evolution
pharyngula | June 10, 2006
To continue a bit of theme, I mentioned that there were some different ways to approach biology, and that old-school systematists with their breadth of knowledge about the diversity of life are getting harder and harder to find. This is something I also bring up in my introductory biology course, where we discuss how biologists do their work, and I mention that one distinction you can find (which is really a continuum and frequently breached) is that there are bench scientists and field scientists, and they differ in multiple ways. Bench scientists tend to be strongly reductionist, tend to…
evolvingthoughts | June 10, 2006Here is a nice site showing dinosaur skeletal fragments and the reconstructions. Go check it out.
evolvingthoughts | June 10, 2006
Originally, science began when people started to give their papers and results publicly, for discussion and correction. Back in the days of the Royal Society and other subsequent bodies, a talk would be read to the society and then published in their proceedings, and there was an immediate live feedback. Nowadays the process is much more ossified - research, give talks to your research group, present posters and if you are really lucky a talk at a major conference, then send in the paper for peer review. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Any researcher has played reviewer roulette in…
razib | June 9, 2006In response to a few reflective posts of mine in regards to the "big picture" of evolutionary dynamics Brown Gaucho has his own summation of the issues at hand. Worth a read. He tends to take a slightly different tack than myself, but ultimately I think the issues we can agree upon relate to the "unity within the diversity" of the biological sciences. Yes, we all have different interests and emphases, but we deal in one reality which trades in the same general currency of laws. And of course, I highly recommend Armand Leroi's paper which elaborates my general position on this issue.
pharyngula | June 9, 2006
After the recent struggles trying to keep up with the traffic on this site, you wouldn't think I'd feel compelled to go trolling for more visitors, but isn't that the nature of weblogging? The only point to it all is to rack up a bigger score than the next guy, as if we were playing pinball. So what's a good ploy? As Lauren has cleverly pointed out, sex sells. And while it may be estrogen week, I'm going to buck the trend, since we all know what's really important for weblog popularity: penises.
So I was just browsing through some fun journals (Integrative and Comparative Biology, always…
neurotopia | June 9, 2006...you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sittin' in your little room
--The White Stripes
Welcome to the second incarnation of Neurotopia! The old incarnation can be found here, although lately it has just been a collection of posts where I complain about how Blogger stinks. But no more! Now I'm here on this slick new platform! The SEED overlords pulled a mean trick on me: they set up the new blog launch mere hours before I'm supposed to hit the road and celebrate my 8th anniversary by accompanying Mrs. Evil Monkey to Fallingwater for the weekend.…
razib | June 8, 2006My comment about the basics of evolutionary biology and how they enter into non-scientific discourse elicited this response from RPM:
You may not like the concept of speciation, but the parts that make it up (reinforcement, geographic isolation, pre- and post-zygotic barriers, etc) are real. They are also worth studying, imo. In studying those factors, scientists are, for all intents and purposes, studying "speciation". And to study speciation, we must come up with a definition for what we consider species. Coyne and Orr argue that the best definition (in terms of practicality when studying…
evolvingthoughts | June 8, 2006
Before we continue, let's get a few definitional matters out of the way.
First, there is the "state of nature" issue. A longstanding tradition in political philosophy is that humans existed at some stage in a state of nature, that is to say, a condition of living without the constraints of historical society. Hobbes thought it was a bellum omnia contra omnes - a war of all against all. Locke, on the other hand, thought that it was a state of free association of contractually independent agents capable of making a social contract. Both positions are just biologically unrealistic. Humans, if…
pharyngula | June 8, 2006
The fugu is a famous fish, at least as a Japanese sushi dish containing a potentially lethal neurotoxin that was featured on an episode of The Simpsons. Fugu is a member of the pufferfish group, which have another claim to fame: an extremely small genome, roughly a tenth the size of that of other vertebrates. The genome of several species of pufferfish is being sequenced, and the latest issue of Nature announces the completion of a draft sequence for the green spotted pufferfish, Tetraodon nigroviridis, a small freshwater species.
Tetraodon has about the same number of genes as we do, 20,…
razib | June 8, 2006Over at my other weblog, Gene Expression "Classic", I addressed the polemics of one David Stove, author of Darwinian Fairytales. I won't go into the details of Stove and that book, but if you follow the comment thread you will see that sometimes shit can be a very good fertilizer and give rise to food for thought. The comment thread made more explicit in my mind a few issues I have in regards to evolution.
First, I hold to the scale independence of evolution, that is, there is no fundamental difference between microevolution and macroevolution. Macroevolution is in reality simply a…
evolvingthoughts | June 8, 2006
Darwin, evolution, and Popper Creationists often appeal to authority in the person of the well-known philosopher, Sir Karl Popper, who said, they say, that evolution is not scientific. Mark Isaak's marvellous Index to Creationist Claims is in the process of adding a section on this. I responded, and so I thought I'd add it to my blog, in part because it is interesting how Popper actually saw evolution.
