Mr. Men - Part I

I received one of the strangest - and easiest - homework assignments of my life today. It was for "Research Methods," in which we're beginning a unit on cladistics. Cladistics, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is a method of looking at evolutionary relationships. Without going into gruesome detail (I'll save that for tomorrow, after our cladistics practical) it looks at shared features of organisms and uses those to sort them into categories. We will be doing just that tomorrow for a particular group of organisms: Mr. Men. 'What are Mr. Men?,' you're probably asking yourself right now. An excellent question, and one that took me a while to figure out. They are a series of cartoony characters that are the subject of children's books here in England. Each represents a particular mood or theme (Mr. Lazy, for example, or Mr. Tickle). It all seems a bit inane, but they seemed very popular with the rest of the class, and tomorrow we'll find out how they're all related to one another. The weird homework assignment I started this entry off with is to design our own Mr. Man online that we can include in the analysis. Seriously. Actually, it looks like it'll be a fun practical, and I certainly look forward to seeing where I fall on the cladogram. My guess is that I'll fall somewhere near the Mr. Grumpy and Mr. Grumble clade. I'll certainly keep you all posted.