evolution
loom | August 22, 2006I'm happy to report that the eyes are back.
My third book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, came out in 2001. It's a survey of the history and cutting edge of evolutionary biology, from the origin of new species to mass extinctions, from the rise of complex life to the emergence of humans. The book explores evolutionary races between hosts and parasites, between males and females. It puts evolution in a historical context as well, showing how Darwin's theory emerged out of the science of his time and how social and political tensions foster hostility to evolution today. Scientific American…
tfk | August 22, 2006The Times reports that Venom Runs Thick in Fish Families:
The study, published in June in The Journal of Heredity, analyzed and compared DNA sequences from 233 species and used the results to create a new family tree for spiny-rayed fishes. That group includes many types of toadfish, scorpionfish (lionfish are a type of scorpionfish), surgeonfish, rabbitfish, jacks, stargazers and saber-toothed blennies.
The family tree shows how the species are related, and which evolved from the same ancestor. Based on the tree, the researchers predicted which species should be venomous. Then, to test their…
cmooney | August 22, 2006Well, I continue to peruse The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design in anticipation of the debate tonight. (11 pm ET, the Alan Colmes Show, website here.) By this point in the text, Wells is done debunking evolution; now he's on to promoting intelligent design. In the "debunk evolution" section, he tried to undermine evidence from the fossil record, embryology, molecular phylogeny, and speciation. None of these attacks were convincing, but what's even more illuminating are the strands of evolutionary evidence that got completely ignored: biogeography, DNA evidence,…
stcynic | August 22, 2006The Worldnutdaily actually has an article up responding to PZ Myers' criticism of D. James Kennedy's ridiculous TV show claiming that Darwin led to Hitler. PZ had initially reacted to the involvement of Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and a staunch defender of evolution (and a committed Christian), in the show. Kennedy has promoted Collins' involvement to gain credibility from his credentials. But Burt Humburg contacted Collins about it and Collins was furious at being misused. He stated that he had granted an interview with Kennedy's group, but he thought it was supposed to…
razib | August 22, 2006Curious about what's going on in the Paleo-shire? John Hawks is all about one stop shopping, just fill your mind-cart and you're good to go.
loom | August 21, 2006Like many parasites, a species of bacteria called Wolbachia takes charge of its own fate. Wolbachia can only survive inside the cells of its hosts--invertebrates such as this lovely common eggfly. This way of life limits Wolbachia's opportunities for long-term survival. If Wolbachia lives inside a female insect, it can infect her eggs. When those eggs hatch and mature into adult insects, they will be infected by Wolbachia as well. But if Wolbachia should find itself in a male, it has reached a dead end. It cannot infect sperm cells, and thus it has no escape from a male host. When a male host…
clock | August 21, 2006Several ScienceBloggers are reviewing Coming To Life today (see reviews by Janet, Shelley, RPM, Nick and PZ Edit: Razib has also posted his take), each one of us from a different perspective and looking from a different angle, so go read them to get the full scoop.
PZ Myers reviewed the book a few weeks ago. Someting that struck me was that PZ said that the book :
"....assumes nothing more than that the reader is intelligent and curious. Seriously, you don't need a biology degree to read it!"
...while a reviewer, Edward F. Strasser (a math PhD whose hobby is reviewing books from this angle…
hrynyshyn | August 21, 2006If Richard Dawkins spends much time in the blogosphere, he's probably quite pleased with himself these days on account of the success of the meme meme. By that, I mean the "unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another" that describes the idea of a meme itself, something Dawkins proposed in The Selfish Gene 30 years ago.
These days, it's hard not to stumble across a reference to one alleged meme or another. A common one seems to be the "book meme," a ten-part list in which bloggers share their…
clock | August 21, 2006Why Piglets Shudder To Keep Warm:
Brown fat helps newborn mammals maintain their body temperature by burning fat, which converts into heat. The protein UCP1 (Uncoupling Protein 1) has a key role in this energy conversion, which takes place in the cell mitochondria.
No brown fat or UCP1 protein has been found in domesticated pigs, however. In their study, Berg and colleagues show that the UCP1 gene was shut down about 20 million years ago in an ancestor of the wild boar. They identified four different mutations, each of which would be sufficient to knock out the function of the protein.
This…
sporte | August 21, 2006In which we see the results and come to our own conclusions.
If you want to let other people tell you what's right and what's wrong, they will surely do so. Turn on the TV and hordes of happy actors bounce around, only too happy to help you purchase the right deodorant. Open your e-mail and everyone wants to share the best on-line pharmacy and investment guide.
Ugh.
I prefer making my own decisions, thank you very much.
So, I want to give you a chance to look at the data and decide for yourself, if the data show HIV protease sequences changing over time.
