evolution
evolvingthoughts | December 19, 2007
As I mentioned earlier, I love a good book review if it excoriates a stupid book. Norman Levitt, of Rutgers University, has an absolutely lovely piece of critical invective for Steve Fuller's defense of Intelligent Design here. Fuller is a sociologist philosopher* of science who seems to dislike science intensely, unless he does it. At the Dover Trial, he got a lot of money to write a fairly incoherent defense of ID, which seemed only to exacerbate the judge's final decision, and it seems he is cashing in again by putting out a book based on his "expert witness". Read Levitt's deflation of…
loom | December 19, 2007When I first met Hans Thewissen, he spending an afternoon standing on a table, pointing a camera at a fossil between his feet. He asked me to hold a clip light to get rid of some shadows. I felt like I was at a paleontological fashion shoot.
Thewissen was taking pictures of bones from a whale that walked. As I later wrote in my book At the Water's Edge, Thewissen has discovered some crucial clues to the transitions that the ancestors of whales made from land to sea. In Pakistan, he discovered a 47-million-year-old fossil called Ambulocetus natans, that had an otter-like body. It was the first…
voltagegate | December 19, 2007The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science recently published an article discussing some progress in blue crab research and conservation, and mentioned a related report:
The Chesapeake Bay blue crab population has stabilized, but at historically low levels according to a recent report by the Chesapeake Bay Commission's Bi-State Blue Crab Technical Advisory Committee.
Though the news isn't quite heartening, it's better than nothing.
Blue crab populations have been declining tremendously over the past few decades, not only threatening a population of the animals, but also…
laelaps | December 19, 2007
Awful Changes.
Man found only in a fossil state -- Reappearance of Ichthyosauri.
A Lecture. -- "You will at once perceive," continued Professor Ichthyosaurus, "that the skull before us belonged to some of the Lower order of animals the teeth are very insignificant the power of the jaw trifling, and altogether it seems wonderful how the creature could have procured food."
[Cribbed from Neil.]
Every once in a while scientists get thrown a curve ball by the popular press, a kind of question that requires a short and carefully-devised answer as the query, in any other setting, what make the…
evolvingthoughts | December 18, 2007
PZ Murghl has challenged me to explain why there are theology departments in universities. Of course, most universities lack theology departments, and some, like the Princeton Theological Seminary, have been hived off their home institution. Back when I actually did theology, at Ridley College at the University of Melbourne, the theology was run independently of the university under the aegis of a nationwide theological umbrella institution, and its entire connection with the university was as a domiciliary college.
But that's not what PZ is asking. So I will give a reason and limited…
razib | December 18, 2007Family Ties That Bind: Maternal Grandparents Are More Involved In The Lives Of Their Grandchildren:
For grandparents living within 19.5 miles (30 km) of their grandchildren, over 30% of the maternal grandmothers had contact daily or a few times a week. Around 25% of the maternal grandfathers had contact daily or a few times a week. In contrast, only around 15 % of the paternal grandmothers and little more than 15% of the paternal grandfathers would have contact daily or a few times a week.
The sample was Dutch, and the authors hypothesize that the reason that maternal, as opposed to paternal…
razib | December 17, 2007The acceleration story has finally cooled down a bit judging by my google news feed. That being said, I suggest you check out the comments threads on p-ter's two posts, here & here. John Hawks and some of the other authors of the paper have been participating in the back and forth. The paper is finally on PNAS's site (Open Access), with the supplementary information. It is also important that you read this paper in concert with Global landscape of recent inferred Darwinian selection for Homo sapiens, which has a detailed explication of the methods and more specific data.
grrlscientist | December 17, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, blue tits, Cyanistes caeruleus, Parus caeruleus, sexual selection, mate choice, ornithology, female coloration, reproduction, maternal quality, evolution, birds, ornithology
In many bird species, the females are brightly colored, just as the males are, but the evolutionary reasons for brightly colored females is unclear. According to one hypothesis, because males and females share the same genome, their traits are similar. However, according to another hypothesis, there may also be selective pressures on females, just as there are on males, to develop brightly…
evolvingthoughts | December 17, 2007
Sorry I haven't blogged for a bit - I've been on the road, err, sky for a while.
So it turns out that Texas, which seems to be the source of much antiscience reaction these days, has yet another problem, and it turns on what a species is. Texas named the Guadalupe bass its state fish in 1989. Now it seems that overfishing, and restocking waterways with another species, has led to the probable extinction by interbreeding of the state icon.
kxan is reporting that the restocked fish, the small mouthed bass, was assumed to be infertile with the Guadalupe bass because it was a different…
pharyngula | December 17, 2007Larry Moran has had a couple of articles up lately on Dr Sharon Moalem, a fellow who has a book out called Survival of the Sickest, and who also has a blog. Larry noticed a couple of things: he's writing utter tripe about junk DNA, he's editing and deleting comments about his science from his blog, and he's been misleading about his credentials — although, to be fair, Moalem does plainly and accurately list his background on the endflaps of the book (some of this has come from a student blog that has been dissecting his dubious claims).
