evolution
oracknows | January 31, 2010This may be a bit over the top, but it does rather point out what is in effect done when journalists lazily present "both sides" of issues that don't really have two sides, at least not two sides that are anywhere in the same universe as far as scientific validity:
I do rather think that they could have found a better example for "Western" versus "alternative" medicine. That part of the video was actually pretty dumb and, quite frankly, painfully unfunny. Come on! A Hulda Clark parody, where the alt-med practitioner claims that all cancer is caused by a liver fluke and that it can be cured…
grrlscientist | January 30, 2010tags: evolutionary biology, convergent evolution, paleontology, taxonomy, zoology, basal birds, theropods, dinosaurs, ornithology, birds, Alvarezsauroidea, Haplocheirus sollers, Maniraptora, Archaeopteryx, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper
A Newly Discovered Basal Alvarezsauroid Theropod from the Early Late Jurassic.
Artwork: Portia Sloan [larger view]
DOI: 10.1126/science.1182143
A long-standing scientific debate focuses on the origins of birds: did they evolve from reptiles or dinosaurs? Currently, most scientists think that birds are modern dinosaurs,…
clock | January 29, 2010This week on PRI/BBC World Science:
This month, the movie Creation opened in theaters across the United States.
The film chronicles the life and work of Charles Darwin.
The movie is directed by Jon Amiel. Paul Bettany stars as Darwin. Jennfer Connelly plays Darwin's wife, Emma.
Creation is based on a biography written by Charles Darwin's great great grandson, Randal Keynes.
Keynes is a conservation biologist who lives in London.
The World's science correspondent, Rhitu Chatterjee, spoke with Keynes about his famous ancestor and the experience of seeing his book turned into a movie.
Listen to…
ddobbs | January 29, 2010Hits of the week:
Savage Minds (with a spiffy website redesign) asks Why is there no Anthropology Journalism?
Jerry Coyne takes sharp exception to both a paper and a SciAm Mind Matters article by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson arguing that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation. Dr. Pangloss punches back. (NB: 1. I was founding editor of Mind Matters, but no longer edit it, did not edit the Andrews/Thomson piece, and don't know any of these people. 2. While my recent Atlantic article presented an argument for how a gene associated with depression (the so-called SERT gene) might be…
cagapakis | January 29, 2010The music from the Darwin Electro-Opera I mentioned a while back is now available for free, streaming on Pitchfork!
(via Nick)
emjohnson | January 29, 2010 Goldberg shown here (right) "gangbanging" with a guy who enjoys making fun of the dead.I must have done something very, very wrong. Jonah Goldberg, that noxious, infected man-tit of a human being, has just praised my work at the National Review. Referring to my series on Deconstructing Social Darwinism Goldberg writes:
This is a very comprehensive assault on the prevailing understanding of "social Darwinism." Eric Michael Johnson's essay is a bit too rambling at times, but it is very welcome and good reading nonetheless.
Readers of my book might remember that I have nothing but…
laelaps | January 28, 2010
"The Barefoot Professor", a behind-the-scenes look at the new Nature paper.
Humans that had to escape from saber-toothed cats, giant hyenas, and charging mammoths did not wear Nike or Adidas sneakers. They ran barefoot, but don't feel too bad that they did not have good running shoes to help them. As suggested by a team of researchers led by Daniel Lieberman in the latest issue of Nature, habitually shoeless runners have a unique step that may be better for our feet than even the most expensive, cushioned running shoe.
Whenever I go for a jog I run in the way that is most familiar to me…
grrlscientist | January 28, 2010tags: evolutionary biology, fossils, feathers, plumage color, color, dinosaurs, theropods, Sinosauropteryx, Sinornithosaurus, birds, Confuciusornis, melanosomes, phaeomelanosomes, eumelanosomes, keratinocytes, SEM, scanning electron microscopy, 10.1038/nature08740, researchblogging.org, peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper
Reconstruction of two Sinosauropteryx, sporting their orange and white striped tails.
Artwork by Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing [larger view]
DOI: 10.1038/nature08740
While looking at museum dioramas that feature dinosaurs, I often overhear people asking "How do they…
edyong | January 28, 2010
When our lives are in danger, some humans go on the run, seeking refuge in other countries far away from the threats of home. Animals too migrate to escape danger but one group - the pond-living bdelloid rotifers - have taken this game of hide-and-seek to an extreme.
If they are threatened by parasitic fungi, they completely remove any trace of water in their bodies, drying themselves out to a degree that their parasites can't stand. In this desiccated state, they ride the wind to safety, seeking fresh pastures where they can establish new populations free of any parasites.
This…
awild | January 28, 2010I did not expect everyone to nearly instantaneously solve yesterday's termite ball mystery. I'm either going to have to post more difficult challenges (from now on, nothing will be in focus!) or attract a slower class of reader.
Cuckoo fungus grows in a termite nest.
