evolution
clock | December 17, 2009Although I've known Craig McClain for a few years now, both online and offline, I only had some vague ideas about what kind of research he is doing. I knew it has something to do with the Deep Sea and with the evolution of body size, but I did not know the details. So, when the opportunity arose to hear him give a talk summarizing his work, I jumped to it and went to see him on Tuesday at Sigma Xi as a part of their pizza lunch series.
First I have to say that Craig is a great speaker (if you are looking for one for a seminar series, this is useful information for you) - it was fun and very…
laelaps | December 16, 2009
A comparison of the third molars from three species of Pakicetus as viewed from the back. (From Cooper et al., 2009)
Crack open just about any recent popular overview of evolution (namely Why Evolution is True, The Greatest Show on Earth, and Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters) and somewhere inside you will find a string of skeletal whales. Starting with either Indohyus or Pakicetus, the illustration will feature a graded series of forms that connect modern whales with their terrestrial ancestors. A caveat may be included in the text to say that we cannot be absolutely…
edyong | December 15, 2009The feather is an extraordinary biological invention and the key to the success of modern birds. It has to be light and flexible to give birds fine control over their airborne movements, but tough and strong enough to withstand the massive forces generated by high-speed flight. It achieves this through a complicated internal structure that we are only just beginning to fully understand, with the aid of unlikely research assistants - fungi.
At a microscopic level, feathers are made of a protein called beta-keratin. The same protein also forms the beaks and claws of birds, and the scales and…
emjohnson | December 14, 2009Image: Jesus! vs. Darwin! by The Searcher
It's a tired old routine, yet time and again the same argument is taken off the shelf, dusted, buffed and then presented with a sly smile as if it were something new. Evolution, it's asserted, is only progressive and builds on earlier adaptations in its march forward through natural history. Therefore, if there is any evidence that a species adapted "backwards" it must mean that natural selection is flawed. However, the fallacy in this argument is that natural selection has nothing to do with progress, it's merely one of the mechanisms by which…
grrlscientist | December 13, 2009tags: 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…
edyong | December 11, 2009I've got a new story up in New Scientist about the discovery of a gene called p53 - the so-called guardian of the genome - in one of the simplest group of animals, the Placozoa.
A vital gene that defends us against cancer has been found in one of the simplest of animals - a flat, amoeba-like creature called a placozoan. The discovery shows that p53, sometimes described as the "guardian of the genome", has been around for over 1 billion years
Placozoans are so simple that it's hard to conceive of them as animals at all. They have no tissues or organs, no front or back, no left or right. They…
ddobbs | December 9, 2009Over at the Times Magazine Motherlode blog, Lisa Belkin ran a short post about my Atlantic "Orchid Children" piece a couple days ago, and some of the responses she got strike to an issue that has come up quite a few other places. I posted a note on this at Motherlode, and wanted to expand on it a bit here as well. This is the first what may be several posts of the "FAQ" sort examining reader or blogger concerns.
In this case, the concern dominating the Motherlode commenter thread responses, and in a few other places as well, is whether the "Orchid Children" of my title are what many people…
razib | December 7, 2009
Well, I don't quite know about that, but that's the sort of take-away from a new paper in PLoS Biology which looks at the downsides of female attractiveness. A Cost of Sexual Attractiveness to High-Fitness Females:
Adaptive mate choice by females is an important component of sexual selection in many species. The evolutionary consequences of male mate preferences, however, have received relatively little study, especially in the context of sexual conflict, where males often harm their mates. Here, we describe a new and counterintuitive cost of sexual selection in species with both male mate…
milhayser | December 7, 2009Two of our resident bloggers show their faces on Bloggingheads.tv, in an in-depth video interview on the subjects of science, evolution, and group selection. If the entire 66-minute video is too long for you, there are links to shorter segments with specific topics. You can see more of David Sloan Wilson on Evolution for Everyone, and Razib Khan on Gene Expression.
ddobbs | December 7, 2009
I'm happy to announce that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publisher of many a fine book over the decades, will be publishing "The Orchid and the Dandelion" (working title), in which I'll explore further the emerging "orchid-dandelion hypothesis" I wrote about in my recent Atlantic story. (In brief, that hypothesis -- a simple but deeply transformative amendment of current views -- hoids that many 'risk genes' for behavior and mental problems magnify not just maladaptive responses to bad environments but advantageous responses to good environments. That is, these "risk genes" confer not just…
grrlscientist | December 6, 2009tags: 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 | December 5, 2009Darwin's idea has cost lives:
Truths that America's founding fathers had held to be self-evident - that all men were created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights - were now scorned as gross sentimentalities that had been overtaken by Darwinian science. Within a decade the self-styled "scientific racialists" had begun to classify other groups as genetically inferior. Immigrants from Spain and Italy were held to be a threat to the quality of the American gene pool and spurious scientific evidence was adduced to "prove" that Jewish immigrants were near-imbeciles whose admission in…
laelaps | December 4, 2009Much of my forthcoming book is steeped in insights about evolution that have been derived from the new paleobiological synthesis, and in doing a bit a background reading I came across an interesting tidbit.
