Travels of a Fish Nut

Physics has fundamental forces as its core. Chemistry has its elements. And the fundamental unit of biology is the species. In this regard it's been likened to stamp collecting. A more modern analogy might be to Pokemon - gotta catch em all! Like chemists studying elements, once we know the different species we can work out how they interact with each other and how they work. And in so doing we can learn about our natural world. Fun stuff! But what actually is a species?   What is a Species? You probably learned the "biological species" definition at school. This definition states that: species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups (Mayr, 1942) This is an often-used definition, which is why you learn it in school, but there are problems with it. For one thing, there are species that are parthenogenetic , meaning they don't breed but reproduce asexually, with the egg developing ...

Emmeline Pankhurst is a pretty important person. Through her leadership of the Women's Social and Political Union she was instrumental in getting British women the vote. 2018 is the centenary of women's suffrage (although it was only partial, being granted only to women over 30 with property or husbands with property; full suffrage only came in 1920 1928*) and the celebrations have brought renewed attention on the women who fought for their (our) political representation.  Emmeline is memorialised in a statue that stands in Victoria Tower Gardens, right by the Houses of Parliament. I stopped by to pay my respects when I was there in July. Emmeline Pankhurst statue It's right by the entrance and pretty hard to miss when you enter the park from the Houses of Parliament end. So I was surprised and quite indignant when I read a few months ago that a non-profit organisation proposed to move the statue . According to the article, they originally wanted to move it to...

Over the last few years I have become increasingly interested in feminism. I have always been a feminist, even if I may not have called myself as such. I finished school in the late 1990s (class of 2000, to be precise) and I believed I could have it all - career and family (not that I ever wanted kids but that's not relevant to this discussion). What is, is that when I left school I slowly began to realise that the story I'd been sold was a pack of lies. Having it all is hard, some might say impossible. There's always compromise and it soon became apparent to me that the bulk of the compromise seemed to fall on women. That's not true, of course, but the compromise falls differently for men and women. Men are supposed to compromise by putting their work first - but working late at the office and being always on call so that their family takes second place. Women, on the other hand are supposed to always put their family first, above and beyond their job or even their ow...