evolution
mikethemadbiologist | May 4, 2007No, KPC isn't a new fast food restaurant. It's short for Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase. The bad news: it's very hard to treat. The good news: it's very rare...for now.
Actually, the correct term is KPC-possessing K. pneumoniae*, but we'll just use the slang 'KPC'--it's what all the cool microbiologists use (I'll refer to the carbapenemase gene as the 'KPC gene'). KPC causes pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and sepsis; the mortality rate from these infections is extremely high.
The KPC gene confers resistance to all cephalosporins and Ã-lactam antibiotics: basically,…
pharyngula | May 3, 2007The gang at the NCSE have put together Padian's testimony at the Dover trial with the slides he used. You may have already read the transcript, but with the figures added it acquires a whole new dimension — it's basically a wonderfully done primer in the basics of macroevolutionary biology. Next time some creationist tries to simper at you that he accepts microevolution, but that there's no evidence for macroevolution and he refuses to believe it, point him at this page. It's aimed not at scientists, but at the judges and lawyers at a trial, so it's eminently comprehensible to any…
jrosenhouse | May 3, 2007Writing in PLoS Biology, Catriona MacCallum offers these wise words on the subject of evolution and medicine. The article describes a conference MacCallum attended on the subject. MacCallum writes:
One reason that evolution doesn't figure prominently in the medical community is that although it makes sense to have evolution taught as part of medicine, that doesn't make it essential. As explained at a meeting on evolution and medicine I recently attended in York, United Kingdom (the Society for the Study of Human Biology and the Biosocial Society's 2006 symposium, “Medicine and Evolution…
jrosenhouse | May 3, 2007In a pleasant change from the ordinary, Slate has been posting a lot of good stuff lately. Today they have this review of a new book by Janet Browne entitled Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography. The review is by Jonathan Weiner:
In 2009, On the Origin of Species will be 150 years old. On Feb. 12, 2009, its author would have turned 200.* Dozens of new books will be published to mark this double anniversary, and at last, Darwin the writer will receive the attention he deserves. Darwin the scientist is beyond famous. Darwin the scribbler is comparatively obscure. But I think he should be…
oracknows | May 3, 2007If there's one undeniable aspect of "intelligent design" creationism advocates, it is their ability to twist and misrepresent science and any discussions of evolution to their own ends. Be it Dr. Michael Egnor's twisting of history to claim that eugenics is based on Darwinism, rather than the artificial selection (or, as we snarky ones like to call it, intelligent design), claims that "Darwinism" is a tautology and irrelevant to the question of antimicrobial resistance, or blaming evolution for atheism, the decline of Western mores, and, if you believe the ID advocates, bad breath, key to the…
evolgen | May 3, 2007Sorry, dude, but it has to be said. In a feature from the March issue of Seed Magazine (one that doesn't appear to be available online), Jonah Lehrer profiles six young scientists dubbed "The Truth Seekers". In his description of Pardis Sabeti, Jonah makes the common error of conflating evolution with natural selection.
Sabeti has helped develop algorithms that use linkage disequilibrium (LD) in DNA sequence polymorphism data to detect evidence for natural selection acting on those regions. She was also involved in a study that identified signatures of natural selection in the malaria…
clock | May 2, 2007Of course, I was not the only one commenting on the recent duck phallus paper. You should check out the other blogospheric responses, e.g., by Carl, PZ, RPM, Grrrl, Laelaps, Neil, Belle, Zuzu, Guru and many others.
Unfortunately, most people link only to each other, or to the press release, or to the NYTimes article. The articles are fine, but they are simplified for the mass audience. If you are a scientist, you should read the original paper to get all the details.
Furthermore, many commenters on blogs have asked some very good questions about the research which remained unanswered, e.…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2007tags: ducks, birds, phallus, vagina, evolution, reproduction
An interesting article was published today by a group led by Patricia Brennan in the open-access journal, PLoS One, about the structural co-evolution of duck phalluses and vaginas. What, you ask? Ducks have phalluses? Yes, indeed they do. Further, ducks are also famous for forced copulations -- as many as 30% of all copulations are forced -- so it only makes evolutionary sense that females have co-evolved a method for excluding sperm they don't want fertilizing their precious eggs.
This paper examines the reproductive and…
mikethemadbiologist | May 2, 2007Yesterday, the NY Times had an article about using vaccination to eliminate or greatly reduce E. coli O157:H7 infections. Strategies differ: some would vaccinate the cows, while others would vaccinate people. The new threat due to E. coli O157:H7 isn't from contaminated meat, but from contaminated vegetables, such as the spinach outbreak. Unfortunately, I don't think vaccination is going to work.
