evolution
grrlscientist | December 11, 2007tags: holidays, social relationships, gift-giving, psychology, behavioral evolution, evolution
Since the holidays are upon us once more, I thought you would be interested to read about the psychology of gift-giving. In short, even though giving someone a gift is simple enough, the psychology behind this act is much more complex than most people realize.
A large number of scientists, ranging from psychologists to economists, have studied the purpose and ramifications of gift giving in humans and have learned a surprising number of things about it. Even though many people claim they are…
sciencetolife | December 11, 2007A new video by evolution biologist Aaron Filler, MD, PhD, medical director at the Institute for Spinal Disorders at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, provides striking evidence that infant siamang apes walk like humans.
This evidence, along with new information from the fossil record and from genetics, supports an upright bipedal ancestor for both the apes and humans. By showing that the upright bipedal body form of humans evolved before the knuckle-walkers (like gorillas), it promises to push back the date of the first human to 21 million years ago.
Dr. Filler has written about…
gregladen | December 11, 2007There seems to be some interesting things going on with the recently reported study of rates of evolution in humans. We are getting reports of a wide range of rather startling conclusions being touted by the researchers who wrote this paper. These conclusions typically come from press releases, and then are regurgitated by press outlets, then read and reported by bloggers, and so on. Here is, in toto, the press release from the University of Wisconsin, where John Hawks, one of the authors of the study, works. I reproduce the press release here without further comment.
Genome study…
oracknows | December 11, 2007It's been a while since I've visited the cesspool that is Uncommon Descent, a.k.a. Bill Dembski's home for wandering sycophants, toadies, and lackeys. There's a good reason for this; I just get tired of the sheer stupidity that routinely assaults my brain every time I make the mistake of taking a look at UD's latest attempt to try to refute evolution. Worse, there's lots of other pseudoscience there these days, from the promotion of the use of cancer therapies that haven't been subjected to clinical trials yet to anthropomorphic global warming "skepticism." Yes, every time I peruse the posts…
loom | December 10, 2007In tomorrow's New York Times, I have a story about some very fun research--the study of the world's biggest gulp. Some new research indicates that the biggest species of whales eat by gulping their own weight in water every thirty seconds. They do so in much the same way a parachute stops a race car.
Here's the article.
Here's the podcast (I come on at about 8:30)
Here's the original paper.
And here are the web sites of two of the authors, Nick Pyenson and Jeremy Goldbogen.
evolvingthoughts | December 10, 2007
Let's suppose there is a game, say, baseball. This game is named and described for the ways that adult humans with bats, balls, and fields, behave normatively, as written up in an authoritative manual. Everybody knows what baseball is, or can point to an example of it.
Along comes someone, however, who notes that there is a formal resemblance between baseball and what some ants do in some hitherto undiscovered nest. So, they start to call it "ant baseball". So far, no harm. Then someone else comes along and starts making inferences about what ants do in terms of the rules of the game as…
razib | December 10, 2007Update on paper access: You can get it here already.
Note: I'm going to put a link roundup (updated) at this post. End Note
Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution:
Genomic surveys in humans identify a large amount of recent positive selection. Using the 3.9-million HapMap SNP dataset, we found that selection has accelerated greatly during the last 40,000 years. We tested the null hypothesis that the observed age distribution of recent positively selected linkage blocks is consistent with a constant rate of adaptive substitution during human evolution. We show that a constant rate…
gregladen | December 10, 2007There is a new paper, just coming out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that explores the idea that humans have undergone an increased rate of evolution over the last several tens of thousands of years.
By an increased rate of evolution, the authors mean an increased rate of adaptive change in the genome. By recent times, the authors mean various things, depending on which part of the analysis you examine, and depending on what is meant by "increased." ... In other words, the timing of an event that is not really an event (but rather a change in rate of something) is hard…
evolvingthoughts | December 9, 2007
Just to head off the obvious:
Do people kill because their religion or ideology tells them that nonbelievers are subhuman? Yes. Do people go to war because their religion or ideology tells them it is their patriotic duty? Yes. Do people walk into a church or missionary school and kill people because of their religion or ideology. Almost never. They do it because they are insane.
Believe it or not, the former actions are adaptive: if you follow the conventions you are accepted in your community, which raises your fitness. It's political, not ideological. The latter - the random killing of…
terrasig | December 9, 2007PZ Myers also noted this story that came via Brandon Haught of Florida Citizens for Science: a Florida Department of Education official used her professional affiliations (albeit via a personal e-mail account) to lobby against evolution being taught as the state updates its science educational standards:
My name is Charlie Carraway and I'm a member of Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church, Sopchoppy , Florida , but I also work for the Florida Department of Education as the Director of the Office of Instructional Materials. That means I oversee the adoption process in the state, and I work in…
hrynyshyn | December 8, 2007So there was this guy, right? He worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His research was specifically targeted at evolutionary processes. But he was a creationist, so he refused to address evolution in his research. So he was fired. So he sued.
