evolution
pharyngula | November 30, 2006I found these on youtube, a couple of nice cartoony animations of the development of the urogenital system. This is one of the weirder modules in organogenesis, I think; many strange things go on that are relics of ancestral states. We actually build three pairs of kidneys—pronephros, mesonephros, and metanephros—and throw each one away in succession, except the last. Both sexes form paramesonephric (or Müllerian) ducts, in blue in the animation, and these form the core of the female plumbing, but again, males basically throw it away and use a more primitive duct (the mesonephric or Wolffian…
razib | November 28, 2006Science Daily summarizes findings that Neandertal teeth grew at the same rate as modern humans. John Hawks applies the skeptical eye of a scientist. N matters....
mikethemadbiologist | November 26, 2006As a part of the Carnival of the Liberals, I wrote a post about our failing political discourse. Here's something related from the archives.
In an excellent post on news reporting, Thoughts from Kansas writes (italics mine):
The same thing is a major part of the ongoing creationism battles. A good reporter with a background in science would not feel obliged to go to a scientist and get a quote to balance a story about creationists. Nor would such a reporter feel obliged to troll the waters for some bottom-feeding creationist to "balance" some claim about actual science.
But that's what many…
clock | November 26, 2006 I am sure glad that others have started parsing the numbers of the new report on 'The Internet as a Resource for News and Information about Science'.
Duane Smith takes a close look at a couple of tables in the report and concludes that, while relatively few people say they get their information on evolution directly from the Bible and Church, many do so indirectly, by beeing steeped in their comunities' beliefs transmitted by family, friends and neighbors (as well as local and church-run media). Interesting take (and I agree with him on this). What have you found so far?
clock | November 25, 2006You know that I think that Wallace Arthur is one of the sharpest writers on evolution today and that his Biased Embryos and Evolution is one of the best books I've read recently on the topic. I just saw that he has a new book out, Creatures of Accident. Has anyone read it yet? Is it good? Just in case, I placed it on my amazon wish list, so, if you think it is worth my while, I can get it once I get hold of some cash.
grrlscientist | November 25, 2006
elephant embryo at six months after conception (above)
elephant embryo at 12 months of development.
Using an array of technologies, a series of images reveal the secret of animal development in the wormb. Using a combination of three-dimensional ultrasound scans, computer graphics and tiny cameras, the research team followed the entire developmental process from conception to birth for a variety of animals, including an elephant (pictured). The team found some interesting behaviors along the way; a dolphin swimming in the womb, and an unborn dog (right) panting.
"The images in the film…
mikethemadbiologist | November 25, 2006One topic that I don't discuss enough is the role that the agricultural use of antibiotics plays in the evolution (and ecology) of antibiotic resistance. A recent review in Clinical Microbiology and Infection describes how the illegal use of nitrofuran antibiotics in Portugese agriculture led to an increase in highly virulent Salmonella.
What are nitrofurans? There are several different nitrofuran antibiotics (furazolidone, nitrofurazone, and nitrofurantoin), but the one drug some readers might have heard of (or taken) is nitrofurantoin, which is used to treat urinary tract infections, in…
grrlscientist | November 24, 2006tags: Cinerocaris magnifica, Nymphatelina gravida, ostracod, arthropoda, crustacean, fossil, zoology, biology
Recently, geologists made a stunning discovery: hard boiled eggs that are over 425 million years old! The scientists, who are from the USA and the UK, discovered a female from a new ostracod species, Nymphatelina gravida -- a minute relative of the shrimp -- complete with a brood of approximately 20 eggs and 2 possible juveniles inside her body. Other parts of her soft anatomy were also preserved, including legs and eyes.
"Ostracods are common, pin-head sized crustaceans known from…
mikethemadbiologist | November 24, 2006Here's some follow-up thoughts on my Salmonella-related moment of fame that I reposted yesterday
So while on vacation, I was mentioned in a NY Times article about diseases that can be caught from your fish tank. The moral of the story is when cleaning your fish tank, pretend it's toilet water, clean everything including the sink that comes in contact with the aquarium water, and you'll be fine. (Here's the Emerging and Infectious Disease article that led to the NY Times story).
