evolution
loom | May 2, 2006In March, six men entered a London hospital to receive an experimental drug. The men were volunteers, and the drug--a potential treatment for arthritis and leukemia--appeared from animal tests to be safe. But within minutes of the first round of doses, there was trouble. The men complained of headaches, of intolerable heat and cold. The drug made one man's limbs turned blue, while another's head swelled like a balloon. Doctors gave them steroids to counteract the side-effect, and managed to save their lives. But several ended up on life support for a time, and they all may suffer lifelong…
loom | May 1, 2006Today I've got an article in the New York Times about the report in Nature that starlings can recognize syntax-like patterns in songs, and what that might mean--if anything--for the evolution of language. The blogs have been buzzing about the study since it came out on Wednesday, with the Language Log logging in several complaints about bad science and bad reporting. (Fortunately, they gave me a pass, and I hope not merely because I'm the brother of one of the bloggers there!)
So why should you now turn to Tuesday's science section of the Times, days after the wires and the blogs have had…
jlynch | May 1, 2006
A new study of side-blotched lizards [Uta stansburiana] in California has revealed the genetic underpinnings of altruistic behavior in this common lizard species, providing new insights into the long-standing puzzle of how cooperation and altruism can evolve. The study, led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, offers the first evidence in vertebrates of an important theoretical concept in evolutionary biology known as "greenbeard" altruism. (source)
From the press release:
The paper describes unrelated male lizards that form cooperative partnerships to protect their…
loom | May 1, 2006The Loom gathered a bit of dust over the past couple weeks as I grappled with another round of deadlines for work that actually pays the mortgage. Life should now get relaxed enough for more blogging, I hope--starting this evening. And as the articles I've been working on come out in the next few weeks, I'll point you to the links--starting with my recent (brief but free) take
on the new fossil of snakes with legs for the New York Times. And speaking of evolutionary transitions, I'm also happy to bring news of a cool new project, called Kosmos: You Are Here. It's an e-book on the history of…
pharyngula | April 30, 2006
In previous articles about fly development, I'd gone from the maternal gradient to genes that are expressed in alternating stripes (pair-rule genes), and mentioned some genes (the segment polarity genes) that are expressed in every segment. The end result is the development of a segmented animal: one made up of a repeated series of morphological modules, all the same.
Building an animal with repeated elements like that is a wonderfully versatile strategy for making an organism larger without making it too much more complicated, but it's not the whole story. Just repeating the same bits over…
pharyngula | April 27, 2006This strange fish is Euphanerops longaevus, which is one of two species of 370 million year old jawless fishes (the other is Endeiolepis aneri, and the paper suggests that they may actually represent differently preserved members of the same species). These are soft-bodied animals that are usually poorly preserved, and are of interest because they seem to have some properties in common with both the lampreys and the gnathostomes, or jawed fishes. Their exact position in the vertebrate family tree is problematic, and the experts go back and forth on it; sometimes they are grouped with the…
oracknows | April 26, 2006Oh, boy.
Last week, as part of my series Medicine and Evolution, I mentioned the blog of a homeschooled medical student who also happens to be a young earth creationist and used her as an example of why I feared that credulity towards a a pseudoscience that is so obviously wrong based on the empirical evidence, so easily debunked with so little effort is an indicator of credulity when it comes to other forms of pseudoscience, like quackery. I hadn't really planned on mentioning her again any time soon, or even ever, as I thought my point had been made.
Then a reader had to point out to me…
razib | April 25, 2006The San Jose Mercury News has a review up of Ann Gibbons' The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors. It concludes:
But too many pieces are still missing from the puzzle -- including fossils of the ancestors of our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas -- to allow for a clear picture of the evolutionary lineage.
So in the end, ``The First Human'' is a bit like a detective story without a conclusion, or like a detective story that puts Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade, V.I. Warshawski, Easy Rawlins and Gil Grissom all in the same room, gives them a handful…
pharyngula | April 25, 2006This really is an excellent review of three books in the field of evo-devo—
From DNA to Diversity: Molecular Genetics and the Evolution of Animal Design (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll),
Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and
The Plausibility of Life:Resolving Darwin's Dilemma (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)—all highly recommended by me and the NY Times. The nice thing about this review, too, is that it gives a short summary of the field and its growing importance.
evolgen | April 25, 2006Bora has been pushing the idea of publishing original research (hypotheses, data, etc) on science blogs. This post is part of a series exploring the evolution of a duplicated gene in the genus Drosophila. Links to the previous posts can be found below. Part 2 of this series (The Backstory) can be found after the jump.
