10:04 – Costco run with Paul and Mary yesterday, followed by dinner. The safety officer for Mary’s company is retiring, and Mary has been appointed to serve that role. As she says, this following a week in which their lab facility experienced an earthquake and a hurricane. Not to mention a plague of locusts.
Colin’s pictures will appear in the biology lab book, in the chapter on genetics and inheritance. This image of Colin at 10 weeks old shows him with full drop ears, a common (and genetically dominant) form.
This image shows Colin at 28 weeks old, by which time his ears have assumed their final fully-erect (prick) form.
I’m using these images to illustrate two ear forms, one dominant and one recessive, and tightly-cropped head shots of these two images in a table to illustrate what puppies a breeding pair of Border Collies with different ear traits can be expected to have. (Colin’s parents are both flip/drop-eared, which means they’re both dominant-recessive with respect to prick ears. If they had eight puppies, which they did, one would expect on average two of those puppies to have prick ears, which was indeed the result.)
16:01 – Geez. I just alerted Jerry Coyne to a free science book deal on Amazon, and almost forgot to tell my own readers about it. The book is Eugene V. Koonin’s The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution. It’s regularly priced at $69.99, print or Kindle, and is currently on sale for $0.00 for Kindle. If you’re interested in this subject, grab while the grabbing is good, because these sales often last 24 hours or less.