Popper originally said that evolution (by which he meant natural selection) was a "metaphysical research programme". Popper, unlike the logical positivists he opposed, held that…
oracknows | June 8, 2006A couple of days ago, on the Day of the Beast (6/6/06), Ann Coulter took the opportunity to unleash yet another spray of spittle-drenched attacks on liberals (Godless: The Church of Liberalism) into bookstores across the nation. As is her schtick, she's made quite the stir over the airwaves by making very inflammatory and offensive statements. This time, it was about the 9/11 widows during an interview with Matt Lauer Tuesday morning (video here) about what she wrote in her book:
These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9-11 was an attack on our nation and acted like as if the…
pharyngula | June 8, 2006
Creationists are fond of the "it can't happen" argument: they like to point to things like the complexity of the eye or intricate cell lineages and invent bogus rules like "irreducible complexity" so they can claim evolution is impossible. In particular, it's easy for them to take any single organism in isolation and go oooh, aaah over its elaborate detail, and then segue into the argument from personal incredulity.
Two things, one natural and one artificial, help them do this. Organisms are incredibly complicated, there is no denying it. This should be no solace to the anti-evolutionists,…
razib | June 6, 2006Evolgen has a has a nice little post poking fun at the late Ernst Mayr. A few comments.
1) R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and J.M. Smith were trained as mathematical/physical scientists before their biological days. Fisher did work in statistical mechanics before he went off to Rothamsted. Physical scientists can and do say stupid things about biology, but that is only when they aren't biologists.
2) I think what Mayr was getting at was denigrating "bean baggery" and "reductionism." Theoretical population geneticists break down complex evolutionary dynamics to analytically tractable…
grrlscientist | June 6, 2006
Although these fish look similar and have the same genetic makeup, they
produce very different electrical signals (right) and will only mate with fish that produce
the same signals. Cornell researchers believe that these different electrical signals are the
fishes' first step in diverging into separate species. [Image: Carl Hopkins.]
The fishes depicted in the picture above are several types of mormyrids that are endemic to some tributaries of the Ivindo River in Gabon, Africa. These fishes produce weak electrical signals from a battery-like organ at the base of the tail to communicate…
evolvingthoughts | June 6, 2006
I often wonder what goes through the minds of those who propose utopian political ideals that turn out to become the worst of all possible dystopias, like Leninism or Maoism, or for that matter the extreme laisse faire capitalist conservatism. For it appears to me that these systems would work just fine, if only they didn't involve any human beings. And that raises an interesting question in my mind, and I hope, yours too. What sorts of political systems are biologically feasible for human beings? As Aristotle said, Man is a Political Animal, but what sort of political animal?
Any…
evolgen | June 6, 2006I've learned that writing about alcohol is great for the ol' site meter. Even the teetotalers got active in the comments. Despite the rampant sobriety that seems to be spreading amongst sciency types, I still believe that alcohol is the lubricant that greases the scientific process.
But scientists -- being scientists -- aren't just interesting in drinking the alcohol; they also want to know where the critters that make it come from and how it gets produced. Of course, alcohol on its own isn't very enjoyable. That's why beer makers add things like hops to their brew, and wine makers try to…
razib | June 5, 2006Nick Wade reviews and summarizes the new festschrift to Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins : How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think. Here is the list of contributors (from Edge):
Dr Robert Aunger, Senior Lecturer, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
David P.Barash, Professor of Psychology, University of Washington
Sir Patrick Bateson, Professor of Ethology, University of Cambridge
Dr Seth Bullock, University of Leeds
Helena Cronin, Co-Director, Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, LSE
Martin Daly, Department of Psychology, McMaster University
Marian Stamp Dawkins,…
razib | June 5, 2006Here is a press release of a paper which reviews Neandertal mtDNA diversity. Here is the first paragraph:
The cohabitation of Neandertals and modern humans in Europe about 35,000 years ago has stimulated considerable debate regarding hypothetical admixture. Recently, sequences of the hypervariable region-1 (HVR-1) of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from 9 Neandertal specimens dated between 29,000 and 42,000 years ago from dispersed locations have revealed the genetic diversity of Neandertals around the time of the cohabitation 1, 2, 3 and 4. The genetic signatures before and after contact with…
grrlscientist | June 5, 2006
Female thorn bug or thorn treehopper, Umbonia crassicornis (Insecta: Hemiptera: Membracidae).
Have you ever seen an insect evolved to look like a thorn? This not-quite-sharp photo is one I took during the 2004 NABA biennial meeting in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
Image (resized): by frequent reader, Biosparite.
This is a group-living herbivorous insect that lives in the southern USA. They communicate with each other using vibrations and females provide parental care (predator defense) for their nymphs.
If you are interested to learn more about communication in this, and other,…