evolution
clock | September 12, 2006Baby bugs team up for sex scam
The moment they're born, beetles of one species join forces for a curious drill.
The larvae hatch out of their eggs and together, as a group, climb to the tip of the plant. There, they secrete a sex pheromone that attracts a male of a bee who tries to couplate with the ball of larvae. They jump on him. He flies away carrying the little buggers.
When he finds a female to mate with, the larvae jump ship and go away hithhiking on her. When she goes back to her nest they disembark, eat the nectar she collected and her eggs before their final metamorphosis.…
pharyngula | September 12, 2006I'm a little surprised at the convergence of interest in this news report of a conserved mechanism of organizing the nervous system—I've gotten a half-dozen requests to explain what it all means. Is there a rising consciousness about evo-devo issues? What's caused the sudden focus on this one paper?
It doesn't really matter, I suppose. It's an interesting observation about how both arthropods and vertebrates seem to partition regions along the dorso-ventral axis of the nervous system using exactly the same set of molecules, a remarkable degree of similarity that supports the idea of a common…
clock | September 12, 2006Remember this post from a couple of weeks ago? It was quite popular on tagging sites like Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon. It was about endogenous retroviruses and their role in the evolution of placenta (which made the evolution of other mammalian traits possible).
Now, there is a new study in sheep, on this same topic, and it looks very good at first glance:
Researchers Discover That Sheep Need Retroviruses For Reproduction:
A team of scientists from Texas A&M University and The University of Glasgow Veterinary School in Scotland has discovered that naturally occurring endogenous…
mikethemadbiologist | September 11, 2006After reading PZ's post and the follow-up about Ken Miller's statements regarding atheism, I was just going to leave the subject alone. I usually find the arguments predictable, boring; there's always a lot of talking past each other. But for some reason, this particular argument over Ken Miller's remarks intrigues me. So, foolishly, I'm going to dive in. (I'm partially responding to particular claims by both sides, and also adding a few points of my own.) Here goes nuthin':
1) If you believe in a God who intervenes in history, then evolution is a theological challenge to that belief.…
razib | September 10, 2006The Guardian has a short piece titled Humans 'hardwired for religion'. The researcher quoted makes the point that humans seem to exhibit strong, powerful and sometimes
irrational intuitions and sentiments. And intuitive belief in gods is like part of this set of psychological phenomena. As I've noted before even those who disavow any supernatural beliefs often feel "creepy" when walking through cemeteries. Materialists may hold with their minds that our bodies are but elements and compounds driven to a state of dynamic flux by a series of intricate biochemical pathways, but often their (…
evolvingthoughts | September 9, 2006Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 611]
A question I have wondered about for a long time is this: why do people become creationists? I mean, nobody is born a creationist (or an evolutionist, or a Mayan cosmic-cyclist, etc.). These are views that one acquires as one learns and integrates into society. But we live, notionally, in a society in which science has learned more about the world in 300 years than in the prior million or so. So, why do people become…
pharyngula | September 9, 2006I got this email from Alan Kazlev, one of the main fellows working on the Palaeos website (a very useful paleontological resource), which I had previously reported as going offline. Plans are afoot to bring it back, and the answer seems to be to wikify it and build it anew, with a more distributed set of contributors. How Web 2.0! I've included the full email below the fold if you'd like more details.
Hi everyone
For those who don't know me, I was the co-author of Palaeos, until I got
caught up in other projects that consumed all my time. Toby
White of course continued to work on the site (…
razib | September 9, 2006In the annals of they had to do "research"?, Researchers identify 'male warrior effect'":
In experiments with 300 university men and women students, Van Vugt and his team gave the volunteers small sums of money which they could either keep or invest in a common fund that would be doubled and equally divided. None of the students knew what the others were doing.
Both sexes cooperated in investing in the fund. But when the groups were told they were competing against other universities, the males were more eager to invest rather than keep their money while the number of women contributing…
mikethemadbiologist | September 9, 2006
This is really odd: there just might be a stable population of lionfish off the cost of Long Island. Many moons ago, I used to be a marine ecologist, and I would have never considered the notion that a tropical fish would be able to maintain an overwintering population even in Long Island Sound (which is a little warmer than the Atlantic Ocean). It's not clear if the population actually overwinters, since mostly juveniles have been found; however, the number of juveniles suggests that there is more than one breeding female. I'm wondering if there is the possibility that a cold-tolerant…
evolgen | September 8, 2006A few months ago I wrote the following:
I should point out that the mammalian Y chromosome is an anomaly in origin and sex determination. In fact, every single sex determination system and sex chromosome system that I know of differs from all of the others in some manner. It looks like I'm going to have to write an entry on the evolutionary genetics of sex determination in everything other than mammals.
