere. I always wonder how they choose their 3 verbs. I suspect the semantic precision of each word matters less than the rhetorical flourish and in-group signaling.
That triple-negation phrasing is subtle ideological browbeating or shaming. You're right.
The key may that by "front-loading" (overloading) the terms, resistance is undermined far more than the words as stand-alones would do. The result: the concepts swirl into a larger Big Demonization. A majority of people -- especially females and non-adult males -- will simply submit to this shaming and give up, or join in.
How about this sort of phrasing:
"Wokeness misapplies White-Western people's traditional goodwill towards outsiders and non-kin; Wokeness misconstrues many parts of U.S. and Western history; and it distorts the characterization of social dynamics in which Nonwhite people tend to get worse outcomes."
That is the kind of phrasing I might use, if wanting to apply those three words towards a concept being critiqued.
Stretching it out is a lot longer, requires more effort by the writer (in addition to the reader), to be more specific about what you're actually saying; and more nuance. Such a way as that can be 'addressed' point-by-point.
Meanwhile, a frontloaded attack with three adjectival modifiers on one neutral-word ("misapplies, misconstrues, and distorts anthropology") is harder to deal with, except through submission or avoiding the matter (running for cover).
> A 2024 study of DNA, for example, revealed that living giraffes belong to four main branches that do not interbreed much since diverging from a common ancestor about 280,000 years ago. <
LOL. And this four-pane picture of ... four giraffes is pure comedy gold. How can anyone miss the obvious? If this was DC, people would assume those were all creatures from the same gray-scale neighborhood.
What's Zimmer up to here? I haven't read any of his books, and as the NYT bio-reporter his job essentially involves crafting and recrafting and re-recrafting soothing, mellifluous verbiage to present some biology but not ruffle placid narrative compliant readers.
Thanks Steve--confess, I was not aware of this crisis.
America must immediately arm the Northern Giraffes so they can fight off this invasive species which is occupying and destroying their territory and genociding their species.
(There may be downstream benefits to other northern endangered species as well.)
One of the things I've pointed out--i.e. it's so obvious even I can't miss it--is that almost *everything* on the traditional "progressive" agenda--and nominally on the modern one--is undermined/destroyed by the "diversity!" and especially the "must have immigration!" agenda.
Really pretty much everything:
-- good wages and working conditions
-- affordable quality housing
-- poverty reduction / slum eradication
-- good public health / disease control
-- quality education / good public schools
-- income equality
-- community / social cohesion
-- crime reduction safe streets
-- support for generous social welfare
-- women's opportunity/equality
-- LGBQWERTY (a late 20th century addition)
-- public transit / walkable communities
-- parks
-- containing sprawl
-- population control
-- land / species preservation
-- environmental protection
It is all at odds with the "must have immigration!" insanity. But few things are as diametrically opposed as the whole environmental conservation agenda and immigration lunacy.
Basically, the early 20th century WASP/Germanic progressives had fairly coherent ideology/program of broad social uplift involving better working and living conditions, education, eugenics, population control--immigration control and lower fertility--and conservation. Overall, a push for higher standards--"everyone behave like a middle class WASP"--to improve the nation and preserve our nice things.
But with the rise of the Jews grafted onto this is all their white-host-population-hostility, minoritarian glop and "must have immigration!" zealotry. Diversity über alles. White majorities--Nazis!--must be balkanized, broken, replaced, destroyed. Hardly a recipe for preserving any "nice things" including the environment, open space, or endangered species.
Only $100 for a whole year!
Substack should let non-subscribers see a half dozen comments out of order and then break off in the middle of a long one.
Different isolated Giraffe populations are not species, they are races. Theoretically, maintaining different Giraffe races could be an advantage if some new virus crashes one race to a much greater extent than a different race. On the other hand, Giraffes are rarely eaten by us. Despite being from a Scriptural perspective pure, ruminant even-toed ungulates. So I wouldn't know how much money is justified to be spent on this. Compared with say, cows or chickens?
Perhaps, but try to imaging the kosher butchering process with those long necks.
Yep, it's a bit of an engineering challenge.
Hilariously, it seems they mainly differ by skin pattern. Of course that's just me using my lying eyes but it would seem like there are other species which the calipers might differentiate more easily and on more spectra.
Commenting from NZ, I do find myself feeling some sympathy for the plight of the the northerner, with its smaller population and its greater challenges to survival. Having Its meager population scattered in isolated pockets.
