evolution
oracknows | September 3, 2007John is sick and tired of antievolutionists. Who can blame him? As he points out, they are utterly immune to evidence or reason:
I was wrong. Very wrong. Information isn't what makes people change their minds. Experience is, and generally nobody has much experience of the facts of biology that underwrite evolution. The so-called "deficit model" of the public understanding of science, which assumes that all they need is more information, is false.
I could also point out that this is the very reason that alternative medicine to this day so regularly trumps scientific, evidence-based medicine in…
evolvingthoughts | September 1, 2007
I have decided that I am sick and tired of the antievolutionists. When I got into this game about 15 years or more ago, I thought that if we just argued and presented information about what evolution really is, and what it means for modern thinking, people would move away from attacking evolution in order to bolster their religious agendas.
I was wrong. Very wrong. Information isn't what makes people change their minds. Experience is, and generally nobody has much experience of the facts of biology that underwrite evolution. The so-called "deficit model" of the public understanding of…
evolgen | September 1, 2007Shelley's posted some pictures of nerd cakes. She calls 'em geek cakes, but I see no headless chickens. Anyway, I've got my own little nerd cake:
We had it made for a party we threw during recruitment weekend for our grad program this past spring. Sadly, the icer responsible for the art couldn't spell, so I put a sprig of something green on the cake for the missing "C" in Lamarck. And if you don't get it, see here.
voltagegate | September 1, 2007The bints, it turns out, have an interesting evolutionary history.
Recent molecular analysis of the order Carnivora (dogs, cats, bears, seals, bints, etc.) places all subsequent species into two clades (branches): the Caniformia and the Feliformia.
The Caniformia clade contains a staggering array of animals - dogs, bears, seals, martins, pandas, otters and walruses - but interestingly enough, dogs (canids) were the first to split from the group (from the Arctoids), something like this:
The other side of the clade, the Feliformia, starts with the split of Nandinia, the African palm civet.…
evolgen | September 1, 2007According to this press release Trends in Genetics (TIG) is "the most established monthly journal in Genetics". I have no idea what that means, but if I were asked to name the top journals in genetics, TIG wouldn't crack the top four. In fact, here is my top four:
Nature Genetics
PLoS Genetics
Genetics
Heredity
Additionally, TIG is published by Elsevier, which means TIG sold guns to terrorists and rogue nations (but they don't anymore). Well, TIG is also publishing an article in November (according to the press release) that will "shed new and unexpected light on some of the long standing…
evolvingthoughts | September 1, 2007
Continuing on from my last post, let's consider the modes of speciation that are called into account for the existence of species.
Here is a list taken from Sergey Gavrilets, which I put in my most recent paper in Biology and Philosophy (2007).
Vicariant – divergent selection and stochastic factors like drift after division of a population by extrinsic factors such as geographical changes;
Peripatric – a small subpopulation, mostly isolated, at the extreme of the parent range. The idea is that it will have both a non-standard sampling of alleles, and also be subjected to divergent…
voltagegate | August 31, 2007It's nice when you stumble across some scientific literature that answers a question that's been bugging you. Well, in this case, maybe half of a question.
I've always wondered if there was some connection between an organism's intelligence and its ability to manipulate objects with hands or some analog, and if there would be a way to quantify either attribute effectively. In my mind, cephalopods (squid, octopus) and primates are prime examples of intelligent manipulators, though this connection breaks down as soon as you browse the cetaceans (whales, dolphins).
In my search for literature…
loom | August 31, 2007 I've been a bit of a slave to trends recently. Everybody else has a Facebook page, so I guess I need one too--even if I don't quite know what to do with it. Myspace? Uh, okay...
As with so many things in the human experience, great or small, we are not quite alone when it comes to trend-following--as I explain in my latest column for Forbes. Check it out.
Per usual, here are some of the sources I used for the piece:
Transmission of multiple traditions within and between chimpanzee groups [The evolution of animal "cultures" and social intelligence
Spread of arbitrary conventions among…
evolvingthoughts | August 31, 2007
A lot of people have said something like "species are the units of evolution". What does this even mean? So far as I can tell, nobody has really fleshed this out.
What, to begin, are the units of evolution? It depends a lot on what theory is being employed. If you are talking about population genetics, then the basic unit is, of course, the allele and the locus. That is, alternative genes (a concept that is itself rather problematic) at a given point or position on the genome. If you are talking about development, then the unit is the organism, as it also is when you are talking about…
grrlscientist | August 31, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, splendid fairy-wren, Malurus splendens,sexual dichromatism, evolution, behavior, promiscuity, social monogamy
Male splendid fairy-wren, Malurus splendens.
