evolution
razib | November 20, 2009Pleistocene Megafaunal Collapse, Novel Plant Communities, and Enhanced Fire Regimes in North America:
Although the North American megafaunal extinctions and the formation of novel plant communities are well-known features of the last deglaciation, the causal relationships between these phenomena are unclear. Using the dung fungus Sporormiella and other paleoecological proxies from Appleman Lake, Indiana, and several New York sites, we established that the megafaunal decline closely preceded enhanced fire regimes and the development of plant communities that have no modern analogs. The loss of…
milhayser | November 20, 2009
The pitched battle between evolutionary theory and Intelligent Design has become one of the signature conflicts of the decade. On Pharyngula, PZ Myers picks up the pieces after his debate with Jerry Bergman on whether ID should be taught in schools. Unambiguously he writes, "creationists are not the heralds of a coming paradigm shift; they are the rotting detritus of the old regime of unreason." Elsewhere, on Gene Expression, Razib Khan crunches some numbers which show that 10-20% of people in certain Muslim countries believe in evolution, versus 80% in certain European countries. The…
emjohnson | November 19, 2009
(To watch this as a music video click on the volume icon in the top left.)
Here you are, all your bright, shining faces with a brand new copy of On the Origin of Species. It's extremely generous of Ray Comfort and Living Waters Publications to distribute so many free copies of a book with no political agenda whatsoever. I noticed that some of you found an odd additional chapter to the book that never appeared in the original edition. But many of you reclaimed Darwin's intent by removing these unfortunate pages and now have an excellent copy for yourselves or to donate to a worthy…
milhayser | November 19, 2009
Forget fashion; when it comes to expressing yourself, it's your genes that wear you! On Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong discusses the explosive evolution of AEM genes in humans and elephants—two long-lived, social animals with "very, very large brains." Big brains need more juice to function, and AEM genes, which govern how mitochondria metabolize food energy, may be a key to evolving intelligence. On Gene Expression, Razib Khan explores the links between gene transmission and language transmission, writing that "linguistic affinity" could modulate gene flow, and vice versa. On Mike…
razib | November 18, 2009
During the first few years of ScienceBlogs there was a lot of talk about religion. Yes, there's talk about religion now, but it's toned down in the wake of the ebbing of the publicity around The God Delusion. Naturally in the wake of the New Atheism a raft of conventional apologetics have been published, The Dawkins' Delusion being a typical example. More recently more nuanced books which wend the middle ground between militant atheism and conventional apologetics have taken center strage. Karen Armstrong's The Case for God approaches this from a philo-theistic angle, while Robert Wright's…
razib | November 18, 2009The evolutionary history of the extinct ratite moa and New Zealand Neogene paleogeography:
...We synthesize mitochondrial phylogenetic information from 263 subfossil moa specimens from across NZ with morphological, ecological, and new geological data to create the first comprehensive phylogeny, taxonomy, and evolutionary timeframe for all of the species of an extinct order. We also present an important new geological/paleogeographical model of late Cenozoic NZ, which suggests that terrestrial biota on the North and South Island landmasses were isolated for most of the past 20-30 Ma. The data…
clock | November 18, 2009NESCent and SCONC:
What: November SCONC-fest
When: Thursday November 19th , 6-8pm
Where: National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham
Please join us to commemorate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of "The Origin of Species."
Learn about the wild world of Ice Age carnivores, brainy birds, and other creatures Darwin missed. Our tour guides will be four postdocs on the frontiers of biology.
We'll begin at 6pm at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham. Parking is free.
National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent)
2024 W. Main Street, Suite A200…
awild | November 17, 2009
The chaotic evolution of colony size in ants. (Tree re-analyzed from Brady et al 2006, colony data taken from Hoelldobler & Wilson 1990 and other sources)
This tree depicts how colony size evolves in ants. The purple/blue colors represent small colonies with only a few to a few dozen ants, while the yellows and oranges represent species with enormous colonies of tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals. What's exciting about this rainbow-colored figure?
If you were expecting ant evolution to be an inexorable march towards larger and more complex societies, this tree should…
terrasig | November 17, 2009
Brandon Haught is Director of Florida Citizens for Science Communications and has been a tireless advocate for science education across this large and educationally diverse state. His blog, an activity of the larger Florida Citizens for Science organization, carries this mission:
This blog is used to keep track of the good, bad and ugly science news in our state and beyond. We tend to focus on educational issues. When a science class makes the news for doing something interesting or positive, I try to make sure a post goes up here about it. When a Florida scientist gets out into the…
emjohnson | November 17, 2009
See thro' this air, this ocean, and this earth
All matter quick, and bursting into birth:
Above, how high progressive life may go!
