evolution
loom | December 26, 2007Last week I wrote about a new study that identified a fossil mammal as the closest relative to whales, helping to shed light on how whales moved from land to sea. The mammal, Indohyus, was a small four-legged creature that probably spent a fair amount of time in water and ate vegetation. The authors of the new study proposed that the ancestors of whales originally lived this way. Gradually, the whale lineage became more adapted to life in water and shifted to eating meat, as exemplified by early whales like Ambulocetus, which was something like a furry alligator.
In the comment thread,…
mikethemadbiologist | December 26, 2007From the archives comes this post about movie critic Roger Ebert and the email he sent me.
A little while back, Roger Ebert wrote a column assailing Imax theaters for pulling movies that were about the origin of life, the origin of the universe, and evolution. I suggested that we should send him email and thank him for supporting science. Well, I did just that, and in my email In Box today was a reply from Ebert. Pretty damn cool.To sum up, he says that he's received a lot of ('countless') emails from creationists who use ridiculous arguments. The criticism he's received the most is what he (…
evolvingthoughts | December 25, 2007
It is the default opinion of those who accept evolution and those who deny it, that before Darwin, or Lamarck at any rate, everyone was a special creationist. Even Darwin implies in the Origin that if one is not a transformist with regards to species, one is a special creationist. Is it true, and what work does "special" do when affixed to "creation"?
It's important to know if only because of those interminable canards creationists of today in which science is supposed to be based on the work of creationists like Newton because they Christians, and didn't believe in evolution. As if one…
oracknows | December 23, 2007You be the judge:
I believe, first of all, evolution is a crock.
It takes a lot of faith to believe that I came from an ameba. A lot of faith!
So evolution should be taught in Faith Class, otherwise known in parochial schools as Religion Class.
It's a crazy world we live in. Crazier every day. But one of the craziest notions that ever came down the pike is evolution. Who in his right mind would ever believe that the complicated homo sapien derived from a speck? That's getting the larger from the smaller.
No, it's an even crazier world when a clueless twit like Grant Swank can write something…
clock | December 22, 2007On Pilobolous:
When I first wrote my post on Pilobolus (here and here) I really wanted to do something extra, which I could not do at the time. If you scroll down that post, you will see I reprinted the Figure 1 from the Uebelmesser paper. What I wanted to do was find (and I asked around for something like that) the exact times of dawn and dusk at the site where Uebelmesser did her work and thus be able to figure out the dates when the tests were done and the exact phase-relationship between the dawn and the time when Pilobolus shoots its spores.
Now, I see that such a chart exists (via) and…
clock | December 22, 2007
Is there any kid who does not love giraffes? They are just so amazing: tall, leggy, fast and graceful, with prehensile tongues and a need to go through complex calistehnics in order to drink. The favourites at zoos, in natural history museums and on TV nature shows.
Giraffes were also important players in the history of evolutionary thought and I bet you have all seen, and heard the criticisms of, the iconic comparison between Lamarck's and Darwin's notions of evolution using a comic strip featuring giraffes and how they got their long necks.
Giraffes sleep very little and mostly standing…
evolvingthoughts | December 22, 2007
Okay, so the Eighth Day Inventism calendar as rolled around to coincide our Holy day with one of yours. We Inventists are open minded people and often try to reach out to you heathen irreligious puppy grinding moral monsters. Because that's what you are, you know, if you don't exactly believe and do what we Inventists do.
So to try to save you from your moral malaise of happy lives and families, meaningless rituals that you perform on turkeys several times a year, and other abominations that you make more or less simultaneous with the summer solstice (did I mention that Inventists use God'…
pharyngula | December 22, 2007So how many species of giraffe are there? 1? 6? 11? You've got to love how messy and complicated biology is.
grrlscientist | December 22, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, giraffe species, Giraffa camelopardalis, speciation, evolution, conservation, molecular phylogeny
West African giraffe, currently Giraffa camelopardalis peralta.
