Ah yes, the striped horse, made by placing striped rods before the drinking-place of a normal horse.
Mike Elzinga · 13 January 2015
logicked said:
Ah yes, the striped horse, made by placing striped rods before the drinking-place of a normal horse.
Ah; hot rods.
I can see the ad now:
"Pimp out your racehorse in pinstripes!"
icstuff · 14 January 2015
I know a few game farmers that have the Burchell's zebra, and they are quite proud of the fact. And the Always make a point of telling you that, you can never mix regular zebra with them. They still taste the same though.
Matt Young · 14 January 2015
Relevant note in Sciencehere. Seems to me that Stephen Jay Gould wrote an article asking whether a zebra was a striped horse or a horse was a zebra without stripes. I forget the answer, but it had to do with whether the gene for stripes was turned on or off. Or something. Maybe someone else recalls that article.
harold · 14 January 2015
What is the creationist explanation for the resemblance of zebras and horses?
Where zebras and horses created separately in their present form, the resemblance a product of "common design"?
Was there a "horse kind" in the Garden of Eden to Noah's flood era, that diverged into horses and zebras in the last 4000 years?
eric · 14 January 2015
harold said:
What is the creationist explanation for the resemblance of zebras and horses?
According to my son's book, the white stripes are made out of salt and the black stripes are made out of pepper, and they are that way so that crocodiles won't want to eat them. Don't judge! Does it really make any less sense than YECism?
gdavidson418 · 14 January 2015
eric said:
harold said:
What is the creationist explanation for the resemblance of zebras and horses?
According to my son's book, the white stripes are made out of salt and the black stripes are made out of pepper, and they are that way so that crocodiles won't want to eat them. Don't judge! Does it really make any less sense than YECism?
Self-seasoned horse meat?
It's like a dream come true...
Glen Davidson
gdavidson418 · 14 January 2015
Matt Young said:
Relevant note in Sciencehere. Seems to me that Stephen Jay Gould wrote an article asking whether a zebra was a striped horse or a horse was a zebra without stripes. I forget the answer, but it had to do with whether the gene for stripes was turned on or off. Or something. Maybe someone else recalls that article.
I think it was, is a zebra a black "horse" with white stripes, or a white "horse" with black stripes. I think there was an "answer," but I don't know (clearly, almost don't care at all) what it was. Black stripes seems right, but that's probably my own guess from the relatively narrower black stripes.
Glen Davidson
eric · 14 January 2015
gdavidson418 said:
I think it was, is a zebra a black "horse" with white stripes, or a white "horse" with black stripes.
Wikipedia says the former. The skin is naturally brown, the white belly and white stripes are the oddity of development.
prongs · 14 January 2015
Matt Young said:
Relevant note in Sciencehere. Seems to me that Stephen Jay Gould wrote an article asking whether a zebra was a striped horse or a horse was a zebra without stripes. I forget the answer, but it had to do with whether the gene for stripes was turned on or off. Or something. Maybe someone else recalls that article.
Gould wrote "How the Zebra Gets Its Stripes" for his column in Natural History magazine. It was republished as chapter 29 in "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes", W. W. Norton and Co, (c) 1983; first paperback edition 1984 (from which I quote).
In it Gould quotes Darwin,
"He who believes that each equine species was independently created, will, I presume, assert that each species has been created with a tendency to vary, both under nature and under domestication, in this particular manner, so as often to become striped like other species of the genus; and that each has been created with a strong tendency, when crossed with species inhabiting distant quarters of the world, to produce hybrids resembling in their stripes, not their own parents, but other species of the genus. To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells now living on the seashore."
In his closing paragraph, Gould summarizes the work of J. B. L. Bard, the Edinburgh embryologist,
Biologists often look to teratologies, or abnormalities of development, to solve such issues. Bard has uncovered an abnormal zebra whose "stripes" are rows of dots and discontinuous blotches, rather than coherent lines of color. The dots and blotches are white on a black background Bard writes: "It is only possible to understand this pattern if the white stripes had failed to form properly and that therefore the 'default' color is black. The role of the striping mechanism is thus to inhibit natural pigment formation rather than to stimulate it." The zebra, in other words, is a black animal with white stripes.
So that's Gould's best explanation of the subject. Also relevant is chapter 28 of the same book, "What, If Anything, Is a Zebra?" and chapter 30, "Quaggas, Coiled Oysters, and Flimsy Facts", that Gould joined together into Section 7, "A Zebra Trilogy".
(Any typographical errors are likely mine and not in the original.)
Byers offends everyone. This latest effusion as much contradicts scripture as it denies all scientific knowledge. It should enrage fundamentalists as much as it does rational people.
Truly, if it were not for the inveterate qualities of his prose, one would conclude that Byers is impossible.