I never did get around to writing that review of sex chromosomes. All is not lost, however, as the most recent issue of Current Biology is devoted to the evolution of sex. There is even an…
loom | September 8, 2006The comment thread over on my recent creationist-critique post has been very lively. A second creationist has joined in the fray, and I've posted a response.
scientificactivist | September 7, 2006Robert Trivers was the first to describe the theory of reciprocal altruism and Noam Chomsky is... well... Noam Chomsky is the man (not to be confused with The Man). What happens when you bring together in one room the evolutionary theorist who changed the way we think about cooperation and social interactions with the intellectual who has probably done more to challenge entrenched power structures in our society than anyone else? A hell of an interesting conversation, that's what. From Seed magazine:
The full text of the discussion can be found here.
Chomsky and Trivers discuss the role…
jrosenhouse | September 7, 2006Jerry Coyne has a review of the new book The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life, by David Mindell, in the current issue of Nature. The ID folks are crowing over this remark:
To some extent these excesses are not Mindell's fault, for, if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and…
pharyngula | September 7, 2006I was reading a review paper that was frustrating because I wanted to know more—it's on the evolution of complex brains, and briefly summarizes some of the current confusion about what, exactly, is involved in building a brain with complex problem solving ability. It's not as simple as "size matters"—we have to jigger the formulae a fair bit to take into account brain:body size ratios, for instance, to get humans to come out on top, and maybe bulk is an inaccurate proxy for more significant matters, such as the number of synapses and nerve conduction velocities.
There's also a growing amount…
stcynic | September 6, 2006The Middle East Times has a report on the attempt by Pentecostals in Kenya to do away with an exhibit at their national museum of some of the world's most important hominid fossils:
"When museums put it out there that man evolved from apes, theologically they are affecting many people who are Christians, who believe God created us," says Bishop Boniface Adoyo, who is leading a campaign against the exhibit. "It's creating a big weapon against Christians that's killing our faith," he said, calling evolution theory an "insult" and dangerous to youths. "When children go to museums they'll start…
mikethemadbiologist | September 6, 2006I just received fellow Scienceblogger Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science. I've already read the first edition. The new edition has a new forward, updates at the end of many chapters, and a revamped conclusion. Hopefully, this weekend, I'll get a chance to read it. For more information about the book, you can go the website.
evolvingthoughts | September 6, 2006And the state of nature, nasty, poor, brutish, and short, or so said Thomas Hobbes. But it seems Hobbes was wrong. Humans have always lived in society. That doesn't mean they lived in cities or nations, of course, but they've always been social animals, just like our sister species the chimps and the gorilla. But what sort of society did they live in?
Thom Hartmann thinks we were democrats in a state of nature. In an op-ed arguing (rightly, I think) that the decline of the middle class is leading to oligarchy, a "feudal aristocracy" (backed up by a recent survey of American mean incomes,…
evolvingthoughts | September 5, 2006John Allen, at National Catholic Review, has an interesting analysis of the motives behind the recent Evolution Study Day the pope held. Unsurprisingly, the issue is not whether life changed over time, or even whether natural selection works - although he indicates that as Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict inclined to thinking that "macro-evolution" (speciation and above) was impossible by random variation and natural selection, showing that he knows very little about the actual biology.
No, it's this:
Evolution has become a kind of "first philosophy" for enlightened thinkers, ruling out the…
jrosenhouse | September 5, 2006In this entry from last week I mentioned Joan Roughgarden's recent book Evolution and Christian Faith, and praised her firm dismissal of ID. Sadly, there are many other parts of her brief book where I believe she has missed the boat.
One such part concerns her criticism of Richard Dawkins' idea of the selfish gene. It comes near the end of the book, where she presumes to criticize extremism on both sides of the evolution debate. She writes:
I suggest we first identify positions that needlessly provoke polarization and learn to avoid them. Then, each of us, one by one, and in groups and…
clock | September 5, 2006
Hypotheses leading to more hypotheses (from March 19, 2006 - the Malaria Day):
I have written a little bit about malaria before, e.g, here and here, but this is my special Malaria Action Day post, inspired by a paper [1] that Tara sent me some weeks ago and I never got to write about it till now.
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In a journal called "Medical Hypotheses" Kumar and Sharma [1] propose that jet-lagged travellers may be more susceptible to getting infected with malaria. They write:
Rapid travel across several time zones leads to…