AI is crying out for regulation, while virologists doing gain-of-function research take the opposite tack. Why?
6 days ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
2 comments:
I have read elsewhere that the American turkey had been taken back by the Spanish and bred extensively throughout Europe and the near east. Commonly sold by Turkish traders the fowl became known as Turkey birds or Turkey fowl and eventually just Turkeys. Wikipedia prefers your explanation, while the Straight Dope gives a rather detailed account mentioning both possibilities and suggesting that we should have stuck with the Aztec name of the bird, "xuehxolotl."
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1972/is-turkey-the-bird-named-after-turkey-the-country-or-vice-versa
But, whether your American-centric story or my Eurocentric story is correct, I'd like to add a layer of confusion. Here in Australia the early European immigrants found a large black and white bird that resembled the American Turkey and so they called it..."Bush Turkey." So now a bird with not even a tangential relationship with the former Ottoman empire shares its name.
Thanks for providing the other plausible story that was new to me. And thanks for reminding me of several Thanksgivings in Australia, and indeed, Bush turkeys were common on my study sites in far Northern Queensland, a great bird.
Post a Comment