~ Linus, HEY LINUS, HEY LISTEN TO ME

~ Gary what do you want what are you freaking out about???

~ The humans are watching, Linus stop washing your food or they will get suspicious!

~ Oh F$%&

Linus bats the rabbit carcass into the stream to pretend to the human biologists he is just playing with his food.

Endangered Lantau toads show genetic and call differences that could signal an emerging species

The short-legged horned toad, an endangered species in Hong Kong, is a small frog measuring around 40 mm in length. It is characterised by short hind limbs, small horn-like projections above the eyes, and skin coloration and patterns that closely resemble dead leaves. (The photo shows the Short-legged Horned Toad population on Lantau Island.) Credit: Lingnan University

The short-legged horned toad (Boulenophrys brachykolos), listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, is the only known small frog species in Hong Kong belonging to the genus Boulenophrys of the family Megophryidae.

A study led by the Division of Science at Lingnan University has found that the Lantau Island population of the short-legged horned toad shows clear genetic divergence from other local populations, along with several notable differences in the mating calls of males.

The research team suggests that the Lantau population represents an early stage of speciation. Geographic isolation of Lantau Island from other landmasses likely contributed to these unique evolutionary traits. The team recommends treating the Lantau population as a separate conservation unit in the future.

These findings have been published in the journal Current Herpetology.

Distinct genes and faster mating calls

The short-legged horned toad is found in mountain streams on Lantau Island, Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, the New Territories and adjacent Shenzhen. The research team, led by Lingnan University, collected 19 samples of the short-legged horned toad (nine from Lantau Island, six from Hong Kong Island and four from Kowloon) to examine their genetic and morphological characteristics.

The study shows that Short-legged Horned Toads are visually almost identical, making evolutionary differences difficult to detect through traditional field surveys alone. (The photo shows the Short-legged Horned Toad population on Hong Kong Island.). Credit: Lingnan University

The results show that the short-legged horned toads on Lantau form a distinct genetic group separate from those on Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and Shenzhen. This suggests that the Lantau population has been separated from other populations for a considerable period.

In addition, the team recorded and analyzed the mating calls of male short-legged horned toads from Lantau Island, Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. They found significant differences between the calls of the Lantau Island population and those of other local populations. The Lantau population produces calls with a faster rhythm and shorter individual notes.

Similar appearance masks evolutionary differences

In terms of physical appearance, the team found no marked differences between frogs from Lantau Island and other regions, indicating that physical characteristics alone may be insufficient to distinguish the Lantau population from other populations.

Jonathan Fong, the corresponding author of the study, associate dean (administration and education) of the Wu Jieh Yee School of Interdisciplinary Studies and associate professor of the Division of Science at Lingnan University, said the study provides a more comprehensive approach to evaluating evolutionary divergence among populations of the same species.

He said, "Many amphibians look very similar, making evolutionary differences difficult to detect through traditional methods that examine morphology alone. By integrating genetic and acoustic data, we found that frogs on Lantau Island have a distinct genetic makeup and male toads have different mating calls. This suggests that the Lantau population is following a distinct evolutionary trajectory."

Isolation strengthens the case for separate conservation

Sung Yik-hei, the first author of the study and adjunct assistant professor of the Division of Science at Lingnan University, explained that Lantau Island became geographically isolated from the mainland approximately 10,000 years ago. The geographic isolation likely reduced gene flow between populations, allowing the Lantau short-legged horned toad population to develop unique genetic traits over time. The study also highlights that Hong Kong may harbor undiscovered biodiversity.

Sung said, "The results suggest that the short-legged horned toad population on Lantau Island may represent an early stage of speciation, although current evidence is insufficient to determine whether the Lantau population constitutes a distinct species. The short-legged horned toad is an endangered species, and if the Lantau population declines or becomes extinct, its unique genetic traits could be lost and could not be replaced by populations from other areas.

"We therefore propose that conservation management recognize the Lantau population as an independent conservation unit, giving due consideration to its specific conservation needs to ensure the survival of this unique native population."

This is a great article on the history of how we have thought about knowing itself in philosophical, logical, mathematical and scientific contexts/intersections.

This is also coincidentally a perfect explanation of how fascism can co-opt science (arguably science was the necessary host for fascism) but it can never co-exist with it since one way to describe the fundamental root of fascism is to set it in terms of a radical extremist ideology centered on violently denying the reality that everything cannot be perfectly categorized, segmented and controlled, a reality which science, philosophy, art and math has illuminated in undeniable, and beautifully strange ways over and over again.

also see https://www.quantamagazine.org/series/the-evolving-foundations-of-math/

Fascists cannot emotionally handle the universe being anything other than a complex yet elegant clock humming along perfectly according to its mechanisms and perfectly predictable so long as you understood them, and yet the pursuit of knowledge has thoroughly proven that the universe is not that way. From the perspective of science then, fascism is the most cynical religion and the only religion that is fundamentally incompatible with science as it desires to occupy the describable and destroy the idea of the indescribable completely rather than positioning itself across the divide of the indescribable from science as other religions have positioned themselves... which contrary to popular belief as this article establishes itself, is not a divide to which Science is necessarily hostile.

edit This article is also a superb explanation of why Science it is crucial to distinguish between Science itself vs. the residue of facts it leaves behind.