We'll ignore the notion that if we were to institute a mass vaccination campaign of either cattle or people, we might want to target something that kills more than 61 people per year, and, in…
razib | May 2, 2007The Washington Post has an article up on recent controversies regarding the relationship between Neandertals and our own lineage. Nothing too surprising, though I did note one point:
But one genetic trait of modern Europeans makes him [Chris Stringer] doubt there was any major Neanderthal input -- the fact that most humans today are genetically ill-adapted to cold weather. Only some native Indian populations, as well as people in the north of Eurasia and aborigines in Australia (who experience deep cold at night), have good genetic defenses to cold. Since Neanderthals lived in Europe for…
razib | May 1, 2007Apparently Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite implicated in human behavior modification, might have its origins in South America. This puts a whole new spin on The Columbian Exchange. One of the underemphasized aspects of the meeting of "Old" and "New" World, to my mind, are the first order biological dynamics. That is, there is plenty of discussion of the transmission of potatoes to various Eurasian cultures and how it revolutionized agriculture there, but it seems likely (as documented by Charles C. Mann in his book 1491) that biological interaction between human populations was just as…
evolvingthoughts | May 1, 2007
OK, Americans, a couple of years after the British saw it, you are being treated to Jonathon Miller's A Brief History of Unbelief, a three-part series on how atheism came to be possible in western society, such that it is now one of the larger "religious" divisions in our culture. I'm not mocking, as Australia hasn't seen it yet. But I got sent a review copy, so here are my thoughts, below the fold. It starts on 54 May on PBS, I'm told, so check your local schedules, as they say.
I really really really wanted to like this series. Miller is one of my TV heroes, and was famously a member of…
pharyngula | May 1, 2007I'm sure you've already heard about it, so I'm a little redundant to bring it up — Carl Zimmer has a spiffy article in the NY Times about duck phalluses. No, that's not quite right; the most interesting part of the story was the bit about duck oviducts. Female ducks have been evolving increasingly convoluted oviducts to baffle the efforts of duck rapists to inseminate them, and male ducks have been evolving concomitantly long phalluses to thread the maze and deliver sperm to the ovaries.
I'd heard about these huge intromittent organs in ducks before, but this is another fascinating revelation…
clock | May 1, 2007...because weird sex does not only happen on Fridays....
Remember this? Many have asked themselves (I did) where does it go, i.e., what kind of female genital tract can accomodate such a large penis. But one person actually did not stop at wondering but set out to find out. You can find out who and how and why in Carl Zimmer's today's NYTimes article about today's PLoS-One paper.
evolvingthoughts | April 30, 2007
So, it appears that one's metabolic rate and hunger triggers are set by in utero factors. This means that leptin and insulin have different effects depending on early experiences in life, particularly the brain's desire to feed.
Worse, it seems that once you have the weight, you are unlikely to get it off, according to this release by the American Physiological Society.
I'm a lost cause. You children go eat healthily and I will be forced to consume this chocolate bar. Damn...
Silverbacks are supposed to look.. bulgy. I tain't all muscle, you know.
loom | April 30, 2007 When you find yourself, as I did a few days ago, spending a morning watching the absurdly long phalluses of ducks being coaxed from their nether regions, you can find yourself wondering how your life ended up this way. Fortunately, there is a higher goal to such weirdness. The phalluses of ducks are just the tip of an evolutionary iceberg. The female ducks have their own kinkiness, too. It's all part of a fierce avian battle of the sexes.
For the latest, see my article in tomorrow's New York Times. The paper on which it is based appears in the open-access journal PLOS One.
Update 5/1, 11…
hrynyshyn | April 30, 2007I've always been intrigued by the Roman Catholic Church's relationship with science and intellectualism in general. On the one hand, the church's history is not one anyone who cares about reason would be proud of, what with the Inquisition, its opposition to Copernican theory and whatnot. On the other, the Jesuit tradition of intellectual inquiry has produced some sharp fellows, many of whom have gone on to embrace a secular approach to politics, e.g. Pierre Trudeau. But every now and then we are reminded that religion is not the best context to foster a love of science. Case in point: the…
mikethemadbiologist | April 30, 2007PZ, in response to a Boston Globe article about ID proponent George Gilder, attacks Gilder's idiocy. I've pointed out some of Gilder's stupidity he displayed in a Wired article before, so I won't revisit that intellectually depauperate wasteland again. But while rereading my original post and PZ's response, something struck me: Gilder is the antithesis of education.
In what I called the "Power and Glory" section of Gilder's Wired article, he expounds on the Majestic Mystery of the Phospholipid Bilayer:
Just as physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as Newton believed…
oracknows | April 29, 2007Thanks to a reader commenting in yesterday's post, I've been made aware of a truly brilliant summation of creationism of both the young earth and intelligent design variety:
Exactly.
oracknows | April 29, 2007I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Certainly it's a bad thing that another physician is diving head-first into the pseudoscience that is "intelligent design" creationism and making a of himself in the process.
On the other hand, at least this time it's not a surgeon:
A Columbia medical professor made his case for scientific acceptance of "intelligent design" last night and found himself taking fire from his peers for his view.
John Marshall, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Missouri-Columbia, argued in front of about 100 people in a University Hospital…