July 24, 2004

For the biology geek in all of us, this is a really cool site (click on "The Root of the Tree" to get started).

And, to whom it may concern: crabs and lobsters are much more closely related to insects than they are to spiders. But, they are so distantly related to mammals, that the split occurred before the ancestor of the modern day sea urchin--just to give it a little perspective. In the grand scheme of things, spiders and lobsters are very closely related. Therefore, eating a spider or an insect would be, philosophically, very similar to eating lobster--not gross at all.

However, most of arthopoda is made up of marine species--with the notable exceptions of insects, spiders, millipedes, and centipedes (and the close relatives thereof). And, if memory serves, all major evolutionary splits between the arthropods occurred under marine conditions (long ago), and the various groups later gave rise to several cases of convergent evolution (the terrestrial species). So, spiders are not lobsters that crawled out of the ocean. But spiders and lobsters have a common ancestor that had many descendants, some of which did crawl out of the ocean. If the condition of crawling out of the ocean makes an animal gross to eat, then spiders are more gross than lobsters.