evolution
ddobbs | March 17, 2010I'll try doing this now and then, maybe regularly, to gather the more notable tweets I get in my twitter feed.
Darwin2009: Population-level traits that affect, and do not affect, invasion success http://ow.ly/1mMUp
jayrosen_nyu: "The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company." <--- Bill Keller http://jr.ly/2pfz
dhayton: âH-Madnessâ is a new blog on the history of psychiatry, madness, etc. For and by scholars: http://historypsychiatry.wordpress.com/
stevesilberman: The brains of psychopaths may be hypersensitive to dopamine rewards - http://bit.ly/daP9Go…
razib | March 16, 2010Dienekes has reposted some of the abstracts from the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. This one caught my eye, Genetic analyses reveal a history of serial founder effects, admixture between long separated founding populations in Oceania, and interbreeding with archaic humans:
Genetic anthropologists continue to debate whether human neutral genetic variation primarily reflects a continuum of demes connected by local gene flow or colonization and serial founder effects. A second unresolved issue concerns the genetic contribution of archaic species to the modern…
pharyngula | March 16, 2010
First, you start with a lizard.
Really, I'm not joking. Snakes didn't just appear out of nowhere, nor was there simply some massive cosmic zot of a mutation in some primordial legged ancestor that turned their progeny into slithery limbless serpents. One of the tougher lessons to get across to people is that evolution is not about abrupt transmutations of one form into another, but the gradual accumulation of many changes at the genetic level which are typically buffered and have minimal effects on the phenotype, only rarely expanding into a lineage with a marked difference in morphology.…
emjohnson | March 16, 2010 Looking nonhumans in the eye. Image: Elephant Man by Chris GallucciIn 1927 Bertrand Russell wrote his now famous essay "Why I Am Not A Christian" and outlined the general reasons for why he rejected such an ideology. This approach has been followed by other writers such as Ibn Warraq in Why I Am Not A Muslim, Ramendra Nath in his essay "Why I Am Not A Hindu" and David Dvorkin in his "Why I Am Not A Jew." My own choice of title is not in the same tradition as these other writers (since I agree with much of what humanism has to offer), but I do share with them a concern over…
emjohnson | March 16, 2010My essay The Unseen and Unknowable Has No Place in Science has just gone up this morning in the Religion section of The Huffington Post:
Yes, religion is incompatible with science. This doesn't mean, of course, that religious people are incapable of doing science. Far from it. There are certain questions that don't probe too deeply into the foundations of a person's faith and they have no problem employing their reason to its fullest in those cases. But when reason starts to get uncomfortably close (as it has for Francis Collins, Deepak Chopra and Michael Behe) well, that's when the…
razib | March 15, 2010The Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition in Cova Gran (Catalunya, Spain) and the extinction of Neanderthals in the Iberian Peninsula:
The excavations carried out in Cova Gran de Santa Linya (Southeastern PrePyrenees, Catalunya, Spain) have unearthed a new archaeological sequence attributable to the Middle Palaeoloithic/Upper Palaeolithic (MP/UP) transition. This article presents data on the stratigraphy, archaeology, and 14C AMS dates of three Early Upper Palaeolithic and four Late Middle Palaeolithic levels excavated in Cova Gran. All these archaeological levels fall within the 34-32 ka…
ddobbs | March 15, 2010
We'll start with the science, cruise through J school, and end with healthcare reform or bust.
Genetic material
Willful ignorance is not an effective argument against personal genomics : Genetic Future Mr. McDonald spanks the frightened.
The American Scientist, meanwhile, takes a shot at Putting Genes in Perspective
Culture and the human genome From the excellent A Replicated Typo. (That's gene humor, is 'replicated typo.')
Going to J School
State of the Media, By the Numbers : CJR A review of a review: Columbia Journalism reviews Pew's "State of the Media" report. Eye-popping numbers and…
emjohnson | March 15, 2010Image: The Daffodil Cichlid of Lake Tanganyika / Koen Eeckhoudt
In 1888 "Darwin's Bulldog", Thomas Henry Huxley, declared that nature was little more than a "gladiator's show" whereby only "the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day." Brutal competition was the only important factor in the natural world, in which a "Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence." As such, we shouldn't expect cooperation in nature because only strength and selfishness is rewarded by evolution.
But a paper by Dik Heg and colleagues, entitled Helpful Female…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
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 by me and published here for your information and…
gregladen | March 13, 2010Accoring to Aubrea Wagner, the 17 year old winner of the Christian World View essay contest in which students were asked to write an essay on the following theme:
Write a letter to Charles Darwin explaining why you believe biblical creationism is more plausible and reasonable than Darwin's theory of evolution.