DS · 14 January 2015
what abouts unicorns booby boy, was they on the magic ark also? shirley you jest
ksplawn · 15 January 2015
DS said:
what abouts unicorns booby boy, was they on the magic ark also? shirley you jest
Well, unicorns are the ones with magic spells. I wonder if any pegasi had a role in causing the flood by moving in the storm clouds for the deluge...
Kevin B · 15 January 2015
ksplawn said:
DS said:
what abouts unicorns booby boy, was they on the magic ark also? shirley you jest
Well, unicorns are the ones with magic spells. I wonder if any pegasi had a role in causing the flood by moving in the storm clouds for the deluge...
No, it was the raindeer that did that.
I did once encounter the chapter title "Giant Horse-Eating Birds of the Eocene". However, it turned out that although the birds were very big, the horses were very small....
Kelpie · 17 January 2015
gdavidson418 said:
Matt Young said:
Relevant note in Sciencehere. Seems to me that Stephen Jay Gould wrote an article asking whether a zebra was a striped horse or a horse was a zebra without stripes. I forget the answer, but it had to do with whether the gene for stripes was turned on or off. Or something. Maybe someone else recalls that article.
I think it was, is a zebra a black "horse" with white stripes, or a white "horse" with black stripes. I think there was an "answer," but I don't know (clearly, almost don't care at all) what it was. Black stripes seems right, but that's probably my own guess from the relatively narrower black stripes.
Glen Davidson
This is late, so I'm not sure if anyone will see it, but maybe someone will...
Honestly, as a horse person who is fascinated with color genetics, I think zebras are all bay (EE extension AA agouti) and homozygous for a form of dun specific to them. All zorses I have seen pictures of have been bay with stripes. The stripes look like what you'd get if zebra dun is some kind of incomplete dominant. Farms often don't show the dams, so I suppose it is possible that none of the pictures I've seen have been the result of a zebra crossed on a black mare, and they always inherit an A agouti from the horse, but I'm somewhat doubtful.
Also, check out the brown noses and faint brownish stripes on some zebras. Black, at least in horses, never leaves brown on the nose.
Additionally, if you look at a zorse's stripes, you can see how the brown pigment between the stripes seems to dilute more in areas of more intense striping than in areas of less intense striping. The coloration of the quagga is also a big clue, since their striping was so incomplete that they had brown from shoulders to hindquarters.
I think zebras are EE AA DD, and their form of dun causes the brown pigment to concentrate to an extreme degree in the striped areas and dilute to an extreme degree in the areas between the black stripes.
26 Comments
gdavidson418 · 12 January 2015
Clearly had the same Designer as the tiger.
Glen Davidson
Just Bob · 12 January 2015
Henry J · 12 January 2015
Horses that earned their stripes?
Mike Elzinga · 12 January 2015
KlausH · 13 January 2015
Aren't all zebras properly called Quaggas? IIRC, the Plains Zebra was found to be the same species as the Quagga, and the Quagga was named first.
KlausH · 13 January 2015
Henry J · 13 January 2015
Kevin B · 13 January 2015
gdavidson418 · 13 January 2015
eric · 13 January 2015
Horse mimes.
logicked · 13 January 2015
Ah yes, the striped horse, made by placing striped rods before the drinking-place of a normal horse.
Mike Elzinga · 13 January 2015
icstuff · 14 January 2015
I know a few game farmers that have the Burchell's zebra, and they are quite proud of the fact. And the Always make a point of telling you that, you can never mix regular zebra with them. They still taste the same though.
Matt Young · 14 January 2015
Relevant note in Science here. Seems to me that Stephen Jay Gould wrote an article asking whether a zebra was a striped horse or a horse was a zebra without stripes. I forget the answer, but it had to do with whether the gene for stripes was turned on or off. Or something. Maybe someone else recalls that article.
harold · 14 January 2015
What is the creationist explanation for the resemblance of zebras and horses?
Where zebras and horses created separately in their present form, the resemblance a product of "common design"?
Was there a "horse kind" in the Garden of Eden to Noah's flood era, that diverged into horses and zebras in the last 4000 years?
eric · 14 January 2015
gdavidson418 · 14 January 2015
gdavidson418 · 14 January 2015
eric · 14 January 2015
prongs · 14 January 2015
Robert Byers · 14 January 2015
This comment has been moved to The Bathroom Wall.
Dave Luckett · 14 January 2015
Byers offends everyone. This latest effusion as much contradicts scripture as it denies all scientific knowledge. It should enrage fundamentalists as much as it does rational people.
Truly, if it were not for the inveterate qualities of his prose, one would conclude that Byers is impossible.
DS · 14 January 2015
what abouts unicorns booby boy, was they on the magic ark also? shirley you jest
ksplawn · 15 January 2015
Kevin B · 15 January 2015
Kelpie · 17 January 2015