evolution
evolgen | March 23, 2006Alex Palazzo managed to piss off some people with his taxonomy of biomedical disciplines. We have also learned that there are different types of physics geeks and anthropologists. (By the way, don't ever call me a geek; geeks bite the heads off of chickens. I'm a nerd.) I previously attempted to classify evolutionary biologists and named them after the important names in their particular field. It was actually a satire of the creationist ploy to call people Darwinists, so laugh. Now I'm going to further divide up the evolutionary geneticists (already a sub-set of biologists) into a bunch…
evolgen | March 23, 2006The term "Junk DNA" is bullshit. There, I said it. The moment I hear someone utter that phrase, I immediately lose respect for him or her. No one whose opinion is worth anything will refer to non-coding DNA as junk. That's why this article bothers me. The title, "Junk DNA may not be so junky after all" has nothing to do with the content of the article. The research being described is not about showing that non-coding DNA has a function. The function has already been determined. The researchers have used zebrafish to identify enhancers for human genes. The subtitle to the article (…
oracknows | March 23, 2006Longtime readers of this blog may have noticed that, since my move to ScienceBlogs six weeks ago, I haven't written nearly as much about evolution or intelligent design as I used to on the old blog.. There are probably at least several reasons for this. For one thing, lots of other topics have forced their way to the forefront of my attention, including more autism quackery by the Geiers, a politically oriented medical journal that is anything but scientific, the fire at The Holocaust History Project, applying science to green tea, and a variety of other things. Also, in light of the Dover…
evolgen | March 20, 2006Japan has jumped out to an early lead over Cuba in the World Baseball Classic championship game. Why do I mention this? Not only have Japanese researchers made great contributions to evolutionary genetics, but the emperor of Japan has actually actively studied evolutionary biology. Also, the Japanese left fielder, Hitoshi Tamura, happens to share his name with the fairly prominent scientist, Koichiro Tamura. Every time I hear them refer to Tamura, I think about the Tamura-Nei distance correction.
evolgen | March 20, 2006Robert Skipper took issue with Dick Lewontin's definition of natural selection. Skipper did not like how Lewontin removed the struggle for existence and interaction with the environment from the requirements for evolution by natural selection. John Hawks points out that the environment encompasses everything outside of the genome (the proteome, cell environment, extracellular physiology, the extra-organismal environment, and even culture), and I agree with him -- as a reductionist, I like to view the nucleotide as the unit of selection and everything else as the environment. Skipper agrees…
loom | March 19, 2006Check out Pharyngula on the new paper that uses penguin fossils to time the evolution of living bird groups. In October I posted this picture of a reconstruction of the penguin in question, which now has a name: Waimanu. I'd just add to PZ's run down that this fossil is also important because it is part of the transition from flying ancestors to flightless living penguins. Its wings could still bend at the elbows.
evolgen | March 19, 2006The human Y, that is. The Science Creative Quarterly has a very thorough (ie, make sure you have some time to spare) review of the mammalian Y chromosome (focusing on the human Y). The article covers the origin and evolution of the mammalian Y and what the degeneration of the Y means for the future of human male fertility and sex determination. I should point out that the mammalian Y chromosome is an anomaly in origin and sex determination. In fact, every single sex determination system and sex chromosome system that I know of differs from all of the others in some manner. It looks like…
pharyngula | March 18, 2006
We haven't had enough fossil penguins here, so let me rectify that deficiency. Below the fold you'll find a reconstruction of Waimanu, a 61-62 million year old penguin that was discovered in New Zealand.
Oh, and Carl Zimmer has posted a photo of the bird with its skin and feathers on.
Reconstruction of Waimanu (composite of W. manneringi and W. tuatahi, based on original art
by Chris Gaskin ©Geology Museum, University of Otago). ca, caudal vertebrae; ce, cervical
vertebrae; cm, carpometacarpus; cr, coracoid; fb, fibula; fe, femur; fu, furcula; hu, humerus; sk,
skull, md, mandible; oc, os…
razib | March 18, 2006I was just sent a link to the torrent for last night's showing of The Family that Walks on All Fours.
evolgen | March 17, 2006PLoS Computational Biology has an article in the pipeline on detecting natural selection in humans in chimps. The authors looked for genes evolving at unequal rates between the two species and genes with signals of positive selection. I have not read the entire article, but it looks like a good attempt to distinguish actual positive selection from changes in selective constraint.
pharyngula | March 17, 2006I've been reading Hazen's Gen-e-sis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I haven't finished it yet, but it led me to appreciate this post and this diagram more.
