evolution
oracknows | October 19, 2010The Lorne Trottier Symposium is over, and it went quite well. Amazingly, even though I had to follow Michael Shermer's talk, people told me I didn't suck, which made me feel better. Oh, there was this issue of a guy who wanted to tout Royal Rife and his machine. He wouldn't have irritated me so much for doing that. What did irritate me was that he went on and on and on and wouldn't yield the microphone, to the point where I tried to interrupt him to ask him if he had a question and then ended up being perhaps too dismissive of his question. On the other hand, even Michael Shermer told him, "…
mikethemadbiologist | October 19, 2010To steal a phrase. By way of ScienceBlogling David Sloan Wilson, we come across an interesting white paper, "The Relevance of Evolutionary Science For Economic Theory and Policy" (pdf). Since I'm an evolutionary biologist, you would probably expect me to be partial to the white paper, but I'm not convinced.
ZOMG!! TEH DARWINISMZ!!
No, that's not why. I'll leave aside the focus on general equilibrium theory in economics* (I don't care for it either), and simply note that the current spate of problems really aren't theoretical in nature, but ideological and methodological.
The latter,…
mikethemadbiologist | October 14, 2010And by hot, I mean employable. I'll get to that in a bit, but I first want to relate some history. Back when I was a wee lil' Mad Biologist, and molecular population genetics was in its infancy, there was a brief period where people had to be convinced that this stuff was useful (it was). Then it became fashionable, and the 'early adopters'--people who were regularly using PCR and clone-based sequencing (followed by S35 sequencing)--became hot intellectual commodities for about five years. Then the field became crowded, but 'good' molecular population geneticists (whatever 'good' means)…
gregladen | October 12, 2010Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other's shoes (the gals)?
This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the "evolutionary psychology" argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The Pleistocene with today's behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by "sound" you mean "sounds good unless you listen really hard."
I list this argument among the falsehoods, but really, this is a category of argument…
pharyngula | October 7, 2010I was mystified why Chief Teabagger David Koch would invest so much in a Smithsonian exhibit on human evolution — usually those knuckledraggers object to people putting their ancestry on display. An explanation is at hand, though: his big issue is denying the significance of global climate change, and the exhibit is tailored to make climate change look like a universal good.
There are some convincing examples of the subterfuge being perpetrated. There is a big emphasis on how evolutionary changes were accompanied by (or even caused by) climate shifts, which evolutionary biologists would see…
sa smith | September 29, 2010Hepatitis B is my favorite non-retrovirus.
Why?
Because its a retrovirus :-D
Heres another reason for me to love it-- Its viral family, Hepadnaviridae, inserted themselves into bird genomes 19 million years ago.
Genomic Fossils Calibrate the Long-Term Evolution of Hepadnaviruses
*happy-prospector-dance* Okay, this is like, the billionth time this has happened in the past few months-- Finding endogenous versions of viruses that arent 'supposed' to endogenize. THIS IS SO AMAZING!
We do not have viral fossils for us to study what a kind of virus looked like 100, 1000, 1000000000 years ago.…
pharyngula | September 27, 2010There have been no science fiction movies that I know of that accurately describe evolution. None. And there have been very few novels that deal with it at all well. I suspect it's because it makes for very bad drama: it's so darned slow, and worst of all, the individual is relatively unimportant and all the action takes place incrementally over a lineage of a group, which removes personal immediacy from the script. Lineages just don't make for coherent, interesting personalities.
io9 takes a moment to list the worst offenders in the SF/evolution genre. There are a couple of obvious choices:…
gregladen | September 21, 2010It is very common, across the U.S., for science teachers to dread the "evolution" unit that they teach during life science class.
As they approach the day, and start to prepare the students for what is coming, they begin to hear the sarcastic remarks from the creationist students. When the day to engage the evolution unit arrives, students may show up in the classroom with handouts from anti-science sites like Answers in Genesis, to give to their friends. They may carry a bible to the lab station and read it instead of doing the work. If there is a parent conference night around that…
pharyngula | September 21, 2010People are always asking me for the source of those nice t-shirts that illustrate how long we've diverged from a given species. I think the name must be hard to remember: they're at evogeneao.com. Now there's a little software widget that will be just as neat-o.
Look up TimeTree, and remember to show it to the kids. This is a page with a simple premise: type in the name of two taxa (it will accept common names, but may give you a list of scientific names to narrow the search), and then it looks them up in the public gene databases and gives you a best estimate of how long ago their last…
sa smith | September 17, 2010Lentiviruses, we think, are evolutionarily young.
For example-- you have retroviruses in your DNA (ERVs) from other genuses (genii?) genera of retrovirus that are millions and millions of years old. So we know those other genuses (genii?) genera are millions and millions of years old.