Image: Wikipedia (Creative Commons) [larger view]
How many species of giraffes are there? Well, it may surprise you to learn this, but some people have actually thought about this throughout the decades, and they decided that there is only one species, Giraffa camelopardalis. However, a paper published today in BMC Biology convincingly demonstrates that giraffes are actually comprised of at least six…
razib | December 22, 2007No, this should not be in the "Physical Science" category. By hypersphere I'm thinking of the model that R.A. Fisher popularized as opposed to Sewall Wright's conception of the adaptive landscape, a multidimensional sphere within which was located a position which was the adaptive optimum. While Wright's landscapes were rugged, and so opened up the possibility that gene-gene interactions and some level of stochasticity and meta-population dynamics were critical factors in evolution over the long term, Fisher's more symmetrical model focuses on the power of selection operating on loci of…
evolgen | December 21, 2007There's been a whole lot of hype around the Hawks et al. paper describing a recent burst of adaptive evolution in the human genome. The problem is a lot of people are conflating accelerated adaptive evolution with accelerated evolution. Take this for example:
12/11: Accelerated Human Evolution
In recent years, humans have evolved at a much higher rate than previously thought, according to a new paper in PNAS. By analyzing genome variations, researchers found that the rate of human evolution was fairly stagnant until about 50,000 years ago, and then--because of larger populations, climate…
gregladen | December 21, 2007Plant and animal fossils recently discovered from an island in the Bahamas tell a story of habitat change and human involvement in local extinction.
These finds are reported in a paper by Steadman et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Most people with an interest in natural history know about one or more regions that were at one time covered by "a great inland sea." For instance, if you live in the American Midwest, you probably know that much of this region was covered by such a sea, evidenced by extensive limestone beds and other geological manifestations. As…
pharyngula | December 21, 2007
A while back, I summarized a review of the evolution of eyes across the whole of the metazoa — it doesn't matter whether we're looking at flies or jellyfish or salmon or shrimp, when you get right down to the biochemistry and cell biology of photoreception, the common ancestry of the visual system is apparent. Vision evolved in the pre-Cambrian, and we have all inherited the same basic machinery — since then, we've mainly been elaborating, refining, and randomly varying the structures that add functionality to the eye.
Now there's a new and wonderfully comprehensive review of the evolution…
voltagegate | December 21, 2007
I had to visit an elementary school for a story the other day and had to wait a bit for my interview, so I started walking around the halls, looking at what the kids had been up to in class.
There were the requisite scaled models of Native American abodes, teepees and wigwams, complete with little plastic figures and livestock. Behind that, hanging on a giant corkboard, were self portraits of the children, all smiles and scribbly shirts.
In a smaller corner of the corkboard there was a cluster of little watercolor paintings surrounding a hand written construction paper sign that read "Mrs.…
hrynyshyn | December 20, 2007It doesn't really matter how many transition fossils paleontologists uncover. Creationists are forever claiming fasely that they've produced "nothing which would qualify as intermediate" between today's whales and their terrestrial ancestors. So this week's fascinating news that we might have figured out what such a forebearer looked like is unlikely to change anyone's mind. Still, it would be nice if everyone who rejected evolution watched the video that the journal Nature has made freely available to help explain the paper it just published on what may be "the missing Eocene piece of the…
mikethemadbiologist | December 20, 2007By way of Amanda, I came across this NY Times op-ed by Michael Pollan that discusses the role of agribusiness' misuse of antibiotics in the rise community-acquired methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA). I've talked about the MRSA 'pig epidemic' before, and, Intelligent Designer knows I've talked about the misuse of antibiotics in agriculture, such as the attempt to get cefquinome approved for use in agriculture (Sack, met Mr. Stupid and Ms. Hammers). But I'm not sure that Pollan is correct about this.
The strain of CA-MRSA found in pigs is nothing like those found in healthy…
sporte | December 20, 2007You can get a jump on the Darwin Day festivities.
Once again the Alliance for Science is sponsoring an essay contest for Darwin Day. If you download their suggestions for good essay writing, you can get your essay done over winter break and have a good crack at winning on those cash prizes!
The Alliance for Science is pleased to announce our second annual National High School Essay Contest. We invite interested students to submit essays of up to 1,000 words on one of two topics -- Climate and Evolution or Agriculture and Evolution. Click on the topic names for some possible ideas to explore…
evolvingthoughts | December 19, 2007
A little while back I published an article on species concepts in Reports of the National Center for Science Education, and I just discovered that it is available on the web. This is actually abetter format than the published version, which has weird columns and layout. The citation is
Wilkins, John S. 2006. Species, Kinds, and Evolution. Reports of the National Center for Science Education 26 (4): 36-45.
pharyngula | December 19, 2007We've got a splendid new analysis of a southeast Asian artiodactyl from the Thewissen lab that reveals that these little deer-like animals are a sister taxon to whales — so this pushes our understanding of the ancestry of whales yet further back. Carl Zimmer has already described the essentials — I'll just show a few pictures of the fossils.
If you're read Zimmer's At the Water's Edge, you already know that one of the key diagnostic features of cetaceans is the large auditory bulla at the bottom of the skull. It's a distinctive bony capsule that contains the ear structures, and which also has…