And finally, in passing, one wonders if Hybrid-American will ever come into fashion (capitalized of course).
I was out walking this morning my dog and noticed the complete absence of pterodactyls in the sky. No saber-tooth tigers or brontosauri either.
Haven’t we been losing and gaining species for eons? Why is the current mix the mix we should fight to preserve?
There are clearly a number of folks who think earth would be better-off with a lot less humans. Should humans be permitted to put the brakes on evolution? If so, why apply them today?
During my years in Africa I saw lions munching on dead giraffes once or twice. A giraffe makes a large meal, more than can be eaten at a single seating. Lions seem comfortable munching on rotting leftovers for days. You don’t want to be downwind. The smell is memorable.
I would preserve giraffes because they’re pretty. If a species is neither pretty nor ecologically significant, I’d worry a lot less.
This is everyone's instinct and the subliminal intent of the endangered species act. Kudos on having the balls to say it.
Who’s worrying about, say, mosquito diversity? Can we drive them to extinction (please)?
I’m a Canadian.
There’s mosquitoes in the US too. In fact mosquitoes are almost everywhere (except deserts and Antarctica).
Yellowjackets should be the first to go.
Good point.
I'd respond the way Michael Crichton did in "Jurassic Park"--there's a difference between species dying out naturally, due to a variety of factors (yes, even a meteor strike), and due to human actions or intervention.
Yes, I’ll second that, but I recall while watching Jurassic Park that the humans were so stupid they deserved to die.
Yes, most of them were comically stupid, but Crichton's message was that hubris was even more dangerous than stupidity.
"each with their own narrative."
The giraffes remain silent.
Human biodiversity exists. However, the claim that humans have clearly defined categories of race or sub-race is not true. I do not know of any biologists that make such a claim. Interbreeding has made such taxonomy complicated. On the other hand, I have read about efforts (conspiracies) which seek to eliminate the White race through interbreeding with dark races, on the premise that the White race is destructive. My reaction to such a crazy plot is the thought that if the White race is eliminated, where will colored people go for free stuff?
A public TV series about all the NC state parks went on and on praising each one for its abundant biodiversity. Rather tiresome. No one is planning to clear-cut them like Nazis.
Anything with a blue tongue is worth some extra effort.
Ah, the dreadfully scandalized Scientific Racism article. I consulted that a few years ago, in connection with a post on another website about Aldous Huxley’s 1934 book Beyond the Mexique Bay. It certainly had nothing to add, not that Huxley’s mention of the “Precipitin-Test” had been dispositive in any way. Anyway, I see two readers had liked my suggestion that Wikipedia needs mouseover tooltips that display “I’m literally shaking” and “I can’t even”.
As for giraffes and their narratives (I can’t even believe that a biologist said four-legged animals had those), I am put in mind of something else I came across in other researches for that other website. I’d had the idea that Vasco da Gama and Zheng He may have brushed by each other on the east African coast. Nope: finally cracking open Os Lusiadas and also reading more about China’s deepwater navy, I learned these guys were active at opposite ends of the fifteenth century. However, they may have both visited the same place, Malindi, in what is now Kenya. At least in Camões’s mythology, da Gama used it as his jumping-off point for Calicut in India; but what Zheng He did there was accept the gift of a giraffe, which he managed to bring home alive. I fear that if it had a story to tell, this wasn’t in Chinese.
Anyway, it’s fun to review what I learned. One historian said that had it not been for his very impressive voyages, Zheng He would have been “just another eunuch.” Seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all. I was likewise amused by his finding Mogadishu so destitute it had no wood. That sounds comical, as if the fleet went so far it found a country that had no air. Whoa, we better go home NOW! But the commander commanded and the sailors sailed, and the giraffe was their prize.
"Anyway, I see two readers had liked my suggestion that Wikipedia needs mouseover tooltips that display “I’m literally shaking” and “I can’t even”."
That's genius.
"...other disciplines or pseudo-disciplines"
The person who wrote "pseudo-disciplines" is clearly stupid. I try not to judge strangers on the internet on a small number of data points, but this is beyond doubt.
"that do not interbreed much since diverging from a common ancestor about 280,000 years ago." Is it because it doesn't work or because they don't live near each other?
Whenever Giraffes (or cervical vertebrae) come up I am compelled--in my capacity as a dork--to mention that almost all mammals, including giraffes, have 7 cervical vertebrae. Then I ask the audience if they can name any of the exceptions.
Cervical vertebrae. Let's see...those are the ones near the cervix, right?