Lentiviruses, on the other hand, havent left us many of these kinds of fossils for us to figure out their age. We can still put out a good estimate, though. For instance-- SIV is all over the place in non-human primates in Africa. And while its ubiquitious in Africa (implying 'old'), its not found in non-…
sa smith | September 15, 2010Creationists cant deal with ERVs. They have no answer to the problems ERVs pose to Creationism. They have no alternative explanation for the weight ERVs lend to evilution.
However, this doesnt stop Creationists from bluffing/lying to save face in front of the True Believers.
One of the more baffling responses Ive gotten to ERVs is 'ERVs dont exist. They arent really ancient retroviral fossils.' The most common response is 'ERVs arent junk DNA! See, this one gene (out of 1,000,000 similar genes that are clearly junk) has been co-opted for use by the host! So, YAY JESUS!'
Real world, real…
pharyngula | September 10, 2010Williams was one of the giants of 20th century evolutionary biology, and he died on Wednesday. Michael Ruse offers a brief summary of his career, while Edge has personal testimonials from people who knew him. I never met him, to my regret, but knew his work, which was enormously influential.
cagapakis | September 10, 2010
Noise obscures meaningful information. Noise is what ruins your carefully designed synthetic biology gene circuit. But noise is part of life and life, it turns out, needs noise. There's a terrific review article in this week's Nature discussing recent theoretical and experimental work on biological noise showing functional roles for molecular, genetic, and evolutionary noise.
From the abstract:
The genetic circuits that regulate cellular functions are subject to stochastic fluctuations, or 'noise', in the levels of their components. Noise, far from just a nuisance, has begun to be…
cagapakis | September 4, 2010
Life transforms environments, creating ecosystems where there was once only rocks. The evolution of photosynthetic bacteria billions of years ago created the atmosphere we have today, paving the way for the evolution of larger, oxygen-breathing organisms. We humans obviously transform our environment in countless ways, but can we also engineer barren environments to be hospitable to life? Can we create new living, self-sustaining ecosystems in hostile places? Can we turn lifeless planets into second Earths through the clever introduction of life forms?
Terraforming is the (currently…
pharyngula | August 25, 2010Jebus, but I despise that fluffy, superficial, Newagey site run by the flibbertigibbet Ariana. I will not be linking to it, but if you must, you can just search for this recent article: "Darwin May Have Been WRONG, New Study Argues". I don't recommend it. It sucks. Read the title, and you've already got the false sensationalism of the whole story down cold.
It's actually an old and familiar story that doesn't upset any applecarts at all. There is a well-known concept in evolutionary theory of an adaptive radiation: a lineage acquires a new trait (birds evolve flight, for instance), or an…
gregladen | August 25, 2010I'm going to talk about one or two peer reviewed papers, but in doing so, I'm going to have to say a few words ... and this will not be pretty ... about a certain science writer's report at the BBC.
In an article titled "Space is the final frontier for evolution, study claims" BBC "science writer" Howard Falcon-Lang uses the old, tired, and quite frankly, stupendously unethical tack of making a claim that Darwin has been overthrown by new research. If someone actually overthrows Darwin, then so be it. But this is not what has happened. Falcon-Lang, or perhaps his BBC handlers, have used the…
elerner | August 18, 2010The science song is a strange beast; people have surely converted information to rhythms or rhymes as a mnemonic device for millennia, though the idea of "educational music" as a genre has only recently crystallized. Its target audience has oscillated since then; while Tom Lehrer was playing for adults in the 50s and 60s, a renaissance of children's television in the 70s, from Sesame Street to Schoolhouse Rock!, marked the style as child's play. Those children are now grown up and making music of their own. Frank Swain of SciencePunk provides two video examples: Amoeba to Zebra's "Shake your…
gregladen | August 13, 2010Money Harper is a musician who has put to song several actual research projects of University of Oklahoma scientists. He's raising money to finish the project. Maybe you can help him out. Either way, it is an interesting story, and I'm sure you are going to want a copy of the CD.
My old friend Dan Bewley, of The News On 6, had produced a news piece on the story. Here's the text of the story, and here's the video:
Check out the story and follow the link to Monty Harper's web site.
gregladen | August 11, 2010The newly reported Saadanius hijazensis may or may not be a "missing link" but in order for this monkey to climb onto the primate family tree, a new branch had to be sprouted. So, not only is Saadanius hijazensis a new species, but it is a member of a new taxonomic Family, Saadaniidae, which in turn is a member of a new Superfamily, Saadanioidea. Why is this important? It's complicated. But not too complicated.
The fossil was found while University of Michigan paleontologist Iyad Zalmout was busy looking for dinosaur fossils in western Saudi Arabia. He found the monkey, from a much…