Around, how wide! how deep extend below!
Vast chain of being! which from God began;
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, who no eye can see,
No glass can reach; from infinite to thee;
From thee to nothing.--On superior powers
Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed:
From Nature's chain whatever link you like,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the…
edyong | November 16, 2009At first glance, the African elephant doesn't look like it has much in common with us humans. We support around 70-80 kg of weight on two legs, while it carries around four to six tonnes on four. We grasp objects with opposable thumbs, while it uses its trunk. We need axes and chainsaws to knock down a tree, but it can just use its head. Yet among these differences, there is common ground. We're both long-lived animals with rich social lives. And we have very, very large brains (well, mostly).
But all that intelligence doesn't come cheaply. Large brains are gas-guzzling organs and they need…
laelaps | November 16, 2009
The display of horse evolution at the AMNH as created by W.D. Matthew. Price reproduced this illustration without permission in his creationist textbook The New Geology.
The 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" put scientists on the defensive. It did not matter that the defendant in the famous case, John Scopes, probably never taught evolution in a Tennessee school (he was only a substitute teacher and football coach who agreed to take the fall so that the ACLU could test a law that barred evolution from schools); the issue that everyone was concerned about was the conflict between science and…
grrlscientist | November 15, 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…
pharyngula | November 15, 2009My little laptop is functional again, so at least I'll be able to blog these Sunday morning IGERT sessions in real-time. I still have to transcribe my notes from yesterday; I'll plan on getting that done on the plane this afternoon.
Kristi Montooth: Mitochondrial-nuclear epistasis for metabolic fitness in flies
How do physiological systems evolve to maintain metabolic fitness? This is a process that involves interactions between two genomes, the nuclear and mitochondrial. Energy metabolism is important and is the target of mutation, but the same players are found all across the tree of life…
grrlscientist | November 15, 2009tags: religion, fundamentalism, christianity, humor, satire, funny, evolution shmevolution, Edward Current, streaming video
Edward Current comments about all of the ignorant evilutionists (including me) who are contaminating the world with our crazy ideas. Nevermind that we have proof and the religious wingnuts do not.
gregladen | November 13, 2009People and dinosaurs were adapted to chase down and kill any plants that tried to get away.
milhayser | November 13, 2009
Shakespeare wrote that "past is prologue," but it's not always that easy to read. Brian Switek on Laelaps tells the tale of P. H. Gosse, a man who tried to reconcile the fossil record with the Book of Genesis, at the same time Darwin was writing his Origin of Species. Convincing no one, Gosse estranged even the faithful with his image of God as "a trickster who planted gags to fool geologists." But given the ample evidence that dinosaurs were once alive, the debate continues: were they warm-blooded? On Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong shows us a new study which says yes, based on the "hip…
razib | November 11, 2009There are many ways one can model population genetic dynamics. A simple avenue is to imagine a deme, a group of breeding individuals, subject to a few major parameters which are modulating genetic variation. Mutation, migration, random drift and selection. A model being what a model is, one's goal is to simplify, utilize approximations, and still manage to extract insight as to the relevant aspects of the dynamics one is focusing on (unless you're Stephen Wolfram). One of the major upsides of the Price Equation is that it makes no compromises, rather, it starts from first principles and…
razib | November 11, 2009In the post below on the Price Equation I stayed true to George Price's original notation in his 1970 paper where he introduced his formalism. But here is a more conventional form, the "Full Price Equation," which introduces a second element on the right-side.
Δz = Cov(w, z) / w
One can specifically reformulate this verbally for a biological context:
Change in trait = Change due to selection on individuals + Change due to individual transmission
The first element on the right-side is explicable as selection upon a heritable trait. w is the conventional letter used for "fitness," so w is…
milhayser | November 11, 2009
Humans believe a lot of things, for a lot of reasons. Confronted by a student who had learned lions' manes are an expression of their testosterone level--and not just a bit of claw-catching fluff--Greg Laden observes that when someone finds you wrong on one count, they will assume you are wrong about everything. He calls this "a known feature of student thinking in early development," a true-or-false mentality which sooner or later must reconcile itself with the complexity of our universe. Elsewhere, Razib Khan theorizes on Gene Expression that organized religion arose to meet the needs of…