Go congratulate the Jets Nature Network!

The Nature Network of blogs announced reaching a 50,000 comment milestone today.

Yes, that’s right, we’ve reached the impressive though totally arbitrary milestone of 50,000 comments on the blogs. Congratulations to Richard Grant, who unwittingly tipped the threshold with his remark ‘Wintlito? Is that like Wintle Lite?’ on this post.

As you know, I’m of the opinion that blogging is mostly about the comments so cheers to them!
A related Twitt from @NatNetNews asked:

Is Nature Network too insular? How would you like us to improve? Have your say in the comment thread: http://bit.ly/8GDI7b

So if you have any opinion on that, go comment.

Roosters and Lab Rats

A recent post over at Casaubon’s Book discusses the plight of the male farm animal and, in particular, the humble rooster.

What do I mean by “the problem of husbandry?” What I mean is that generally speaking, in the rearing of domesticated animals, one gender of the animals is more valuable than the other. Often, but not always, females are preferred, because they lay the eggs, give the milk, and can reproduce themselves perfectly well with only a very tiny number of male participants.

Now true, we have a highly similar problem in genetic research which involves breeding laboratory vertebrates (most typically mice) for a desired genotype. Frequently enough some fraction of the bred animals never make it into the papers. A desire to match group sizes means that in the simple Mendellian situation, you have twice as many heterozygous as homozygous offspring. A poorly-surviving genotype may further complicate the picture. As does the array of current multi-gene breeding techniques designed to target a controllable gene expression system to a specific tissue.
Nevertheless I wanted to address the broader points made by Sharon Astyk because they are critical for the well-intentioned, non-extremist person who only leans in the direction of Animal Rights wackaloonery.