Isn't that the truth? What creationists see as a weakness, that we have so many ideas (and so many gaps), we see as a strength.
loom | March 17, 2006Randy Olson, who sparked a massive discussion here a couple weeks ago in connection to his movie, Flock of Dodos and how to explain evolution, sends an update:
Hello Carl -
Big news here -- the official World Premiere of "Flock of Dodos: the evolution-intelligent design circus," will be at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film Festival on the evening of Sunday, April 30 in New York City, followed by three more screenings during the following days. We will have details on our website next week on how to get tickets. Here's the Tribeca announcement: http://www.indiewire.com/ots/2006/03/…
pharyngula | March 16, 2006Both Twisty and Amanda seem a bit weirded out by this news that the fetus can be viewed as a kind of parasite. This story has been around long enough that a lot of us just take it for granted—I wrote about the example of preeclampsia a while back.
There are worse feminist-troubling theories out there, though. In particular, there is the idea of intersexual evolutionary conflict and male-induced harm. In species where there is some level of promiscuity, it can be to the male's evolutionary advantage to compel his mate to a) invest more effort in his immediate progeny, b) increase her short-…
oracknows | March 16, 2006MarkCC is really making a name for himself pretty fast with Good Math, Bad Math, a blog dedicated to "shredding bad math and squashing the crackpots who espouse it." (And to think that a post of mine had a small role in getting him going and promoting him in the blogosphere; it almost makes me tear up to see him doing so well so fast.)
This time, Mark's turning his mathematical skills to deconstructing the dubious mathematics in a paper entitled Fitness Among Competitive Agents by that icon of and tireless propagandist for "intelligent design" creationism, William Dembski. The result is--…
razib | March 16, 2006A recent story of a non-feathered dinosaur in a presumably feathered clade is stirring the pot a bit right now. The importance of shared derived characters in systematics is one reason that something like feathers tends to elicit a response from many scientists, since one character might result in the reworking of the tree of life. But there are other ways to study feathers aside from paleontology, in particular, I point you to the work of Richard Prum (in particular, this paper) and Matthew Harris. Development and genetics can be crucial supplements to the fossil evidence in this case,…
evolgen | March 15, 2006Randy Olson has been taking his film Flock of Dodos around the United States, showing free screenings at a bunch of universities. The list of places he's visited reads like the lyrics to a Johnny Cash song: Kansas City, Boston, New Haven, Houston. . . (if you have more places to add to the list, put them in the comments). But the show has skipped the largest university in one of the big anti-evolution states, Pennsylvania. It would be awesome if they could schedule a visit to Penn State, where there is some interest in evolution. What do I have to do to get a screening in Central…
loom | March 14, 2006Harper has put up a new page on Amazon for the reissued paperback of Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. It will include an introduction I've written that surveys some of the important developments in both the science and politics of evolution in the five years since the book was published. The Amazon page doesn't show the cover yet, but it's in the fall catalog--a subset of these lovely eyes. The publication date is scheduled for November (cough...Christmas gifts...cough).
evolgen | March 14, 2006PLoS Biology (the people that brought you the recent paper from Jonathan Pritchard on detecting selection in the human genome and George Zhang's paper on selection on human pseudogenes) has published an editorial on detecting natural selection. It is a good follow up to my series on detecting natural selection using molecular data.
razib | March 14, 2006Chris of Mixing Memory has a long post on the cognitive science of evolutionary biology, or, more precisely, how people tend to interpret and perceive evolutionary biology. The whole post is worth reading (and linking if you have a weblog). I hit upon some of the points in my post Endless Forms Most Continuous, but Chris points out three primary blocks to an acceptance of evolutionary biology:
1) Intuitive theism, the tendency to see design in complex objects and phenomena.
2) Intuitive essentialism, the tendency to not frame populations as populations as opposed to iterations of an…
loom | March 14, 2006Last October, a lawsuit was leveled against an evolution web site at UC Berkeley, based on the claim that government funds had been used to promote religious belief. I contributed the section on the history of biological thought. Judy Scotchmoor, the project's coordinator, just dropped me an email letting me know that the judge has dismissed the case. One less frivolous lawsuit clogging the courts. I've got to run, but if I get more information later, I'll update this post.
Update: Berkeley press release here.