Haha. The words are the same. The uterine cervix is the neck of the uterus I guess...although either the head or the shoulders of the uterus are missing.
> although either the head or the shoulders of the uterus are missing.
Why, do bottles need heads or shoulders?
hmmmmm....
"Scientific racism misapplies, misconstrues, or distorts anthropology..." What's up with this sentence construction? X verb, verb, verb Y. It's such a signature of leftist texts: ubiquitous there, rare elsewhere. I always wonder how they choose their 3 verbs. I suspect the semantic precision of each word matters less than the rhetorical flourish and in-group signaling.
That triple-negation phrasing is subtle ideological browbeating or shaming. You're right.
The key may that by "front-loading" (overloading) the terms, resistance is undermined far more than the words as stand-alones would do. The result: the concepts swirl into a larger Big Demonization. A majority of people -- especially females and non-adult males -- will simply submit to this shaming and give up, or join in.
How about this sort of phrasing:
"Wokeness misapplies White-Western people's traditional goodwill towards outsiders and non-kin; Wokeness misconstrues many parts of U.S. and Western history; and it distorts the characterization of social dynamics in which Nonwhite people tend to get worse outcomes."
That is the kind of phrasing I might use, if wanting to apply those three words towards a concept being critiqued.
Stretching it out is a lot longer, requires more effort by the writer (in addition to the reader), to be more specific about what you're actually saying; and more nuance. Such a way as that can be 'addressed' point-by-point.
Meanwhile, a frontloaded attack with three adjectival modifiers on one neutral-word ("misapplies, misconstrues, and distorts anthropology") is harder to deal with, except through submission or avoiding the matter (running for cover).
Does wikipedia's "scientific racism" explain why the NBA and NFL are the way they are?
There's a zoo about an hour from my house that has a giraffe born a year or two ago without any spots
Weird.
https://brightszoo.com/rare-patternless-giraffe/
Kipekee!
> A 2024 study of DNA, for example, revealed that living giraffes belong to four main branches that do not interbreed much since diverging from a common ancestor about 280,000 years ago. <
LOL. And this four-pane picture of ... four giraffes is pure comedy gold. How can anyone miss the obvious? If this was DC, people would assume those were all creatures from the same gray-scale neighborhood.
What's Zimmer up to here? I haven't read any of his books, and as the NYT bio-reporter his job essentially involves crafting and recrafting and re-recrafting soothing, mellifluous verbiage to present some biology but not ruffle placid narrative compliant readers.
Thanks Steve--confess, I was not aware of this crisis.
America must immediately arm the Northern Giraffes so they can fight off this invasive species which is occupying and destroying their territory and genociding their species.
(There may be downstream benefits to other northern endangered species as well.)
What if the Northern Giraffes are Palestinian? "Just got a call from Bibi. Call it off, call of the arming of the Northern Giraffe."
One of the things I've pointed out--i.e. it's so obvious even I can't miss it--is that almost *everything* on the traditional "progressive" agenda--and nominally on the modern one--is undermined/destroyed by the "diversity!" and especially the "must have immigration!" agenda.
Really pretty much everything:
-- good wages and working conditions
-- affordable quality housing
-- poverty reduction / slum eradication
-- good public health / disease control
-- quality education / good public schools
-- income equality
-- community / social cohesion
-- crime reduction safe streets
-- support for generous social welfare
-- women's opportunity/equality
-- LGBQWERTY (a late 20th century addition)
-- public transit / walkable communities
-- parks
-- containing sprawl
-- population control
-- land / species preservation
-- environmental protection
It is all at odds with the "must have immigration!" insanity. But few things are as diametrically opposed as the whole environmental conservation agenda and immigration lunacy.
Basically, the early 20th century WASP/Germanic progressives had fairly coherent ideology/program of broad social uplift involving better working and living conditions, education, eugenics, population control--immigration control and lower fertility--and conservation. Overall, a push for higher standards--"everyone behave like a middle class WASP"--to improve the nation and preserve our nice things.
But with the rise of the Jews grafted onto this is all their white-host-population-hostility, minoritarian glop and "must have immigration!" zealotry. Diversity über alles. White majorities--Nazis!--must be balkanized, broken, replaced, destroyed. Hardly a recipe for preserving any "nice things" including the environment, open space, or endangered species.
This reads like leftist cope.
"Sure our quasi-socialist policies failed, but maybe if we try socialism with only one race/ethnicity/nationality it'll work."