evolution
grrlscientist | May 2, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
cwilcox | May 2, 2010Jerry Coyne, the author of Why Evolution is True, recently held a contest. The rules were simple:
Please recommend one nonfiction book that you think everyone should read, and explain in no more than three sentences why we should read it. The book need not be about science, though those entries are welcome too. The only books excluded from this contest are mine and Darwin's Origin, which has been done to death.
Well, the winner has been announced, and the book everyone should read is...
Last Chance to See By Douglas Adams.
I'm not surprised - I've been telling you all this for years. No…
ddobbs | April 30, 2010
from The Everett Collection, via Vanity Fair
Notables I didn't get to. Blog posts, MSM stories, and tweets living together.
Fron the genomics front
NOVA | Ghost in Your Genes | PBS streams some of the Skip Gates program I mentioned in my post last week on the Genomes, Environments, and Traits conference.
What can you learn from a whole genome sequence? : Genetic Future ponders just the Lancet/Quake genome
Heritable, yes, which gene...another issue Razib drills down. He argues elsewhere that The origins of morality do not matter |
AP IMPACT: Testing curbs some genetic diseases -…
awild | April 30, 2010
A pleasingly pink pea aphid (Acrythosiphon pisum)
A long time ago, on a host plant far, far away, an aphid became infected with a fungus. And then it did something unusual: it incorporated some fungal genes into its own genome.
New research by Nancy Moran and Tyler Jarvik, published yesterday in the journal Science, used the newly-published pea aphid genome to demonstrate that the genes the aphids use to make pink carotenoid pigments are derived not from insects but from a gene lineage nested well within the fungi.
This observation is interesting for two points. First, most animals with…
ddobbs | April 29, 2010I had the pleasure of attending the Genomes, Environment, and Traits conference on Tuesday. Was wonderful and strange, with many inspiring, exciting, and/or entertaining moments -- and a few things a bit worrisome.
The twitter feed from the event tracks the talks and agenda pretty thoroughly; it's far better than my own notes. I especially enjoyed the morning's main event, in which a tag team of Robert Krulwich and Carl Zimmer called to stage for interviews different combinations of 13 the 10 "pioneers" who had been among the first to have their entire genomes run. As a journalist, I had…
laelaps | April 29, 2010
Utah may seem like an odd place to search for primates, but you can find them if you know where to look. Although scrubby and arid today, between 46-42 million years ago what is now the northeastern part of the state was a lush forest which was home to a variety of peculiar fossil primates. Called omomyids, these relatives of living tarsiers are primarily known from teeth and associated bits and pieces of bone, but newly discovered postcranial remains may provide paleontologists with a better idea of how some of these ancient primates moved.
For most of their early evolution omomyids were…
mikethemadbiologist | April 29, 2010I came across this excellent article by Jerry Coyne, which is part book review, part defense of natural selection. I recommend it highly. But, in reading the article, I wondered why people are so threatened by natural selection. Because that's not the philosophically challenging part. Unless you're a biblical 'literalist', the idea of a creator dude who acts through the mechanism of natural selection isn't too theologically challenging. After all, traits that are beneficial (at least locally and in the short term) increase, while the deleterious ones decrease. Surely, this is the best…
awild | April 28, 2010Yesterday, Antweb posted its first images of Anomalomyrma workers, and I've been staring at them ever since.
This is a strange ant indeed, a member of the ancient subfamily Leptanillinae that is potentially a sister lineage to the remaining extant ants. It's ostensibly a subterranean predator in the forests of tropical Asia, but beyond that little is known. The number of times Anomalomyrma has been collected can probably be counted on my fingers.
