evolution
evolvingthoughts | June 25, 2007
The Register is reporting that the UK government has ruled that intelligent design is not acceptable in science classes. [via Slashdot]
loom | June 25, 2007In the past few months, the New York Times science section has been putting together some special packages of articles, and this week's bundle is on the topic of evolution. You can read John Noble Wilford on hominids, Nicholas Wade on recent human evolution, Carol Kaesuk Yoon on the evolution of animal development, and more. No animals for me, thanks--I got the microbes. Which is just fine with me. It's a world of evolution I get all to myself.
In my article, I take a look at experiments in which scientists watch microbes evolve, testing out hypotheses about natural selection and other…
voltagegate | June 25, 2007"When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled."
-Charles Darwin
purepedantry | June 25, 2007Science has a fascinating review about the history of cooking and its relation to human evolution. Richard Wrangham, a Harvard primatologist, has been pushing the idea that the expansion in Homo erectus' skull size was the result of additional energy released by cooking meat:
What spurred this dramatic growth in the H. erectus skull? Meat, according to a longstanding body of evidence. The first stone tools appear at Gona in Ethiopia about 2.7 million years ago, along with evidence that hominids were using them to butcher scavenged carcasses and extract marrow from bones. But big changes don'…
voltagegate | June 25, 2007This post was from last July, when I suppose I felt like siphoning some science history into a blog post after reading a great post from Carel. Early 20th century paleontology was exciting stuff.
Tangled Bank # 59 is just itchin' to be read at Science and Reason.
My highly subjective pick of the bunch: A look at the Cambrian explosion from Rigor Vitae:
Everyone's talking about the Cambrian Explosion, it seems. While evolutionary biologists discuss the actual rate of adaptive radiation, a handful of creationists have hailed it as proof of...something...I forget exactly what. The Cambrian…
oracknows | June 25, 2007Longtime readers of this blog may recall Pat Sullivan, Jr. He first popped up as a commenter here two years ago, when I first dove into applying skepticism and critical thinking to the pseudoscientific contention that vaccines in general or the thimerosal preservatives in vaccines cause autism. He's a true believer in the mercury militia and, even to this day, posts on his blog about the unsupported belief that vaccines cause autism somehow. Eventually, he "outed me"--and no doubt will do so again when he notices traffic coming in from this post (yawn). In any case, I haven't really thought…
razib | June 24, 2007Strange. Rise of man theory 'out by 400,000 years'. I'm skeptical, not that I know anything in detail about palaeanthropology aside from books and a few advanced courses. In any case:
Our earliest ancestors gave up hunter-gathering and took to a settled life up to 400,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to controversial research.
...
Professor Ziegert claims that the thousands of blades, scrapers, hand axes and other tools found at sites such as Budrinna, on the shore of the extinct Lake Fezzan in southwest Libya, and at Melka Konture, along the River Awash in Ethiopia,…
pharyngula | June 24, 2007Jason Rosenhouse has dug into the details of the evo-devo chapter of Behe's The Edge of Evolution and found some clear examples of dishonest quote-mining (so what else is new, you may be thinking—it's what creationists do). I've warned you all before that when you see an ellipsis in a creationist quote, you ought to just assume that there's been something cut out that completely contradicts the point the creationist is making; Rosenhouse finds that Behe gets around that little red-flag problem by simply leaving out the ellipses.
I just want to expand a little bit on one point Behe mangles and…
evolvingthoughts | June 21, 2007
I'm putting this up because I will use it to discuss the history of species definitions in a forthcoming talk. It's very interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is the species nominalism, and another that Lewes argues from evidence for biparental inheritance some years before Mendel, and against eugenics, despite his evident racism, and well before Galton.
Footnotes follow their paragraph, and have been slightly retagged for clarity.
Published anonymously by George Henry Lewes, (1856). “Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human.” Westminster Review 66 (July): 135-162. Parts of…
sporte | June 21, 2007If we asked any biologist to pick the five most important techniques in biology, that list would certainly include PCR.
PCR stands for Polymerase Chain Reaction. It's used everywhere. We use it to amplify DNA for cloning, we use it for diagnostic tests, for DNA sequencing, for identifying pathogens, for identifying our long-lost relatives (and sometimes parents), and in forensics. If there's a technique that involves DNA, PCR is probably involved somewhere, too.
Since PCR is such an important technique, and we're going to be using PCR in our course, it's worth checking out a few…
loom | June 21, 2007Last November, scientists announced they had revived a virus that had been dead for millions of years. The virus belongs to a special class that multiply by inserting their genetic code into the genome of their host cell. When the cell divides, it makes a new copy of the virus's genes along with its own DNA. Once it has installed itself in a genome, the virus can liberate itself from time to time, creating new copies. These copies can infect the same cell again, or wander out of the cell to infect another one. Some of these viruses, known as human endogenous retroviruses, may be harmless,…
voltagegate | June 21, 2007Glaciation opening new niches? The bushbuck, Tragelaphus sciptus, is sure to fill them.