And then I noticed…I actually have Moalem's book! I get…
mikethemadbiologist | December 17, 2007ScienceBloging Greg Laden reports that the Texas Board of Higher Education is considering accrediting The Texas Based Institute for Creation Research so it could offer an online course in Science Education.
ScienceBlogling PZ offers one solution to stop the inanity (or at least limit the damage if Texas proceeds):
I hope Texas scientists can slap that Board into wakeful reality before that meeting, because if this goes through, the trust I can give Texas-trained teachers is getting flushed right down the sewer. And if Texans can't fix this, the rest of the country has to step up and deny…
pharyngula | December 15, 2007If you've got an hour free, this interview with Kevin Padian is a pleasant listen. The interviewer is a bit of a bore, but Padian is always an intelligent conversationalist — I'd like to have seen a more aggressive counter to some of the silly stuff brought up by the interviewer, but this was not an antagonistic situation so I can also see why the discussion goes in the direction it does. There were a lot of places where I would have said, "Padian is exactly right, but…" — but then I think I'm just intrinsically crankier.
Well, there is a part about halfway through where he says the role of…
razib | December 15, 2007I received this email today:
Hi, I have a younger cousin who ran with a protestant fundamentalist crowd early in high school and as result started turning her nose at the notion of evolution, I thought she was a lost cause but now in her senior year she as mellowed (probably due to the mellowing of her crush on the fundie boy that drew her to this crowd in the first place) and I'd like to give her a book for Christmas that would relax whatever reflexive hang-ups she has acquired to studying evolution and biology. Since she's planning on going into engineering and has a real interest in the…
pharyngula | December 15, 2007
Those of you who have been pregnant, or have been a partner to someone who has been pregnant, are familiar with one among many common consequences: lower back pain. It's not surprising—pregnant women are carrying this low-slung 7kg (15lb) weight, and the closest we males can come to the experience would be pressing a bowling ball to our bellybutton and hauling it around with us everywhere we go. This is the kind of load that can put someone seriously out of balance, and one way we compensate for a forward-projecting load is to increase the curvature of our spines (especially the lumbar…
evolvingthoughts | December 13, 2007
It's a dangerous thing to let philosophers talk to high school students, in the main, for we tend to drown our audience in terminology and deep concepts (many of which turn out to be not so deep), but I do try to communicate clearly when it is needed. My kids indicate that maybe I am not so successful as I might think, but this is a letter I received yesterday from a student that I thought might be useful for others. Named have been erased to protect the innocent (i.e., not me).
Mr. Wilkins,
My name is Alex ***** and I am a junior in high school. I'm doing a research paper on the moral…
razib | December 13, 2007I've blogged about The Grandmother Hypothesis. Roughly, the question is why do women go through a "change" which rapidly shifts them from being able to become pregnant, though at sharply reduced rates by the time that menopause occurs, to a state of infertility where they may survive for up to three decades? Some argue that this is a peculiar human adaptation and that our social structures, where grandmothers may gain more in investing in their grandchildren than continuing to produce offspring in terms of long term reproductive fitness, are the cause. In contrast to women for males the…
gregladen | December 13, 2007The Central African Rainforest (as distinct from the West African Rain Forest) spans an area from the Atlantic coast to nearly Lake Victoria in Uganda and Tanzania. In fairly recent times (the mid Holocene) this forest was probably continuous all the way to Victoria, and probably extended farther north and south than one might imagine from looking at its current distribution.
Within the forest are major rivers, including the Congo. The Congo River is the only major river in the world that crosses the Equator twice. This trans-equatorial configuration guarantees that the rivers picks up…
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2007If you visit ScienceBlogs regularly, you've probably read about ScienceBloglings Sheril Kirshenbaum's and Chris Mooney's proposal for a presidential debate about science. There's a lot I like about this proposal, but the reality of what could happen bothers me. First, what I like about the idea.
For much of the last two and half years, I worked at a non-profit organization that focused on infectious disease policy and programs. Science policy--and politics--are important. The idea that every political candidate would actually have to devise a science policy, and perhaps even be judged by…
gregladen | December 12, 2007Some of the base pairs in a given genome are strung together into templates that code for proteins or RNA molecules. These are the classic "genes." Other base pairs probably have little or no function. Among the DNA that is not in classic gene-templates, however, there is a lot of important information, including "control regions."
How much of each "type" of DNA exists in a particular genome varies. A recent study suggests that the currently used methods for scanning DNA for regulatory sequences may systematically m miss more than half of that information.
Looking specifically at the DNA…
razib | December 12, 2007Two articles in PNAS caught my attention, Rapid dental development in a Middle Paleolithic Belgian Neanderthal & Life history trade-offs explain the evolution of human pygmies. Here are the abstracts:
Recent evidence for developmental differences between modern humans and Neanderthals remains ambiguous. By measuring tooth formation in the entire dentition of a juvenile Neanderthal from Scladina, Belgium, we show that most teeth formed over a shorter time than in modern humans and that dental initiation and eruption were relatively advanced. By registering manifestations of stress…