evolution
evolgen | June 25, 2006Blogging's been light recently. I spent the last week frantically preparing my talk for the Evolution Meeting. I was analyzing data until late Thursday evening. Then, I still needed to finish putting together my talk. We spent Friday driving to the meeting, and I gave my talk yesterday morning (Saturday). It went well -- I got a packed (albeit, small) room and had enough time for two questions (one coming from a guy whose research I deeply admire).
You probably won't see any new posts until later next week. I'll be spending my time listening to other people talk about their research and…
evolvingthoughts | June 25, 2006Here is a paper in the Canadian Journal of Zoology which documents learned hunting behaviour among Tursiops truncatus, the bottlenose dolphin, in Western Australia.
Specialization and development of beach hunting, a rare foraging behavior, by wild bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.)
B. L. Sargeant, J. Mann, P. Berggren, and M. Krützen
Abstract: Foraging behaviors of bottlenose dolphins vary within and among populations, but few studies attempt to address the causes of individual variation in foraging behavior. We examined how ecological, social, and developmental factors relate to the use of…
evolvingthoughts | June 23, 2006Yahoo news is reporting that Harriet, the world's oldest tortoise, has died aged 176
Harriet was collected by Darwin on the Beagle voyage in 1830, when she was about 2 inches. She found her way to Brisbane, where I currently live, and was allowed to roam the Brisbane botanical gardens, but ignorant and nasty folk would put their cigarettes out on her carapace, which is covered in skin and nerve endings, so she was taken into a zoo and found her way to Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo, about 100kms north of Brisbane, where she was a favourite attraction. I got to touch her there, whice set off a…
clock | June 23, 2006Just check out these recent posts by Karmen, Afarensis, Afarensis again, PZ and Tara.
mikethemadbiologist | June 23, 2006While I'm away at the Evolution 2006 Meeting, I'll leave you with some posts from the archive of the Mad Biologist (Intelligent Designer, I love this scheduled post thingee). This one is about the misuse of language by creationists (originally published Feb. 9, 2005).
From time to time, I get emails from people asking me about evolution (they range from the curious to dogmatic anti-evolutionists). One common refrain I hear from the anti-evolutionists is "evolution is just a theory." This comment also pops up over and over again on widely-read blogs, such as the Washington Monthly. Now, the…
pharyngula | June 23, 2006Two short articles in this week's Science link the orb-weaving spiders back to a common ancestor in the Early Cretaceous, with both physical and molecular evidence. What we have is a 110-million-year-old piece of amber that preserves a piece of an orb web and some captured prey, and a new comparative study of spider silk proteins that ties together the two orb-weaving lineages, the Araneoidea and the Deinopoidea, and dates their last common ancestor to 136 million years ago.
Araneoids and Deinopoids build similar looking webs—a radial frame supporting a sticky spiral—but they differ in how…
stcynic | June 23, 2006Perusing the comments at STACLU can be an amusing way to pass the time. You think the main writers there are clueless? You should see their fans. I particularly liked this little tidbit about evolution from kerwin_brown:
To change from horse to a donkey or vise versa requires at least one and possibly two monstrous changes because of the chromosome difference. This is very unlikely to occur in nature and yet there is evidence that it happens on a regular basis. It sounds like miracles are normal in nature.
If it's very unlikely in nature, yet it happens regularly, can it really be said to be…
mikethemadbiologist | June 23, 2006Thanks to the superpowers of the Mighty Seed Blog Engine, I'm able to post this while simultaneously driving to the Evolution 2006 meeting. Hopefully, I'll run into RPM and Carl Zimmer there. It's going to be very weird: I spent four years at Stony Brook and now I'm returning as a visitor. Something about never going home again comes to mind...
A programming note: I have a bunch of scheduled posts from the archives of the Mad Biologist all ready to go.
clock | June 23, 2006There is a tradition in the blogosphere of posting something light on Fridays.
Some people do the Friday Random Ten, but I do not have an iPod, and keep my computer on Mute, so I do not listen to music or can generated a random ten.
Most people post pictures of variousanimals, mostly cats, but I do not like doing what everyone else is doing. And once I've posted pictures of my cats (and I did, a couple of times, though never on a Friday), what's the point of doing it again?
Some people got away from cats and pets and post pictures of cooler animals, like ants, or, well, ants. birds. Or…
hrynyshyn | June 22, 2006If I had $50,000 -- and no mortgage -- I'd love to bid on a letter that's just surfaced and is about to be auctioned off by Sotheby's. It's from the revered Charles Darwin to the Reverend William Denton. New Scientist has a short item with a couple of excerpts:
"I am very far from being surprised at anyone not accepting my conclusions on the origin of species."
and
"Those naturalists who go a little way with me, the more they reflect on the subject the further they go."