Aubrea's essay is here in PDF form. The web site with other essays, the rules of the contest, and additional information is here.
I invite you to review this essay and comment on its veracity and validity.
Hat tip: Scott Lohman
grrlscientist | March 12, 2010tags: evolution, evolutionary biology, gynandromorph, bilateral gynandromorph bird, half-sider, mixed-sex chimaera, sex determination, molecular biology, genetics, developmental biology, endocrinology, birds, chicken, Gallus gallus, ornithology, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper, journal club
Half-sider.
Almost exactly one year ago, hundreds of American birders
were thrilled by sightings and photographs of this remarkable
Northern Cardinal, or Redbird, Cardinalis cardinalis,
photographed in Warrenton, VA.
Image: DW Maiden, 2 March 2009.
I'll never forget…
laelaps | March 12, 2010
When it comes to aliens, Hollywood really does not have much imagination. Most extraterrestrials that have appeared on the big screen look very much like us, or are at least some kind of four-to-six-limbed vertebrate, and this says more about out own vanity than anything else. It would be far more interesting, I think, to take the weird and wonderful organisms of the Cambrian as inspiration for alien life forms, and two new critters have just been added to the odd Cambrian menagerie.
A restoration of Herpetogaster collinsi by Marianne Collins. From Caron et al, 2010.
What was three…
grrlscientist | March 10, 2010tags: evolution, evolutionary biology, ancient DNA, aDNA, molecular biology, molecular ecology, archaeology, paleontology, fossil eggshell, extinct birds, giant moa, Dinornis robustus, elephant birds, Aepyornis maximus, Mullerornis, Thunderbirds, Genyornis, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper, journal club
Elephant bird, Aepyornis maximus, egg
compared to a human hand with a hummingbird egg balanced on a fingertip.
To conduct my avian research, I've isolated and sequenced DNA from a variety of specimens, such as blood, muscle, skin and a variety of internal…
emjohnson | March 10, 2010It is a common argument by those who are opposed to evolution's implication for religious belief to label Darwin as a social Darwinist and a racist. Adrian Desmond and James Moore's book Darwin's Sacred Cause has gone a long way towards dispelling any claims that Darwin sought to justify black inferiority (in fact, as they show, countering such arguments was an important part of Darwin's work). However, the claim that Darwin inspired social Darwinism is a persistent argument and those that proffer it will stoop to any level in order to discredit him. As I pointed out in my series…
cagapakis | March 10, 2010Animal cells are made up of many smaller membrane-bound compartments called organelles that perform highly specialized functions necessary for life. Incredibly, several of these organelles have been shown to be evolutionarily related to free-living bacteria, captured and incorporated inside a larger cell billions of years ago in a complex mutually beneficial relationship, known as endosymbiosis (a partnership between two species where one of the species is inside the other). The mitochondria that power our cells, generating energy by breaking down sugars are in fact relatives of regular old…
ddobbs | March 9, 2010
Jonah Lehrer's story on "Depression's Upside" has created quite a kerfuffle. The idea he explores â that depression creates an analytic, ruminative focus that generates useful insight â sits badly with quite a few people. It's not a brand-new idea, by any means; as Jonah notes, it goes back at least to Aristotle. But Jonah (who â disclosure department â is a friend; plus I write for the Times Magazine, where the piece was published) has stirred the pot with an update drawing from (among other things) a very long review paper published last year by psychiatric researchers Paul Andrews and…
grrlscientist | March 8, 2010tags: reptiles, chameleon species, herpetology, Chris Raxworthy, research, American Museum of Natural History, AMNH, New York City, field research, nature, travel, Madagascar, speciation, streaming video
With Madagascar containing nearly two-third's of the world's chameleon species, Christopher Raxworthy, Associate Curator of Herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History, recently embarked on an expedition to the island in search of these special lizards. His hope was to track down the lined-chameleon in order to further study speciation on Madagascar.
Having recently returned from…
grrlscientist | March 7, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
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 by me and published here for your information and…
razib | March 4, 2010Over the history of this weblog I have blogged about pigmentation a fair amount. The major reason is that that's where the money is; unlike height, let alone intelligence, the genetic architecture and evolutionary history of pigmentation has been elucidated with relative clarity. That is, we know roughly the number and nature of the genes which control much of the between population variation in pigmentation. And, we also have some sense of whether the variation is due to natural selection, as well the historical trajectory of the between population differences.
For example, consider the…