Calexico: I love it when a bad delivers on the promise of their shaky early years.

The other day on NPR, I listened to an otherwise intelligent interview with Richard Ellis regarding his new book, The Empty Ocean. While I agree that declining fish stocks is one of the more pressing environmental problems facing us today, his interview was filled with exagerations and out-and-out lies (for example, Ellis claims that GM fish have already escaped from fish farms -- an impossibility, since GM fish farms are not yet operating). When confronted by a caller, Ellis admitted to fudging his facts to try and stress the importance of his issues to the reader.

Friends like Ellis, the environmental movement doesn't need.

But haplodiploidy creates some bizarre family dynamics (see large image link). A mother's relatedness to her son is 0.5, but consider the same relationship from his perspective and r rises to 1.0. Sister-brother relationships are also unequal: from the sister's viewpoint, r is 0.25; from the brother's, it is 0.5. Mothers and daughters have a relatedness of 0.5, whichever way you look at it, and r for two sisters is always 0.75.