As you surmised, those little orange balls are an egg-mimicking fungus. It is related to free-living soil fungi, but this one has adopted a novel growth form that is similar in diameter, texture, and surface chemistry to the eggs of Reticulitermes termites. These hardened sclerotia are carried about the termite nest as if…
edyong | January 27, 2010
Dinosaur books have become more colourful affairs of late, with the dull greens, browns and greys of yesteryear replaced by vivid hues, stripes and patterns. This has largely been a question of artistic licence. While fossils may constrain an artist's hand in terms of size and shape, they haven't provided any information about colour. But that is starting to change.
The fossils of some small meat-eating dinosaurs were covered in filaments that are widely thought to be the precursors of feathers. And among these filaments, a team of Chinese and British scientists have found the distinctive…
sa smith | January 27, 2010
This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science have a special online edition focused on the place of evilution in medicine.
Shorter Michael Egnor:
:-O
Hat tip to Pharyngula.
Oops. Dr. Egnor, Mr. Professor of Neurosurgery, doesnt seem to have learned a lesson from Mr. 99. And now hes going to get made fun of by a 23 year old girl, too. Someone get a Ziploc bag for his testicles.
Really, it's a funny question. Think about it. Would anyone sponsor an essay contest on 'Why I would want my doctor to study anatomy' or 'Why I…
clock | January 27, 2010One of the nice benefits of hosting ScienceOnline conferences is that I sometimes get presents. The one that I find totally fascinating that I got this year is the 2009 issue of Phlogiston, the Journal of History of Science published once a year in Serbian language - print only (the journal does not even have a homepage).
I got this issue from Jelka Crnobrnja-Isailovic who came all the way from Serbia to do a session on challenges to Open Access in developing countries together with her friend and colleague Tatjana Jovanovic-Grove.
The 2009 issue of Phlogiston is dedicated to Darwin and the…
razib | January 26, 2010Is the Hobbit's Brain Unfeasibly Small?:
Brain expansion began early in primate evolution and has occurred in all major groups, suggesting a strong selective advantage to increased brainpower in most primate lineages. Despite this overall trend, however, Mundy and his colleagues have identified several branches/lineages within each major group that have shown decreasing brain and body mass as they evolve, for example in marmosets and mouse lemurs.
According to Mundy, "We find that, under reasonable assumptions, the reduction in brain size during the evolution of Homo floresiensis is not…
razib | January 26, 2010The debates about the timing of the extinction of the last Neandertals in Iberia seem to one of those interminable disagreements around which paleoanthropologists can't ever reach a resolution. Another offering from PLoS ONE, Pego do Diabo (Loures, Portugal): Dating the Emergence of Anatomical Modernity in Westernmost Eurasia:
Methodology/Principal Findings
Using AMS radiocarbon and advanced pretreatment techniques, we dated a set of stratigraphically associated faunal samples from an Aurignacian III-IV context excavated at the Portuguese cave site of Pego do Diabo. Our results establish a…
grrlscientist | January 26, 2010tags: evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, biochemistry, biophysics, magnetoreception, photoreceptor, cryptochromes, geomagnetic fields, butterflies, Monarch Butterfly, Danaus plexippus, birds, migration, signal transduction, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper
Every autumn, millions of monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus, each weighing less than one gram (one US penny weighs 2.5 grams), migrate nearly 4000 kilometers (3000 miles) between their summer breeding grounds in the United States and their wintering areas either in southern California or in the…
razib | January 25, 2010In Bats and Whales, Convergence in Echolocation Ability Runs Deep:
..."However, it is generally assumed that most of these so-called convergent traits have arisen by different genes or different mutations. Our study shows that a complex trait -- echolocation -- has in fact evolved by identical genetic changes in bats and dolphins."
A hearing gene known as prestin in both bats and dolphins (a toothed whale) has picked up many of the same mutations over time, the studies show. As a result, if you draw a phylogenetic tree of bats, whales, and a few other mammals based on similarities in the…
edyong | January 25, 2010
Millions of years before humans invented sonar, bats and toothed whales had mastered the biological version of the same trick - echolocation. By timing the echoes of their calls, one group effortlessly flies through the darkest of skies and the other swims through the murkiest of waters. It's amazing enough that two such different groups of mammals should have evolved the same trick but that similarity isn't just skin deep.
The echolocation abilities of bats and whales, though different in their details, rely on the same changes to the same gene - Prestin. These changes have produced such…
ddobbs | January 25, 2010
In my "Atlantic article on the genetic roots of stable-versus-reactive temperaments, I noted that the key gene variants linked to these traits appeared to have developed over only the last 50,000-100,000 years -- a short time in evolutionary time. That same idea is developed in Cochran and Harpending's "The 10,000-year Explosion." Here Razib at Gene Expression looks at polymorphisms that have developed over the last 10,000 years in response to agriculture.
Changes in human diet driven by cultural evolution seem to be at the root of many relatively recently emerged patterns of genetic…