Let's see the results.
We're…
clock | August 21, 2006 The review of the second chapter was written on September 06, 2005:
I have commented on Tomasello's Chapter 1 earlier. Second chapter is much longer and somewhat disjointed, but I would like to write some of my own first impressions now (also long and disjointed), before I read what other members of the reading group have written. As usual, I will make the post contrarian and critical, in the good tradition of blog-writing, but that does not mean I dismiss Tomasello's hypothesis altogether or do not look forward to reading the rest of the book. Read reviews by other group members for other…
clock | August 21, 2006 The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by Michael Tomasello was the first book (and still the only one so far) we were reading in the newly minted CogBlogGroup, a group of bloggers reading stuff about cognitive science. You can download the whole book in PDF or the first chapter only in html. This was the first of two parts (I never finished the book nor rerview!), originally posted on August 20, 2005:
Chris of Mixing Memory has written an introductory post providing a broader context and background. Some of the participants have already posted their commentaries on the First Chapter,…
mikethemadbiologist | August 20, 2006Over at Orcinus, guest blogger Sara Robinson has a series of posts (I, II, & III) about the psychology of the authoritarian mindset, and how this affects communication with many religious conservatives. The posts are definitely worth a read in and of themselves, but I want to throw open for discussion what these ideas mean (if anything) for the evolution political controversy.
Is there anything from these posts we can learn about how to communicate, about what should be and should not be communicated, and about who the best communicators would be?
cmooney | August 20, 2006One of the things I have tried to do, as a journalist who's been cast in the role of a defender of science ever since the publication of The Republican War on Science, is to take on some of the attackers. That's why I agreed to debate Jonathan Wells this coming Tuesday night, and it's why I have debated a number of other folks as well, like Tom Bethell. I feel like it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it. Moreover, I can't fairly criticize the scientific community for failing to engage, as I have done repeatedly, if I myself am not engaging.
So I want to thank everyone who posted comments…
revere | August 20, 2006Sometimes on Sunday I catch up on my backed up journal reading. High profile journals like Nature and Science are great except for one major defect: they come once a week, every week. They tend to pile up. So I browse them, looking for interesting articles or just satisfying my somewhat eclectic scientific interests. No surprise, with a Freethinker Sermonette due, the article by Miller, Scott and Okamoto, "Public Acceptance of Evolution" would catch my eye (Science 11 August 2006:Vol. 313. no. 5788, pp. 765 - 766):
Beginning in 1985, national samples of U.S. adults have been asked whether the…
sporte | August 19, 2006Let the experiment begin.
We're experimenting with HIV in this series. And yes, you can try this at home!
If you want to see where we've been and get an idea where we're going, here are the links.
Part I. Meet HIV and learn how we're going to use it look at evolution. An introduction to the experiment and a link to a short flash movie on HIV.
Part II. Instructions for doing the experiment.
Part III. Look at the sequence results.
Part IV. Look at protein structures and see if we can explain why the experiment worked the way it did.
Let's move onward.
1. I made a data set of amino acids…
sporte | August 18, 2006The past few Fridays, we've been comparing human mitochondrial DNA with the mitochondrial DNA of different apes.
We started doing this here, where you can find directions for getting started.
And, we've found some interesting things.
In this installment, we found that humans have practically an entire mitochondrial genome stuck in chromosome 17.
Last week, we found that human mitochondrial DNA is more similar to that of chimpanzees than to gorillas. We found that 90.6% of the bases in human mitochondrial DNA match bases in the Bonobo chimp and 90.7% match bases in the Chimpanzee.
This…
clock | August 18, 2006Allen McNeill's Cornell course on Evolution and Design is now over and the student papers have been posted online.
Dan comments on some of them.
mikethemadbiologist | August 18, 2006...I might as well too. By some weird transcendental quirk of fate, I was planning on moving to this blog ">my skewering of Sally Jenkins' now-infamous column about ID next week. Afarensis has just reposted a very nice takedown of the silliness. Below are my thoughts at the time on Jenkins' idiocy.
I usually like Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post, but today's column can only be described as sheer idiocy. Thankfully, the News Blog has dealt with most of the obvious criticisms, so I don't have to (it gets really old after a while). Before I address just how poorly Jenkins…
loom | August 18, 2006I was happy to see that my post on Tuesday about the evolution of whales attracted a lot of readers. One commenter asked about seals and manatees. As other commenters kindly explained, those mammals descend from other ancestors (relatives of bears and elephants, respectively) that independently moved into the water. This transition has occurred many times since vertebrates moved on land. In some cases, the animals have adapted completely to the water (such as marine reptiles). In other cases, the transition has not been so complete. Other relatives of elephants evolved into desmostylians,…