Previous entries:
Part 1 - Introduction
The Backstory
The enzyme fructose-1,6-bisphosphate aldolase (hereafter referred to as aldolase) is responsible for splitting fructose-1,6-bisphosphate into glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate and dihydroxyacetone-phosphate during glycolysis.…
jlynch | April 24, 2006Haven't had time to read this yet as my print copy only arrived yesterday, but there's a review of Sean Carroll's From DNA to Diversity and Endless Forms Most Beautiful along with Kirschner & Gerhart's The Plausibility of Life in this week's New York Review of Books. For those of you who don't subscribe, it's freely available online. I'm sure PZ may have something to say.
evolgen | April 24, 2006If you read evolgen, you've probably been following the race riots that Wilkins started. It's pretty much died down now, and it was more a debate about semantics rather than an actual scientific disagreement. This is usually the case in evolutionary biology -- take, for example, the neutralist-selection debate or the recent junk DNA fun we had here at evolgen. I have refrained from offering my opinion on Wilkins's post due to my poor understanding of human population genetics (as evidenced by my attempt to discuss marketing BiDil to African Americans), but I have a few comments I would…
pharyngula | April 22, 2006John Wilkins has an excellent linky post on the subject of race. My position on the issue is Richard Lewontin's (seen here in a RealAudio lecture by Richard Lewontin), and more succinctly stated by Wilkins:
So, do I think there are races in biology as well as culture? No. Nothing I have seen indicates that humans nicely group into distinct populations of less than the 54 found by Feldman's group (probably a lot more - for instance, Papua New Guinea is not represented in their sample set). And this leads us to the paper by the Human Race and Ethnicity Working Group (rare to see a paper that…
razib | April 21, 2006Just a note for those of you who don't read my other weblog, Greg Cochran has two new ideas that we're trying to guess at. First, he's got a new theory about the origin/evolution about the Hobbits of Flores. Second, he thinks it might be a possibility that there are living Neandertals. Anyway, I'm throwing this out there because I won't be too surprised if Greg can convince Nick Wade to write a story in the Grey Lady about this stuff at some point in the near future....
evolgen | April 21, 2006Pharyngula has a good summary of the new Sean Carroll Drosophila wing dot paper. Eventually Sean's gonna try to mess around with a hawaiin species and blow the roof off this mother.
evolgen | April 21, 2006Nature has a news article on the resignation of Teri Markow from her position as president of the Society for the Study of Evolution. I don't know much about what happened other than the stuff in the Nature piece, but apparently Markow was frustrated by the treatment of women within the administrative ranks of scientific professional societies. I have some quotes and comments below the fold.
I hardly know Markow -- I have met her and a few of her students briefly -- so I am in no position to evaluate her personally. She does excellent research in a top notch department. She is also the…
pharyngula | April 21, 2006a–c, The wing spots on male flies of the Drosophila genus. Drosophila tristis (a) and D. elegans (b) have wing spots that have arisen during convergent evolution. Drosophila gunungcola (c) instead evolved from a spotted ancestor. d, Males wave their wings to display the spots during elaborate courtship dances.
It's all about style. When you're out and about looking for mates, what tends to draw the eye first are general signals—health and vigor, symmetry, absence of blemishes or injuries, that sort of thing—but then we also look for that special something, that je ne sais quoi, that dash of…
oracknows | April 20, 2006Wow. There was quite a response to yesterday's piece about why doctors are seduced by the pseudoscience of "intelligent design" creationism, more so than I expected from what I thought might be a dry topic.
A couple of the comments provoked by the post are worth discussing briefly in a separate post, rather than my diving into the comments more, where my response would get buried. For example, Flex commented that many physicians are acting as technicians more than anything else. While agreeing with him that most doctors don't need to be scientists, I would quibble with him about how much his…
evolgen | April 20, 2006The evolution of John McCain:
It was not random. It's further evidence of natural selection. The new form is more fit at tricking voters. But keep in mind, natural selection favors the phenotypes best adapted for a previous environment. This means McCain may actually be less fit in 2008.
pharyngula | April 19, 2006
Here's what seems to be a relatively simple problem in evolution. Within the Drosophila genus (and in diverse insects in general), species have evolved patterned spots on their wings, which seem to be important in species-specific courtship. Gompel et al. have been exploring in depth one particular problem, illustrated below: how did a spot-free ancestral fly species acquire that distinctive dark patch near the front tip of the wing in Drosophila biarmipes? Their answer involves dissecting the molecular regulators of pattern in the fly wing, doing comparative sequence analyses and…