In 1980 numerous authorities on evolutionary science converged in Chicago for a conference on macroevolution. Spurred by the work of paleontologists such as Niles Eldredge, Stephen Jay Gould, David Raup, and Steven Stanley, the meeting's goal was to assess whether the traditional slow-and-steady model of evolution preferred by geneticists fit what paleontologists saw in the fossil record.…
awild | December 3, 2009Here's an issue that's been on my mind as I'm shuffling trees around from several concurrent phylogenetic projects.
The primary output from phylogenetics programs is tree diagrams depicting the relationships among organisms. Very clean, very crisp, very precise diagrams. Precision isn't in itself a problem, but for the human foible of mistaking precision for accuracy.
I'm not interested in a precise estimate of evolutionary history so much as a correct one. I'm reminded as much when I see my estimates change from one precise conclusion to another as I add more data from more species. …
edyong | December 3, 2009In the forests of Germany live large numbers of blackcaps, a small species of songbird. They all look very similar, but they actually belong to two genetically distinct groups that are becoming more disparate with time. For the moment, the best way to tell them apart is to wait for winter. As the cold sets in, one group of blackcaps flies southwest to Spain, while a smaller group heads northwest towards Britain.
If the prospect of spending winter in Britain rather than Spain seems odd to you, you're not alone. Indeed, blackcaps were hardly ever ventured across these shores before the 1950s.…
milhayser | December 3, 2009
When it comes to human nature, everyone's an expert—so let's argue about it, shall we? On Cognitive Daily, Dave Munger reviews an investigation into the truly fairer sex which suggests that "men are more tolerant of their friends' failings than women." Not convinced? Then counter your intuition on The Frontal Cortex, where Jonah Lehrer writes "nothing destroys a luxury brand like a sale." Consider the possibility of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps on Laelaps, where Brain Switek discusses Louis Leakey's "fuzzy" postulation that "the invention of stone tools allowed humans to domesticate…
laelaps | December 3, 2009The December 2009 issue of the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach has just been released, and among the new offerings is a paper on "Print Reference Sources about Evolution" by Adam Goldstein. It seems to be a spinoff of Goldstein's paper on evolution blogs published in the same journal earlier this year, and it stresses the importance of print references during a time when online resources are becoming more widely available. While I agree that print references are still very important for anyone who wants to educate themselves about evolution, though, I don't think that Goldstein made…
jrosenhouse | December 2, 2009I have long been a fan of Bertrand Russell, and I am endlessly fascinated by issues in science and religion, so perhaps it is surprising that I have not read Russell's book Religion and Science. Until now, that is. I have now read the first three chapters and anticipate finishing the book later this week.
Chapter Three deals with evolution, and it is just filled with examples of the elegant and lucid writing that makes Russell so much fun to read even when you are disagreeing with him. I laughed at loud when I read this:
Religion, in our day, has accommodated itself to the doctrine of…
Deepak Chopra and his Choprawoo translated: "Skeptics, take my ill-informed speculations seriously!"
oracknows | December 1, 2009He's baaaack.
Deepak Chopra. Remember him? It's been a while since I've said much about him and him alone. True, I've gone after him this year when he joined up with three other major league woo-meisters Dean Ornish, Rustum Roy, and Andrew Weil to try to try to help Senator Tom Harkin hijack the health care overhaul bill currently before Congress. However, given that a couple of years ago, Chopra was the man for whose abuses of quantum theory, evolution, and "universal consciousness" ideas I coined the term "Choprawoo" and the only response ever needed to Choprawoo, it's been a while since I…
laelaps | December 1, 2009
The skull of Paranthropus boisei ("Zinj," "Dear Boy," "Nutcracker Man," etc.).
Louis Leakey had a problem.
During the summer of 1959 he and his wife Mary recovered the skull fragments of an early human scattered about the fossil deposits of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The skull had been deposited among the shattered bones of fossil mammals and a collection stone tools, and this led Louis to conclude that it was one of our early ancestors. Only an ancestor of Homo sapiens could be a toolmaker, Louis thought, but the skull looked nothing like that of our species.
When Mary fit all the pieces…