Science Tuesday - Dinosaurs, Comedy, and Child Abuse

An illustrated reconstruction of the head of the newly discovered Triassic dinosaur Tawa hallae.

OBSERVATORY: Bones Show Early Divergence of Dinosaur Lineage
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, December 15, 2009

The early evolution of dinosaurs, in the late Triassic period, is fuzzy, to say the least. Paleontologists know that the first dinosaurs appeared about 230 million years ago, but fossil evidence is so spotty that it is unclear where and when the major lineages — theropods, sauropods and ornithischians — began to diverge.

Some excellent 215-million-year-old fossils unearthed in Ghost Ranch, in northern New Mexico, are helping to clarify things. The bones, of a theropod that the discoverers have named Tawa hallae, support the idea that the lineages diverged early on in the part of the supercontinent Pangea that is now South America.

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Did You Hear the One About the Former Scientist?
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, December 15, 2009

A biologist walks into a comedy club...

Actually, the story begins earlier. A biologist who had abandoned academia and was working in San Francisco on contract as a computer programmer for Charles Schwab walked into a Laundromat ...

The former biologist was Tim Lee. After completing his undergraduate biology degree at the University of California, San Diego, he worked at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for a while before he realized he needed a doctorate to do the interesting work. But by the time he finished his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis, he had realized he hated academia.

“I just didn’t want to read any more papers,” Dr. Lee said. “I didn’t want to write any more papers.”

Dr. Lee then worked as a computer programmer, and he moved to San Francisco. During a vacation, he read memoirs of comedians like Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart and Jerry Seinfeld, and he wrote some jokes.

Then he walked into a Laundromat, which was holding an open microphone night for anyone who wanted to take a shot at being a comic. Dr. Lee told about a dozen jokes. Only four or five of them got laughs, but that was good enough for the host to offer some encouraging words.

Dr. Lee wrote more jokes. He went to more open mikes. He eventually got a paying gig — $35 from a comedy club in Santa Cruz, Calif. Along the way, he started telling science jokes, and he discovered that PowerPoint made a good comedy prop.

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Case Shined First Light on Abuse of Children
By HOWARD MARKEL, M.D., The New York Times, December 15, 2009

“Mamma has been in the habit of whipping and beating me almost every day,” the little girl testified. “She used to whip me with a twisted whip — a rawhide.

“I have now on my head two black-and-blue marks which were made by Mamma with the whip, and a cut on the left side of my forehead which was made by a pair of scissors in Mamma’s hand; she struck me with the scissors and cut me. ... I never dared speak to anybody, because if I did I would get whipped.”

If the words sound depressingly familiar, it is because they could have come from any number of recent news accounts — or, for that matter, popular entertainment, like the recently opened movie “Precious,” which depicts the emotional and sexual abuse of a Harlem girl.

In fact, though, the quotation is from the 1874 case of Mary Ellen McCormack, below, a self-possessed 10-year-old who lived on West 41st Street, in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan. It was Mary Ellen who finally put a human face on child abuse — and prompted a reformers’ crusade to prevent it and to protect its victims, an effort that continues to this day.

Tellingly, the case was brought by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In 1874, there were no laws protecting children from physical abuse from their parents. It was an era of “spare the rod and spoil the child,” and parents routinely meted out painful and damaging punishment without comment or penalty.

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