I finally had the chance to this paper on molecular biogeography, an interesting method of analyzing the biodiversity of widespread populations of organisms, their core habitats and their interconnectivity. The bushbuck is a perfect model; it populate most of Sub-Saharan Africa. Genetic data - from mitocondrial DNA and cytochrome b complimentary data - was contextualized and integrated with geomorphologic and climatic history. For those keeping track of the ecology basics posts, this is a perfect example…
mikethemadbiologist | June 21, 2007In the May edition of Evolution, Hopi Hoekstra and Jerry Coyne have an interesting commentary, "The Locus of Evolution: Evo Devo and the Genetics of Adaptation." They raise two points about "evo devo" (the fusion of developmental and evolutionary biology) that have always bothered me. From the abstract (boldface mine):
An important tenet of evolutionary developmental biology ("evo devo") is that adaptive mutations affecting morphology are more likely to occur in the cis-regulatory regions than in the protein-coding regions of genes. This argument rests on two claims: (1) the modular nature…
grrlscientist | June 20, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, superb starling, Spreo superbus, Lamprotornis superbus, birds, behavior, infidelity
Superb starling, Lamprotornis (Spreo) superbus.
These small birds are commonly found in open woodlands and savannahs throughout Northeast Africa.
Image: Hogle Zoo, Utah.
While it is widely known that males of many species seek out extra-pair copulations in order to produce as many offspring as possible, the reasons for female "infidelity" are much more complex. For example, a study was recently published that showed how a bird species uses sexual politics to ensure maximal…
mikethemadbiologist | June 20, 2007Having been encouraged by ScienceBlogling John Wilkins, I'm going to follow up on my post about science journalism, and, no doubt, get myself into further trouble. First, though, I want to clarify some points.
Without going into specific detail, I work for a non-profit organization that deals with infectious disease. My primary job--and the one that pays my bills and keeps the lights on--is to conduct and develop research projects. However, I'm also the primary person who deals with questions about the 'science' of our issue (we also have clinical and economic experts). An average day is…
evolvingthoughts | June 20, 2007
A new paper in New Mexico Geology has the following rather tendentious title:
Fassett, J.E. 2007. The documentation of in-place dinosaur fossils in the Paleocene Ojo Alamo Sandstone and Animas Formation in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico and Colorado mandates a paradigm shift: dinosaurs can no longer be thought of as absolute index fossils for end-Cretaceous strata in the Western Interior of North America. New Mexico Geology 29(2):56.
Ack! He mentioned the p-word! Now I have to find him and extract his teeth without anesthetic.
So here's the abstract:
Extensive geochronologic…
grrlscientist | June 20, 2007tags: Donald Rumsfeld, creationism museum, religion, science, streaming video
Three students attended the grand opening of the controversial creationism museum and interview people who agree with it as well as those who do not. This video did not take any side. Their intentions were to simply get people's opinions. [6:07]
evolvingthoughts | June 19, 2007
No! Not orgasmic! [There, that should bump up the hits]
You all know, of course, the inestimable Darren Naish and his wonderful blog Tetrapod Zoology. What? You don't? Go there immediately and come back when you've read it all, and the old site too.
[Fifteen days later]
So, I wanted to mention a similar blog, by a student working on spider systematics (way cool), name of Christopher Taylor, called Catalogue of Organisms. In this 300th anniversary of the first real such catelogue by Linnaeus, that's a way cool title. And of course you have an almost endless supply of cool material, even…
jlynch | June 18, 2007
This image released by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing shows front views of a new fossil panda skull, Ailuropoda microta, from Jinyin Cave, Guangxi, China, left, and a living giant panda skull, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, right. The first skull of the earliest known ancestor of the giant panda has been discovered in China, researchers report. Discovery of the skull, estimated to be at least 2 million years old, is reported by Russell L. Ciochon in the Tuesday June 19, 2007 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (AP Photo/ Institute…
loom | June 16, 2007Today I jump sections at the New York Times. In the Week In Review, I take a look at the news of a bowhead whale that carried a harpoon tip for 115 years. It's a cool discovery, but 115 years is actually not extraordinarily long for a bowhead whale--or a rockeye rockfish. Both those animals can live over 200 years. In today's essay, I reflect on the evolution of old age (as well as the evolution of fleetingly short life spans). If you want to head for some scientific sources, check out the web site of Linda Partridge, a leading thinker on the evolution of aging at University College London.…