Plastiki  is made out of – you guessed it – plastic. Plastiki, the plastic bottle version of Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki  , was carried from San Francisco to Sydney on a conveyor belt...._{and wind}

I remember when water bottles were introduced on the Norwegian market. It was the most stupid idea I had ever heard of and could not imagine how anybody would be willing to loose their money on this bound to fail business project. Obviously I was wrong. Even in a clean country like Norway where fresh water is abundant everywhere there was a market for bottled water. Go figure.

The concept of "primitive" is one that is very often misunderstood.

Properly defined, "primitive" means "more like a particular ancestor", refers only to individual characteristics (not whole species or lineages), and is contrasted with "derived" (not "advanced" or "more evolved").

I have covered this and other misunderstandings of evolutionary concepts in various articles and I try to clarify these in my courses. But the intuitive interpretation in which one species is deemed more primitive than another is very hard to shake, including in the scientific literature.

An example:

As I have explained in various blog posts and in this paper, it is a fallacy to assume that any one character found in a so-called "primitive" species alive today was also found in the ancestral species. All living species are modern species, and "primitive" vs. "derived" refers to characters, not whole species.

Anyway, New Scientist seems to have fallen for this in their interpretation of a recent paper.

Bellyflopping frogs shed light on evolution