Just makes you want to love the guy even more, doesn't it?
hrynyshyn | June 22, 2006Everyone's had a good time taking shots at Ann Coulter's inability to think straight. Some valiant types, like PZ Myers, have even sacrified several hours of their lives to reading and picking apart her pathetic prose. Everything she says is wrong, particularly her efforts to explain why evolution is a myth.
All well and good. This kind of response is necessary. So are international efforts like that of the recent declaration by "67 national academies of science under the united banner of the Interacademy Panel on International Issues [who] blasted the scriptural teaching of biology as a…
scientificactivist | June 21, 2006Today, the Interacademy Panel on International Issues (IAP), an organization of 92 scientific academies from around the globe, released a statement endorsing the importance of teaching evolution as a fundamental scientific principle. The IAP emphasizes the following uncontested evolutionary facts:
In a universe that has evolved towards its present configuration for some 11 to 15 billion years, our Earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago.
Since its formation, the Earth - its geology and its environments - has changed under the effect of numerous physical and chemical forces and…
clock | June 21, 2006Gavin de Beer died on this day in 1972. Aydin Ãrstan wrote the best post for the occasion (also cross-posted on Transitions)
mikethemadbiologist | June 21, 2006I have to admit that creationists are a creative bunch, if not accurate. From the files of the Mad Biologist comes this post about a creationist explanation of antibiotic resistance. It's pretty remarkable. And I hope nobody tells the Coultergeist about this argument... (originally published April 18, 2005).
Google is an amazing thing (so is Gizoogle). I typed in "evangelical" and "antibiotic" and found a "creationist explanation" of the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. What strikes me is the selective use of facts to support a preconceived notion. While creationists do…
pharyngula | June 21, 2006
PvM at the Panda's Thumb has already written a bit about this issue in the article "Human Gland Probably Evolved From Gills", but I'm not going to let the fact that I'm late to the party stop me from having fun with it. This is just such a darned pretty story that reveals how deeply vertebrate similarities run, using multiple lines of evidence.
Here's the start of the situation: fish have a problem. Like most animals, they need to maintain a specific internal salt concentration, but they are immersed in a solution that is much more dilute they they are (for freshwater fish) or much more…
oracknows | June 21, 2006Via Evolving Thoughts, this article about Ann Coulter's misrepresentation of the Dover case is just too good for me not to link to also. Best excerpt:
One part of her latest book that's getting little notice is the part that deals with Dover and what is purported to be the "debate" over evolution.
She begins her screed by saying that liberals have contempt for science.
What?
She offers as proof that liberals support stem-cell research.
Yes, I know, I don't get it either.
Lots of conservatives also support stem-cell research. Nancy Reagan, for one. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for another. Gov.…
evolvingthoughts | June 20, 2006
Well after reading many papers by various bacteriologists, mycologists, and other non-vertebrates specialists, I have come to the conclusion that there is no single set of conceptions or criteria (that much abused word!) for something being a species in non-sexual organisms, which I am here calling "microbial". Of course, as I noted, microbes can be "sexual" in various ways. They can share genes via cross-species viral infection (transfection or transduction), via gene fragment uptake (transformation), via sharing in a protosexual way (conjugation), and so on, with it being occasional and…
evolvingthoughts | June 19, 2006
When we attempt to apply to organisms that are not obligately sexual (that is, which don't have to have sex to reproduce) concepts that were specified to use with those that are, we have problems. The Recombination Model is one such attempt. Sure, some microbial species exchange genes. Others do it more frequently and more completely. There appears to be a continuum of gene exchange all the way from almost never to almost every time. So why should we expect that gene transfer will provide us with the sort of homogeneity of lineages and quasispecies that it does in obligate sexuals?
In part…
clock | June 19, 2006Friday, May 26th
Afternoon
So, about noon or so, we finally got to the American Museum of Natural History. I was pretty smart, actually... A few months ago, when we first started thinking about making this trip, I decided not to renew my subscription to Natural History Magazine, but to subscribe my wife instead. So, when we arrived at the museum, we skipped the long ticket lines and went straight to the "Members" desk, where my wife got a little discount, I got a student discount (yes, I still have a valid student ID - officially they did not kick me out yet), and the kids ar, quite…
evolvingthoughts | June 18, 2006
The second main approach to a natural conception of microbial species (by which I mean, as opposed to operational, practical or conventional ones, collectively called "artificial" conceptions) is what I will call the Quasispecies Model. According to the concept developed by Manfred Eigen for viral species, a quasispecies ("as-if-species") is a cluster of genomes in a genome space of the dimensionality the number of loci. A quasipecies is in effect a cloud of genomes, clustering around a "wild-type" coordinate (that is, genome) that may or may not actually have an extant or extinct instance…