evolution
evolgen | June 15, 2006Andy Clark has written a review of comparative evolutionary genomics for Trends in Ecology and Evolution. His review deals with identifying functional regions of the genome and inference of both positively and negatively selected sequences.
Clark is one of the leaders in the field of evolutionary genetics (and now genomics), actively participating in the analysis of both the human and Drosophila genomes. He also brings a solid understanding of biology, as well as an appreciation of statistical rigor. You can sense his excitement about the union of molecular biology and evolution in the…
loom | June 14, 2006The other day I was interviewed on KUCI-FM in Irvine, California, about the evolution of bacteria in yogurt. You can listen to the podcast here.
clock | June 14, 2006I was checking sporadically his blog throughout the day to see when the good news will get posted and, lo and behold, here it is! Reed Cartwright has successfully defended his PhD dissertation and, next month, is coming to my school for his postdoc. Go say Hello and Congratulations to Dr. Cartwright
(OK, am I going to be next?)!
evolvingthoughts | June 14, 2006Reed, who was a doctoral student at the genetics department of the University of Georgia, is no longer. Now he's Dr Cartwright to you. The author of De Rerum Natura, one of my favourite blogs (understandably a bit sparse lately), Reed is also a contributor to The Panda's Thumb, and found the time to be active also in the Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science. Go Reed! Wealth, power and women now, hey?
purepedantry | June 14, 2006Carl Zimmer at The Loom has a simply must read post on three species of butterflies. Scientists believed that one species might be a hybrid of the other two, so they set out to test it by making the species all over again.
This is really important stuff because it goes against a common argument vs. evolution -- that it cannot be witnessed in action. Experiments like these show that it is plausible and that it occurs on human-relevant time scales.
stcynic | June 14, 2006I read Seed's interview with Joan Roughgarden on homosexuality and sexual selection last week and found it fascinating. It seemed to me, as it did to many others I discussed it with, that she was caricaturing Darwin's views on the subject, but there was still some important points made in the interview about whether homosexuality was an adaptive trait, a maladaptive trait, or neither. I'm glad to see that PZ Myers has taken the time to write up a fairly thorough review of the subject and I agree with most of what he says. Well worth reading for those interested in evolutionary biology and the…
loom | June 14, 2006Scientists have figured out many ways to study the origin of species. They can build evoluitonary trees, to see how species descend from a common ancestor. They can survey islands or mountains or lakes to see how ecological conditions foster the rise of new species. They can look for fossils that offer clues to how long ago species branched off from one another, and how their ranges spread or shrank. Now comes a new trick in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature: to test their ideas about how a new species of butterfly came to be, they essentially recreated it in their lab.
The new species…
pharyngula | June 14, 2006That Stephen Hawking guy is saying that we need to get colonies out there in space to preserve the human race. I'm a space opera fan, I think space exploration is a worthy endeavor, but I have to admit that watching Chris Clarke whomp on Hawking is very entertaining, and I agree. Hawking has it all wrong.
When fans of technology start preaching about escaping disaster on earth by setting up space stations and moon colonies and terraforming Mars, an image comes to mind: a dying hanged man, kicking and squirming, ejaculating reflexively and dribbling a few pitiful drops of semen into the dirt.…
evolgen | June 14, 2006Read this reply to Francis Collins on Pharyngula. Collins, one of the biggest movers and shakers behind the human genome project, is also Christian and very eager to tell the world about it. Now he's written a book about his faith. Doc Myers takes Collins to task for the shaky ground upon which his faith rests. I'll go after Collins's total disregard for science in defending his faith.
PZ links to an interview with Collins, in which the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute's understanding of evolution is described as follows:
Among Collins's most controversial beliefs…
razib | June 14, 2006Bora made two quick references to "group selection" today. I don't have much time...and shouldn't be blogging, but I want to make a few quick points before this topic goes down the memory hole (I know, unnecessary caveat, but I am driven by personal guilt in expressing it, not public shame). For those "not in the know" (e.g., most readers), Bora and I have a history.
Update: Robert Skipper's ruminations are worth a read, as always. And of course I was just making shit up about his political views and draft....
