Title: The Red Queen. Sex and the Ewolution of Human nature
Author(s): Matt Ridley
Release year: 1993 (
Publisher: Viking Books
Why in Database: urtles have been mentioned several times in this book.
First time as a comparison, a reference to their stereotypical slowness:
In about ten years, the genes of the AIDS virus change as much as human genes change in 10 million years. For bacteria, thirty minutes can be a lifetime. Human beings, whose generations are an eternal thirty years long, are evolutionary tortoises.
PICKING DNA’S LOCKS
Evolutionary tortoises nonetheless do more genetic mixing than evolutionary hares. Austin Burt’s discovery of a correlation between generation length and amount of recombination is evidence of the Red Queen at work.”
The second time in the form of the quoted poem about turtles:
The turtle lives
‘twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex:
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile:
—Ogden Nash
The third and fourth references are about the laying of eggs by turtles (and other reptiles) and the influence of the incubation temperature on the sex of hatched animals:
In some fish, shrimp, and reptiles, gender is determined by the temperature at which the egg is incubated. Among turtles, warm eggs hatch into females;
Indeed, no biologist has a watertight explanation for why alligators, crocodiles, and turtles employ this technique: The best one is that it is all size related: The warm eggs hatch as larger babies than the cool ones. If being large is more of an advantage to males than females (true of crocodiles, in which males compete for females) or vice versa (true of turtles, in which large females lay more eggs than small ones, whereas small males are just as capable of fertilizing females as large ones), then it would pay to make warm eggs hatch as the gender that most benefits from being large.
The last turtle fragment is not actually a turtle, ie in the English version the term “porpoises” is used, but in the Polish translation there is the word “żółwie”, “turtles”:
Why bottlenosed dolphins? Why not sharks or porpoises?
Author: XYuriTT