I'm happy with the coverage: the issue of antibiotic resistance needs it. But one important message-that…
clock | November 23, 2006I am still sleepy from all that tryptophan in turkey meat and the Evolution wine, so I don't think I have the energy to write a big post now - I'll leave much of my thoughts on the matter for a post-weekend post reviewing Dawkins' The God Delusion.
But I have to chime in briefly by sending you to the relevant links and copying some of the comments I wrote on those comment threads. Brace yourself for a lot of reading as there are several posts and many comments on each of the posts. Sorry, the links are not neccessarly in order, but you'll get the gist of the argument anyway.
Ed Brayton…
evolvingthoughts | November 23, 2006Nicholas of Cusa wrote a book back in the 15th century called De Docta Ignorantia, often translated as "On learned ignorance". It has nothing whatsoever to do with this post. Well, it sort of does.
Nicholas, a Cardinal, held that human reason was limited, and could not reach knowledge of things beyond the world. In short, he was an agnostic. Wait, I hear you saying - a Cardinal of the Catholic Church who thought that nothing could be known of God? Well yes, as Cusa held that "knowledge" of God was had solely by faith.
The world, as we are so often reminded, divides into two kinds of people.…
razib | November 23, 2006The Messiah will be on In Our Time to discuss the evolutionary origins of altruism. They are pretty good about getting the archive up in a day or so. Interesting that they illustrate the idea with Mr. a priori Kant, or am I being pretentious and misunderstanding Kant? I simply suspect that Dawkins will argue and elucidate an evolutionarily beneficial situationalism.
Matthew 10:34 "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."
evolvingthoughts | November 23, 2006This is such a cool site: the Biology and Palaeontology Qs and As site is for UK school students to ask questions of experts. And some of those questions are way sophisticated. Kids are always dinosaur nuts (or at least more of them are than adults) but these kids are asking interesting questions about much more than that.
If you know a kid who is interested in biology or dinosaurs, get them to ask a question.
Hat tip to Darren Naish's Tetrapod Zoology blogroll, which is also an awesome site..
pharyngula | November 22, 2006New artwork at Olduvai George's place: it's the start of a series on cetacean evolution.
pharyngula | November 21, 2006
I've been reading Valentine's On the Origin of Phyla(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) lately, and I have to tell you, it's a hard slog. This is one of those extremely information-dense science texts that rather gracelessly hammers you with the data and difficult concepts on page after page. I am convinced that James W. Valentine is ten times smarter than I am and knows ten thousand times as much, and it's a struggle to squeeze that volume of knowledge into my miniscule brain pan.
One thing I would like to greatly condense and simplify is his discussion of the Cambrian 'explosion'. Misinterpretation of…
pharyngula | November 20, 2006
I've been writing a fair amount about early pattern formation in animals lately, so to do penance for my zoocentric bias, I thought I'd say a little bit about homeotic genes in plants. Homeotic genes are genes that, when mutated, can transform one body part into another—probably the best known example is antennapedia in Drosophila, which turns the fly's antenna into a leg.
Plants also have homeotic genes, and here is a little review of flower anatomy to remind everyone of what 'body parts' we're going to be talking about. The problem I'll be pursuing is how four different, broadly defined…
evolgen | November 20, 2006One of the potentially most interesting, yet untapped, area of study in population biology is that of intra-individual variation. One thing we do know, however, is that this variation can contribute to cancers. When cells accumulate mutations, some of these cell lines become cancer cells due to changes to genes involved in regulating the cell cycle. It would be especially interesting to apply the theory from population biology to this somatic variation within individuals.
If any of that stuff sounds interesting, you should check out this paper from Nature Reviews Cancer. The authors summarize…
loom | November 19, 2006Well, it's been worth the wait. The week-long attack from the intelligent design crowd on me explodes in a final fireball of absurdity. Read more in the final update of my response to the Pinto-loving Discovery Institute.
evolvingthoughts | November 19, 2006
Just because a bunch of German, French and British people invented geology some 200 or more years ago, all the "type locations" for the geological column have been defined in terms of Northern Hemisphere locations. Finally, though, we Australians have our own period, and it's a doozy - the earliest period in which multicellular life forms are recorded, before the Cambrian, from 542 to 635 million years ago.
For a while now, people have talked about the Vendian, but this wasn't an official name, and was based on a locale in Russia that could only be got to for a month or so a year, so the…