The day before his Königsberg address, at a small academic meeting in the same city, a 24-year-old Austrian named Kurt Gödel had quietly announced that no such system for arithmetic could exist. Whatever reasonable set of rules you fix, something true must lie beyond them and thus beyond our knowledge. We can’t know. We won’t know. Gödel’s results, known as the Incompleteness Theorems, are landmark achievements of 20th-century logic. Recent work in philosophy and mathematics has begun to illuminate the gap they opened, and with it something deeper about the foundations of knowledge itself. The story begins in the same city, but two centuries earlier.

...

Does one unpack ‘add 7 and 5’ to find ‘12’? Kant thought not. Rather, one constructs 12 from 7 and 5 in the mind. More than a century later, a young Dutch mathematician called L E J Brouwer, following Kant’s thought, argued that, if the mathematician’s work consists in such mental constructions, then one cannot assume any statement is either true or false. That was controversial: to strip the mathematician of that assumption, Hilbert retorted, would be like ‘proscribing … to the boxer the use of his fists’.

Gottlob Frege, working in the late 19th century, found Kant’s account of mathematics intolerable for different reasons: arithmetic, he claimed, is not psychological. The numbers exist whether anyone counts them or not. He set about reducing arithmetic to pure logic, grounded in the mind-independent categories of True and False.

The project consumed two decades of his life and produced some of the most consequential advances in the philosophy of language and mathematics in history. It is widely regarded as having sparked the modern discipline of logic. And yet, as the second volume of his masterwork, the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, sat at the printer in 1902, the foundations cracked. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell sent Frege a letter pointing out an inconsistency at the heart of the system. A melancholy note in his diary later summed up his defeat: ‘My efforts to become clear about what is meant by number have resulted in failure.’

Russell had been wrestling with the foundations of mathematics for some years before his letter. It was only after meeting the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano at the International Congress of Philosophy in 1900 that he acquired the tools to attempt the problem. In place of Frege’s edifice, Russell set out to build his own, together with his colleague Alfred North Whitehead. Principia Mathematica appeared in three massive volumes between 1910 and 1913: all of mathematics, grounded in pure logic.

...

The Tractatus became the manifesto of a group of philosophers in Vienna including Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath, who called their position logical positivism. A statement is meaningful only if there is some way of settling whether it is true. Analytic statements are settled by unfolding the definitions of the words involved: for example, ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ is true because a bachelor is, by definition, an unmarried man. Synthetic statements are claims about the world, and are settled by – in principle – going out and looking: ‘It rained in Vienna on 3 June 1929’ is false because one could have observed that the sky over the Ringstrasse stayed clear that day. Anything else is grammar without content.

The Vienna Circle, as they became known, claimed that mathematics is analytic and science is synthetic. The function of mathematics is to extract information from scientific claims: it carries what is already there without adding anything, the way plumbing moves water without supplying any. If the Vienna Circle were right, then Kant’s and Brouwer’s restrictions on scientific and mathematical knowledge were entirely unnecessary. If.

By 1929, after almost three decades of labours by Hilbert, Russell, Frege, Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle and Brouwer, among others, the foundations of mathematics looked very nearly finished. One beam remained that would lock the whole frame together. In the plenary addresses for the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900, Hilbert had set out 23 problems that would define the next century of the subject. The second problem was this: prove that arithmetic is consistent – that is, no chain of reasoning from the axioms, however long, would yield a contradiction. The beam would not go in.

...

What he announced at the Königsberg meeting the day before Hilbert’s radio address, no one had expected. Taking Principia Mathematica as the articulation of mathematics within logic, Gödel showed that there were true mathematical statements that cannot be proved using the resources of Principia Mathematica alone. Among them is the statement ‘Principia Mathematica is consistent.’ The trick at the heart of the proof is to encode statements about the system within the system itself – a move with the same vertiginous quality as Russell’s letter to Frege. But where Russell’s letter had killed a system, Gödel’s theorem killed a programme.

His argument was so general that it applied to any reasonable system for arithmetic. Hilbert’s dream of an axiomatic system capturing all of mathematics – or even just arithmetic – was over.

The researchers used the new chronology to investigate the climate and environmental changes at a timescale equivalent to a human generation, or approximately 50 years, which is rare for terrestrial paleoclimate archives of this time period from the southwestern U.S.

"The White Sands sediments are unique in that they allow us to reconstruct environmental conditions during the last ice age at a very high temporal resolution, so that we can see fluctuations that were relevant for the humans present at that time," said co-author Jessica Tierney, a professor at the U of A Department of Geosciences.

The dinosaur, described in a new paper in the journal Royal Society Open Science, belongs to a group of agile, two-legged carnivores called megaraptorans and is the first of this group to be found in Europe.

Megaraptorans were closely related to tyrannosaurs including Tyrannosaurus rex but had slender heads, attacking prey with their large arms and giant curved claws instead of their jaws.

While some species grew to gigantic sizes, just as tyrannosaurs did, this new species is one of the smallest and earliest of the group to be found, living in the UK in the Early Cretaceous period about 120 million years ago.

It has been named Invictibellatrix amberina. Invictibellatrix means “unconquered female warrior” – honouring megaraptorans’ future role as massive apex predators