In a 2004 letter to [Nathaniel] Abraham, his boss, Woods Hole senior scientist Mark E. Hahn, wrote that Abraham said he did not want to work on "evolutionary aspects" of the National Institutes of Health grant for which he was hired, even though the project clearly required scientists to use the principles of evolution in their analyses…
sporte | December 7, 2007This is a fun puzzle. The pink molecule is a protein and the other molecule is a nucleic acid.
If I gave you the amino acid sequence of this protein, or the nucleotide sequence of this nucleic acid, what is the probability of finding a similar sequence in a different species (picked at random)?
A. High
B. Medium
C. Low
D. It depends on the database that you're searching.
You can have more than one answer.
Now, here's the hard part. Explain why you think your answer is correct.
grrlscientist | December 6, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, evolutionary behavior, sociobiology, ornithology, birds, avian, evolution, William Dilger, Agapornis roseicollis, Agapornis fischeri, lovebirds
Peach-faced lovebirds, Agapornis roseicollis (left)
and Fischer's lovebirds, Agapornis fischeri (right),
can interbreed to produce sterile offspring.
Images: LoveBirds New Zealand.
Is behavior genetically "programmed" or is it the result of learning? Or is it instead a little bit of both? This is the old "nature versus nurture" argument that has occupied behavioral and evolutionary scientists, psychologists and even…
oracknows | December 6, 2007It's hard to believe that two weeks have flown by once again. It's even harder to believe that the Skeptics' Circle has been around long enough to reach its 75th edition, which this time around comes straight out of Denmark, courtesy of longtime Respectful Insolence commenter and now blogger Kristjan Wager at Pro-Science. Kristjan's a just-the-facts kind of guy and he delivers a just-the-facts kind of Circle, chock full of skeptical bloggy goodness.
Next up to host on December 20, just in time for Christmas (and what better Christmas gift than the gift of skepticism?) is fellow ScienceBlogger…
evolvingthoughts | December 5, 2007
I love a good academic stoush, so long as I'm just watching and not involved either as an antagonist or as collateral damage. Recently, Steven Pinker published a book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, which was subsequently reviewed by Patricia Churchland, in Nature. Unfortunately, Churchland ascribed a hypothesis to Pinker, which Pinker was, in fact, attacking. Now Pinker has responded. I trust Nature won't mind my reproducing it here:
Patricia Churchland's review of my book The Stuff of Thought ('Poetry in motion' Nature 450, 29–30; 2007) says virtually…
mikethemadbiologist | December 5, 2007No, it doesn't eat brains: that would be a fossil zombie dinosaur. From The Washington Post:
A high school student hunting fossils in the badlands of his native North Dakota discovered an extremely rare mummified dinosaur that includes not just bones but also seldom seen fossilized soft tissue such as skin and muscles, scientists will announce today.
...."He looks like a blow-up dinosaur in some parts," said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in England who is leading the inquiry. "When you actually look at the detail of the skin, the scales themselves are…
mikethemadbiologist | December 5, 2007Between my original post about how to punish creationist politicians and ScienceBlogling Greg's discussion, several readers commented that I was making this a political issue. Quite simply, I am not the only doing that: the Republican theopolitical conservative base is. The issue is, do we fight back, or lose due to their political power?
The creationists might not be able to defeat the reality of the existence of evolution, but they can defeat every effort to teach and study that reality. So, like it or not, evolution has become a political issue, and it must not only be taught in…
evolvingthoughts | December 4, 2007
Forget about the season; virgin births can happen any time of year... and anywhere.
So there is an Ask a Scienceblogger question about virgin births. In zoology this is called "parthenogenesis" (which means "virgin birth"), and in botany it is either called "vegetative reproduction" (think: cuttings) or "apomixis", in which unfertilised seeds germinate. I want to talk today about what that means for our taxonomies.
A long-standing reaction to the notion of there being asexual reproduction is that every novel individual, or any individual who has a mutant gene, would necessarily be its…
clock | December 4, 2007A few weeks ago John Wilkins wrote a long and thoughtful 5-part review of a recent paper by E.O.Wilson and D.S.Wilson:
The two Wilsons on sociobiology
Sociobiology 2: Theoretical foundations
Sociobiology 3: Kin selection and pluralist explanations
Sociobiology 4: individuals as groups, and a summary
Sociobiology 5: What is at issue
Since I always thought of group selection in the Unto Others sense of the term, I am not as confused as some others who are familiar with some older, unrealistic models. I still think that the best explanation is by Robert Brandon in, I think, fifth chapter.…
razib | December 4, 2007Neanderthal Children Grew Up Fast:
Scientists found differences in the duration of tooth growth in the Neanderthal when compared to modern humans, with the former showing shorter times in most cases. This faster growth resulted in a more advanced pattern of dental development than in fossil and living members of our own species (Homo sapiens).
Tanya M. Smith, Michel Toussaint, Donald J. Reid, Anthony J. Olejniczak, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Rapid Dental Development in a Middle Paleolithic Belgian Neanderthal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA December 2007