evolution
neurotopia | May 19, 2008FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Mary Detweiler,
The Alliance for Science
info@allianceforscience.org
Falls Church, VA -- May 17, 2008. The non-profit Alliance for Science announced the results this week of its second annual National High School Essay Contest. Students were asked to write a 1,000 word essay on either "Agriculture and Evolution" or "Climate and Evolution". Neal Desai, a 10th grader at the Pembroke Hill School in Kansas City, Missouri won the top prize. Neal's insightful essay addressed the tradeoffs between the benefits obtained from genetically modified crops and the potential…
evolvingthoughts | May 18, 2008
Comparative limb growth of a bat (top) and a mouse, in utero development. From the paper below.
One of my favourite statistics is this: one in every four mammal species you meet is a rat or rodent, and one in every five is a bat. That's right, nine in every 20 mammal species is covered by one of these taxa: we may as well treat rodents and bats as the standard mammalian species type. So a paper that combines them has to be good. Quintessence of Dust (what a title!) gives an excellent summary and discussion of a paper that tested evolutionary hypotheses of the evolution of bat wings by…
evolvingthoughts | May 18, 2008
I have been called, for my denial of outright atheism, a Chamberlainist. Well I never felt so much like Neville Chamberlain today as I walked through the corridors of the Seat of Learning* with a contract from the publishers for my book Species: A history of an Idea. I felt like shouting as I waved it, "Peace in our time!" except that the corridors are empty and I'd have felt like a right loon doing that.
As has been noted recently, by the way, Neville Chamberlain noticed that his rapprochement with Hitler had failed and rearmed Britain for the coming war, and responded to Hitler's…
grrlscientist | May 18, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Aves, Psittaciformes, Pseudasturidae, parrots, Palaeogene, Eocene, Denmark
An artist's impression of the parrot-like bird, Mopsitta tanta, dating back 55 million years. The fossils indicate that parrots once flew wild over what is now Norway and Denmark.
Image: David Waterhouse [larger view].
A team of researchers, including a former postdoctoral colleague of mine, recently described fossils from two Lower Eocene parrot-like birds that were discovered in Denmark. The analysis of the fossils reveals that one of the ancient parrots, named Mopsitta tanta, is the…
sa smith | May 18, 2008If you are looking for a 'hero' to look up to in the viral evolution world, you probably couldnt find a better choice than Louis Villarreal of the University of California, Irvine. I mean, he is like *the* definition of someone who came from a tough background, had to struggle through school a bit, but followed their passion to become a leader and innovator in an extraordinarily competitive field.
Villarreal is a Mexican American who grew up in friggen East LA. First one of his family to graduate from high school, he tested the academic waters by first attending community college, then…
pharyngula | May 18, 2008You may recall that a while back I mentioned how Jerry Coyne praised some work on bat evo-devo. I also said that I was going to have to write that paper up sometime. The bad news: I haven't written it up for the blog. The good news: I did write it up for a future Seed column. The better news: Stephen Matheson has a summary right now, so you don't have to wait for my column to come out.
You should still subscribe anyway. It's pretty on shiny paper.
purepedantry | May 16, 2008This is a cool story, but not for the reason the authors are attributing. Researchers at Princeton showed that bacteria can evolve to anticipate future environmental changes. Here is the coverage in Science:
Researchers already know that microbes can mount simple responses to changes in their environment, such as acidity fluctuations, by altering their internal workings. If the changes are regular enough, bacteria can respond ahead of time. But systems biologist Saeed Tavazoie of Princeton University wondered if microbes were capable of more sophisticated reasoning. Could they, for example…
loom | May 15, 2008
The platypus genome, which was published for the first time last week, has proved to be a Whitman's sampler of biological treats. In case you missed the initial reports, you can check out a good summary from PZ Myers (and also take a look at Ryan Gregory's take-down of the bad coverage). But today I just happened to come across another treat that, to my knowledge, hadn't yet been picked out from the box. It's a paper that came out today in Genome Biology. It concerns a very cool side of evolution that not many people appreciate. Species can evolve when their genes are modified, or when they…
cmooney | May 15, 2008...about, like, things people don't want to hear. But if you do want to hear, listen to this Skepticality podcast. I'll quote a particularly poignant part of it, from Olson discussing how little the science world does to support innovative attempts at communication (around minute 40):
What if there's some sixteen year old kid right now that is making great short films about evolution. How can that person get any sort of recognition and support, how can somebody guide them to the place where they can get a hundred thousand dollars to make a documentary film about some aspect of evolution. It…
esiegel | May 14, 2008Good news for science from... the Vatican? No joke. Father Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory and chief astronomer for the Pope, has just issued a public statement stating the following things:
Intelligent beings could exist in outer space.