Here's a pic:
Call me crazy, but the shape of this thing puts me in mind of another ant oddity: Martialis heureka:
Martialis was discovered in…
jrosenhouse | April 27, 2010If for some incomprehensible reason you are not interested in the big chess match, and are looking for something evolutiony to read, let me suggest Jerry Coyne's big review of the recent books by RIchard Dawkins and Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini. The review was published in The Nation. Here's a nugget:
Indeed, virtually none of the biologists who study the “constraints” described by F&P share their dim view of natural selection. That's because, over and over again, selection has wrought the most improbable and unpredictable changes in animals and plants. F&P claim, for…
pharyngula | April 27, 2010If you've ever invited me out to give a science talk, you know that what I generally talk about is this concept of deep homology: the discovery that features that we often consider the hallmarks of complex metazoan life often have at their core a network of genetic circuitry that was first pioneered in bacteria. What life has done is taken useful functional elements that were worked out in the teeming, diverse gene pools of the dominant single-celled forms of life on earth and repurposed it in novel ways. The really interesting big bang of life occurred long before the Cambrian, as organisms…
laelaps | April 27, 2010
Fossil fish from the Eocene age Green River Formation in Colorado. From Wikipedia.
I am pretty tired of Richard Dawkins putting down paleontology. In his 2004 tome The Ancestor's Tale, as well as in his latest book The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins felt compelled to cast the fossil record as an unnecessary bonus when it comes to demonstrating the reality of evolution. "The evidence for evolution would be entirely secure," he asserts in the latter book, "even if not a single corpse had ever fossilized." While this statement contains a crumb of truth - we have learned much about evolution…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2010tags: Parrots the Universe and Everything, biogeography, lemurs, twig technology, conservation, endangered species, evolution, komodo dragons, kakapo, baiji, comedy, Douglas Adams, streaming video
Douglas Adams was the best-selling British author and satirist who created The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [DVD]. In this talk at UCSB recorded shortly before his tragic and untimely death, Adams shares hilarious accounts of some of the apparently absurd lifestyles of the world's creatures, and gleans from them extraordinary perceptions about the future of humanity.
grrlscientist | April 25, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
cwilcox | April 24, 2010We saw that the littlest differences can lead to dramatic variations when we looked at the wide variety in dogs. But despite their differences, all breeds of dogs are still the same species as each other and their ancestor. How do species split? What causes speciation? And what evidence do we have that speciation has ever occurred?
Critics of evolution often fall back on the maxim that no one has ever seen one species split into two. While that's clearly a straw man, because most speciation takes far longer than our lifespan to occur, it's also not true. We have seen species split, and we…
laelaps | April 23, 2010
For at least 30 million years, bone-eating worms have been making their homes in the bodies of decomposing whales on the seabottom, but the rotting cetacean carcasses are not just food sources for the polychaetes.
The term "worm" immediately conjures up images of the red, squiggly things which crawl all over the sidewalk after it rains, but this imagery does not fit the boneworms of the genus Osedax. These worms start off life as sexless larvae, and the timing of their arrival at a whale corpse makes all the difference as to whether they will be male or female. If the larva lands on the…
laelaps | April 22, 2010
A Madagascar sucker-footed bat (Myzopoda aurita).
In the tropical forests of Madagascar, there lives a very peculiar kind of bat. While most bats roost by hanging upside-down from cave ceilings or tree branches, the Madagascar sucker-footed bat (Myzopoda aurita) holds itself head-up thanks to a set of adhesive pads on its wings. Nor is it the only bat to do so. Thousands of miles away in the jungles of Central and South America, Spix's disk-winged bat (Thyroptera tricolor) does the same thing, but how do their sucker pads work, and why do they choose to roost in a different way from all…
grrlscientist | April 22, 2010tags: Glowing Life in an Underwater World, marine biology, bioluminescence, luciferase, luciferin, green fluorescent protein, eye-in-the-sea cam, ethology, evolution, Edith Widder, TEDTalks, streaming video
Some 80 to 90 percent of undersea creatures make light -- and we know very little about how or why. Bioluminescence expert Edith Widder explores this glowing, sparkling, luminous world, sharing glorious images and insight into the unseen depths (and brights) of the ocean.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's…
sa smith | April 21, 2010Hey you remember last year, OU had all these super cool presentations by scientists and evilution-themed activities for Darwins 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of 'Origin'?
Remember how OK politicians and religious radicals had a conniption fit over it?
Well, the professor who spearheaded the Darwinabration, Piers Hale (comrade of the nefarious John Lynch), just won 'The University of Oklahoma's 2010 General Education Teaching Award'!
The University of Oklahoma's 2010 General Education Teaching Award has been presented to Piers Hale, Assistant Professor of the History of Science.…
grrlscientist | April 18, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…