Dan Harmon

Dan Harmon Instagram – Watching Joan close her nictitating membrane and then having the word nictitating get weirdly “spell checked” by my phone made me look it up and go down a fun biology hole. My first question: which animals have nictitating membranes and which don’t? Seems universal for fish and birds because they live in their own toilet and/or commute at high speeds. But it’s also pervasively scattered throughout mammalia and varies in development – Swimming mammals like polar bears have state of the art nictitating membranes, but so do non-swimmy, super murdery mammals like ferocious Joanie here, ostensibly for sinking their fangs into thrashy, less than compliant lunches. Humans lost it as far back as Chimp Time but you can see the remnant of ours, the plica semilunaris (“half moon flap?”) in the mirror. It’s not wholly vestigial because it now helps with “drainage.” It just lost its little servo motors so it can’t open and shut. Why? The only theory is that our survival business got progressively less “in your face.” We got too fancy for burrowing, swimming, swooping and classic snout-to-snout savaging and we gave ourselves the much higher class, futuristic career of waiting for hyena to wander away from gazelle skeletons so we could crack those gnawed skulls and slurp up the delicious half-rotten brains. Kind of the original “remote work” economy. And when your lifestyle is THAT white collar, maybe you let your subscription to built-in safety goggles expire. Honestly if you start googling “which mammals have nictitating membranes and why” you might accidentally spend two hours reading about it but it was a fascinating way to rest my Kate Middleton Theory lobe | Posted on 22/Mar/2024 10:11:52