Life on Mars cannot be ruled out.
The search for extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God.
Next year, the Vatican is organizing a conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.
Whoa. And whoa's wobbly cousin, woah. Did I just step into the 21st century? After my post last week on what Americans…
sa smith | May 14, 2008I wasnt going to talk about this until later, but a commenter/troll left a comment on my last post:
Umm, Do retroviruses have any clinical relevance whatsoever?
Top ten killers in USA per CDC:
Heart disease: 652,091
Cancer: 559,312
Stroke: 143,579
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 130,933
Accidents: 117,809
Diabetes: 75,119
Alzheimer's disease: 71,599
Influenza/Pneumonia: 63,001
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 43,901
Septicemia: 34,136
Do you see any retroviruses on this list? Do you now understand why you toil away at 10 bucks/hour? Your work has not an iota of relevance to…
evolvingthoughts | May 14, 2008
In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V scene 1, Miranda says
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
The third line gave Aldous Huxley the title of his future dystopia, Brave New World. Somewhere between Miranda's naive optimism and Huxley's sardonic pessimism lies What sorts of people should there be? a venture by Canadian academics to investigate the effects of the modern world on our sense of self and "to address concerns around human variation, normalcy, and enhancement". They also have a blog. It is…
gregladen | May 13, 2008There is a point that I've been trying to make for the last few weeks now, off and on, and it is not working. So I'm going to try something new. Please bear with me, and consider the following three scenarios regarding the idea that the Earth is Round (or, possibly, flat):
Please ask yourself: Which of these scenarios is best? Which is least desirable?
Scenario A: Divided Opinion
Maureen: "I think the world is round."
John: "I think the world is flat."
A public opinion poll indicates that fifty percent of those polled believe the world is round, the other fifty percent believe the world…
clock | May 13, 2008One of the latest additions (just two days ago, I think) to the Directory of Open Access Journals is a journal that will be of interest to some of my readers - The Open Sleep Journal. The first volume has been published and contains several interesting articles. One that drew my attention is The Phylogeny of Sleep Database: A New Resource for Sleep Scientists (PDF download) by Patrick McNamara, Isabella Capellini, Erica Harris, Charles L. Nunn, Robert A. Barton and Brian Preston. It describes how they built a database that contains information about sleep patterns in 127 mammalian species…
razib | May 12, 2008Here. The embed is the best bet if you can view it; the download often fails (server has been slammed?). Only a moderate amount of discussion about religion; Dawkins talks a fair bit about an obscure field, evolutionary biology. Well done.
Via Accidental Blogger.
grrlscientist | May 12, 2008tags: How and Why Species Multiply, evolution, ecology, Darwin's finches, Rosemary Grant, Peter Grant, book review
Peter and Rosemary Grant have been studying the phenomenon of speciation in Darwin's finches for 35 years, using every technique available to them from molecular biology to population ecology. They have written several books about various aspects of their work and even were the focus of a Pulitzer-prize winning book. But there has not been a comprehensive yet scholarly book that has captured the essential highlights of their lifetime work, until now. How and Why Species Multiply…
esiegel | May 12, 2008What the heck has this world come to? All over the internet, this picture of an Orangutan trying to fish with a stick has been shown:
But what's the story behind this? Is this evidence that humans are not unique among the Great Apes as tool-users?
Not quite. According to the Daily Mail, this is an orangutan that had extensive exposure to humans; this jungle setting is actually where they reintroduce orangutans into the wild from zoos, private homes and (yikes) butcher shops. This particular orangutan actually doesn't successfully know how to fish; this was something he copied from nearby…
sa smith | May 10, 2008
This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that!
I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;)
WHOO! Classes over! Scary 'wait for grades' time begins... But Im finally going to get to jump into an ERV series Ive been wanting to do for a while! It will hopefully turn into a great resource for all you science defenders when you encounter a Creationist online/real life…
pharyngula | May 10, 2008
Finals week is upon me, and I should be working on piles of paper work right now, but I need a break … and I have to vent some frustration with the popular press coverage of an important scientific event this week, the publication of a draft of the platypus genome. Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is "weird" or "odd" or worse, they imply that the animal is a chimera — "the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri — part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal". No, no, no, a thousand times no; this is the wrong message. The platypus is not part bird, as…