My problem with Bora comes down to assertions like this:
And I have realized…
clock | June 14, 2006I wrote this post on February 27, 2005. Provocative? You decide....
I am happy, along with at least half of the blogosphere, that Billmon is back. One of his recent posts caught my eye, as it was comparing current treatment of science by the Bush Administration to the treatment of science by the Stalin Administration back in the early days of the USSR, notably Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. The US scientists today are very unhappy about this state of things and are pondering ways to fightback (hat tip: Chris Mooney)
I looked around the Internets to see what is there about Lysenko and I found a…
evolvingthoughts | June 13, 2006Another living fossil has been discovered, described and now videoed by a retired professor of biology. Can it be long now until creationists start to claim this falsifies evolution?
"Living fossils" are an artifact of the way we classify species and higher taxonomic groups. Typically it means they are a member, as this baby is, of a group or branch of the evolutionary tree that we had previously thought had no living members.
They are not the "same" organisms as lived 11 or 30 million years ago, or whatever. The species that are found in the fossil record are almost always going to be…
clock | June 13, 2006A few months ago I reviewed Joan Roughgarden's book "Evolutions Rainbow". Now that SEED magazine has published an interview with her, I thought about writing about it again (or just republishing the old one), but now I see that I do not have to, because PZ Myers did a much better job at it than I could ever dream of doing, so go and read it.
The only sentence I did not like was: "There are objections that this requires group selection, which always puts an idea on shaky ground...." As someone who has studied group selection (both biological and philosophical literature) intensely over the…
pharyngula | June 13, 2006Seed has an interview with Joan Roughgarden, somewhat controversial evolutionary biologist and author of Evolution's Rainbow : Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Here's the short summary of her basic thesis:
Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection--she's no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can't explain the homosexuality that's been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that…
oracknows | June 12, 2006A few days ago, given that light of the "intelligent design" creationism movement, William Dembski, had bragged about how much he had helped Ann Coulter write the chapters in her latest screed (Godless: The Church of Liberalism) attacking evolution, I had wondered what he might think now of being associated with her, given some of what we now know to be also in her book, such as her vicious attacks on liberals in general and certain 9/11 widows in particular ("I have never seen people enjoying their husband's death so much" and "now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up…
grrlscientist | June 12, 2006Gazelles and other large desert-dwelling ungulates can live on very little food and water for long periods of time. How do they do it? This was an evolutionary mystery until recently, when researchers found that desert-dwelling gazelles survive by reducing their breathing frequency, thereby cutting fluid loss and decreasing their metabolic demands during periods of water deprivation. [pictured: Arabian sand gazelle, Gazella subgutturosa. Image: BCEAWS]
According to new research that focused on sand gazelles, Gazella subgutturosa, researchers found that these animals rely on two strategies to…
razib | June 12, 2006Regular readers of this weblog know that there are some quick "back of the envelope" prediction equations that one can appeal to to get a rough sense of how quickly evolution can proceed. For example, the time until fixation of a neutral (no selection + or -) mutant is 4Ne generations, where Ne is the effective breeding population. On a quantitative polygenic trait the response to selection, R is proportional to h2, the heritability, multiplied by the selection coefficient, S (R = h2*S being the classic empirical breeder's equation). Nevertheless, sometimes it is important to get an…
evolvingthoughts | June 10, 2006Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology has an excellent roundup of recent work on the group of monkeys named in the title, following the discovery of a new mangabey monkey called a kipunji. He notes that molecular data suggest a diphyletic (two separate evolutionary branches) origin of mangabeys, some of which are more closely related to baboons, and some of which are more closely related to mandrills. He also notes that it is an unanswered question whether the "dog-face" morphology of these animals is primitive, or evolved three times separately, and that fossil data don't resolve the matter…
scientificactivist | June 10, 2006Conservatives in America have become pretty adept at shrugging off worries about global warming, and when it comes to evolution, well, they have their own ideas about how that works. However, this headline from National Geographic might cause some circuits to blow:
"Global Warming Is Spurring Evolution, Study Says"
Wow, what a catch-22! They can continue to ignore global warming but risk causing the body of evidence in favor of evolution to grow even faster, thus making it more difficult to sneak religious ideas in classrooms. On the other hand, if they try to reverse climate change, they'…