Image: Pete Morris (Surfbirds.com). [screensaver size]
Everyone is familiar with sexual dichromatism in birds; you know, the gorgeous, colorful male who is paired with the drab female or two. It has been observed in birds that, when males and females differ dramatically in appearance, the females are preferentially mating with a few "pretty boys"; those that have elaborate plumage colors or ornamentation. As…
razib | August 29, 2007I've talked about menopause a fair amount on this blog, usually in relation to the Grandmother Hypothesis. So I thought I'd pass along this article, Eusociality, menopause and information in matrilineal whales, along. I know that many think that menopause is something that will naturally happen if a mammal lives long enough, as opposed to being an adaptation. I'm generally skeptical of this. The one physical anthropologist who I've talked to and who has explored the topic kept reiterating to me how contingent and interlocking the physiological cascades which shut down the reproductive…
pharyngula | August 29, 2007As I've mentioned before, Lucy is going to be in Houston at the end of this week for an extended stay. This is not entirely a joyous occasion in the scientific community: many people, including Richard Leakey, are not happy that such a precious specimen has been subjected to the risks of travel. I sympathize. The bones of Lucy must be treated with the utmost care and regard, and any loss or damage would be an awful tragedy. However, there's more to it than preserving an important fossil: Lucy is a touchstone to our past and is a symbol of the importance of our long history. We need to bring…
oracknows | August 29, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 15, 2005. Enjoy!
One of the criticisms of "intelligent design" (ID) creationism is that it doesn't really offer any new theory or even hypothesis to replace the theory of evolution, which it seeks to supplant (at least in the public schools). It merely exaggerates perceived weaknesses in evolutionary theory and misrepresents…
clock | August 29, 2007One cool thing about being a blogging biologist is that one can write every day about sex with a straight face and then blame readers for "having a dirty mind". But sex is so interesting - life would cease to exist without it and it is a central question in biology, so we have a license, nay, duty, to write about it all the time. We get all blase about it, I guess, compared to "normal people". ;-)
One cool story that revolves around sex is making the rounds of the science blogosphere today. Jake Young explains in seemingly dry scientific language:
This issue has spawned a variety of weird…
evolvingthoughts | August 28, 2007
Oh honestly. Christianity Today reports the travel of the Australopithecine fossil "Lucy" to the US with the closing paragraph:
It should be interesting to see what the interest in Lucy is, given that according to opinion polls roughly half of the American public has expressed serious reservations about the theory of evolution, which nonetheless has enjoyed almost unquestioned hegemony in academia and the mainstream media. Perhaps one explanation for the throngs at the Creation Museum is that there are so few politically correct alternatives for people who question the evolutionary…
clock | August 28, 2007If we are not there at the moment of birth, how come we can bond with the baby and be good fathers or good adoptive parents? Kate explains. Obligatory Reading of the Day.
Update: Related is this new article by former Scibling David Dobbs: The Hormone That Helps You Read Minds
Update 2: Matt responds to Kate's post.
Update 3: Kate wrote a follow-up: Why help out? The life of an alloparent
loom | August 27, 2007Here is a lovely little creature from Sri Lanka, Pettalus cf. cimiciformis, a member of the same lineage that includes the daddy longlegs we're all familiar with. You could call it a daddy longlegs too, but its legs aren't particularly long (plus it's tiny--the size of a sesame seed.)
It may not seem like much, but it poses a fascinating riddle. It belongs to a family of daddy longlegs called Petallidae. Below is a map of where other species of Petallidae can be found. They seem to be scattered randomly across the world. But petallids are terrible at dispersing. Their ranges are small (…
voltagegate | August 27, 2007PZ mentioned the "aquatic ape" hypothesis (AAH) this morning, a relatively obscure speculation about human evolution, and I thought I'd share a two part radio program (or programme) that David Attenborough narrated a few years ago. The notion that humans have an aquatic past might be far fetched, but Attenborough has a knack for making it interesting nonetheless.
The AAH was the brainchild of Sir Alister Hardy, a notable marine biologist who wrote many books on evolution and did some important research on plankton early on. Supposedly through his studies of zooplankton and their relation to…
pharyngula | August 26, 2007How come you people never come visit? I'm only an hour from the freeway by way of a two-lane county road, roughly equidistant from Fargo, Sioux Falls, and Minneapolis, yet somehow no one ever happens to be passing through this remote rural town … until today. Jim Moore took a little detour from his road trip from Victoria, BC to Oklahoma to pop by lovely Morris, Minnesota and say hello. Now we expect the rest of you to come on by.
In case you don't know who Jim Moor is, he maintains this web page, a critique of the Aquatic Ape "Theory". This "theory" (really, it doesn't deserve the promotion…
grrlscientist | August 24, 2007tags: evolution, helping behavior, cooperative breeding, suberb fairy-wren, Malurus cyaneus, birds
A breeding male superb fairy-wren, Malurus cyaneus.
Image: Martin Fowlie.
Here's a question for all of you: whose offspring would do better; those raised only by their parents, or those raised by their parents in addition to an extended family group?
Cooperative breeding is a breeding strategy where some individuals postpone their own reproductive efforts in order to help others in the family group to raise their offspring. Typically, these helpers are genetically related to the offspring…