My wife is now nine weeks pregnant. According to a baby-information website my wife uses, he is a little bigger than a kumquat. I was not sure what a kumquat was, so I had to do a Google Image Search. Considering that I grew up in the Orange/Citrus Belt in California, I was somewhat embarrassed when I saw the “gem of the citrus family.” However, I think the website my wife used could have been a little more ecumenical in its description of the baby; perhaps it could have said “about the same size as a large mouse, or half a rat.” That not only gives an interesting visual, but it also keeps my progeny and the description in the same general family and kingdom.
Speaking of fetal development, my professor recently brought up the tired old demonstration of evolution by comparing a human’s fetal development to that of a lizard’s and chicken’s, also known as Ernst Haeckel’s “Ontology recapitulates Phylogeny.” I couldn’t believe a college-level class was still using this, and undoubtedly students were accepting it as fact.
Lizards, Chickens, and Humans
