evolution
evolvingthoughts | December 16, 2006
Well, I'm just back from the 3rd Queensland Biohumanities Conference, convened by Paul Griffiths, which was titled "Idealization, mechanism and reduction: New Directions in the Philosophy of Proximal Biology". Speakers were Bill Bechtel (UC San Diego), Alex Rosenberg (Duke), Marcel Weber (Basel), Ingo Brigandt (Alberta), Mark Colyvan (Sydney), Stephen Downes (Utah), Karola Stotz (Indiana), James Tabery (Pittsburgh) and Rasmus Winther (UNAM, Mexico City), plus a host of people from around Australia.
It was, I expected, going to be more of the same old boring stuff on reductionism in biology…
loom | December 15, 2006My radio silence is the result of a perfect storm--reporting trips, upcoming holidays, and the minor matter of my deadline for turning in my book at the end of the year. Any free moment gets gobbled up before I can even think about blogging. But I can point you to some pieces of mine that are now coming out in various non-blog outlets. First up: the natural history of play. It's part of a special report on games that appeared yesterday in Forbes.com.
grrlscientist | December 12, 2006Where the hell DID we all come from? The true source of the big bang, according to the scriptures.
razib | December 12, 2006The Genographic Project is elicting a new round of objections from indigenous community leaders. Genetics and Health has a good post up highlighting the issues. Two prelim points:
I am skeptical of the science that is going to come out of this. I believe that the "hot stuff" is going to be studying selection in the human genome, not trying to reconstruct phylogenies
I also accept that "science" has been the tool of injustice and even barbarity against indigenous peoples
I say "community leaders" because "indigenous peoples" aren't a monolith. Just as George W. Bush doesn't represent all…
evolvingthoughts | December 12, 2006It's nice to see a review of some science that neither dumbs it down nor over technifies it. Ars Technica reviews the lactose tolerance gene evolution in African populations.
clock | December 9, 2006PZ probably already knows about this, but I found this discovery of super-reflective skin cells in squid, cuttlefish and octopus quite amazing!
Hanlon's team discovered that the bottom layer of octopus skin, made up of cells called leucophores, is composed of a translucent, colourless, reflecting protein. "Protein reflectors are very odd in the animal kingdom," says Hanlon, who is a zoologist. What's even more odd is just how reflective these proteins are -- they reflect all wavelengths of light that hit at any angle. "This is beautiful broadband reflection," Hanlon told the Materials…
clock | December 8, 2006Did mammoths scratch themselves against rocks?
Parkman believes, and he has a growing body of evidence to prove that mammoths and other large Ice Age creatures once used these very rocks near Duncan's Landing, along the Sonoma Coast State Beach, to scratch their backs. He claims the giant mammals rubbed so much that large swaths of rock have been buffered smooth.
Bears scratch against the trees, but which species is which? Lumpers vs. Splitters.
sporte | December 7, 2006Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor (dubbed the Tripoli six) may be executed soon by the Libyan government for the crime of deliberately infecting over 400 children with HIV. If they did infect the children, this would be a horrendous crime. If they did not infect the children, it's the Libyan government that will be killing innocent people.
The clock is ticking.
Some of you might be wondering (I know I was): How exactly is molecular sequence data being used to solve the crime? Why are scientists and science bloggers claiming that the Tripoli six are innocent?
Let's begin by…
clock | December 7, 2006Interspecific Communicative and Coordinated Hunting between Groupers and Giant Moray Eels in the Red Sea:
The article offers a description and accompanying videos, such as the one showing a grouper and eel swimming side by side as if they are good friends on a stroll. It also offers quantification, which is truly hard to achieve in the field, of the tendencies involved in this mutually beneficial arrangement. The investigators were able to demonstrate that the two predators seek each other's company, spending more time together than expected by chance. They also found that groupers actively…
clock | December 7, 2006Amanda just reviewed Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma and also recently wrote a post on the same topic while under the influence of the book. I agree with her 100%, so go and read both posts.
I have read the book a couple of months ago and never found time to write a review of my own. I also remember that I finished the book on a Thursday afternoon - an important piece of information as it is on Thursday afternoons that there is a Farmers' Market here in Southern Village, barely a block from me. The first thing I did when I closed the book was to walk up to the Farmers' Market…
pharyngula | December 7, 2006Behold the spectacularly long-tongued glossophagine nectar bat, Anoura fistulata:
Anoura fistulata feeding from a test tube filled with sugared water; its tongue (pink) can extend to 150% of body length.
This length of tongue is unusual for the genus, and there is an explanation for how it can fit all of that into its mouth: it doesn't. The base of the tongue has been carried back deep into the chest in a pocket of epithelium, and is actually rooted in the animal's chest.
Ventral view of A. fistulata, showing tongue (pink), glossal tube and tongue retractor muscle (blue), and skeletal…
razib | December 5, 2006Nick Wade just wrote up an article on the relationship between Neandertals and divison of labor. John Hawks hurls a cannon of a post at this hypothesis.
evolvingthoughts | December 5, 2006
A recent report on the songs of the eponymous "great tit", a common forest bird famous for learning to peck the foil tops of milk bottles in the 1950s, shows that they independently acquire a deeper song when in urban environments than when in forest environments. As the writer at ScienceNOW tells it, in forests they sound like Barry White, and in cities like Michael Jackson.
Passerine songs are usually adapted to the acoustics of their usual environment. Birds in denser vegetation will, I am told, end their songs on a rising sharp note, because there is more absorption of sound than in…
mikethemadbiologist | December 5, 2006I've posted before about the possible approval of cefquinome in agriculture, and why this is a stupid thing to even consider. So some colleagues and I got cranky and wrote a letter to the FDA.
Here's the letter:
Andrew C. von Eschenbach, M.D.
Acting Commissioner
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
5600 Fishers Lane,
Rockville MD 20857-000
Dear Acting Commissioner von Eschenbach,
We are writing to support the recommendation of the VMAC to reject and not approve the use of cefquinome, a fourth-generation cephalosporin antibiotic, for use in animal agriculture. One area that is critical in…
mikethemadbiologist | December 4, 2006The story about Kenyan religious leaders who are attempting to stifle evolutionary biology at the Kenyan National Museum is making the rounds of the progressive political blogs (interesting, how the right-wing blogs aren't covering this...). Within this story, there is a real tragedy: Kenya has a serious problem in treating certain types of bacterial dysentery due to the evolution of antibiotic resistance.
oracknows | December 4, 2006Note: If you're not familiar with the Hitler Zombie, here are two posts to introduce you to the creature, with the most recent installment of his terror here, in which Orac narrowly escaped the creature.
And, now, the adventures (if you can call them that) continue....
PRELUDE: SEVERAL MONTHS AGO
It was a dreary, overcast day, as so many days were there, with the clouds seeming to reach down to engulf everything with a wet chill that went straight to the bone.
An eminent professor sat in his study typing. Gray-haired, bright-eyed, and very professorial in appearance and bearing right down…
grrlscientist | December 3, 2006
Darwin's Evolution of Man.
.
Richard Leakey, the famous paleoanthropologist, is battling with powerful evangelical church leaders in Kenya. These fundamentalist wingnuts are pressuring Kenya's national museum to hide its world-famous collection of hominid fossils that detail the evolution of humans' early ancestors.
Leakey stated that the wingnuts' statements are "the most outrageous comments I have ever heard."
"The National Museums of Kenya should be extremely strong in presenting a very forceful case for the evolutionary theory of the origins of mankind,"continued Leakey. "The…