evolution
edyong | September 30, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
Sex is, on the whole, a good thing. I know it, you know it, and natural selection knows it. But try telling it to bdelloid rotifers. These small invertebrates have survived without sex for some 80 million years.
While many animals, from aphids to Komodo dragons, can reproduce asexually from time to time, it's incredibly rare to find a group that have abandoned sex altogether. The bdelloid rotifers (pronounced…
razib | September 29, 2009The Religious Landscape Survey has a lot of data various denominations. Recently I noticed something weird about Mormons; they are very anti-evolution, as well as anti-universalist in their views on salvation, according to this survey. These are notable views because Mormons don't have well established attitudes on evolution from on high (which is why Mitt Romney expressed anti-Creationist sentiments without any blowback during the 2007-2008 campaign), and, their religious tradition actually seems to have been influenced by American Universalism, and so an exclusive attitude toward salvation…
edyong | September 29, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
For decades, scientists have realised that languages evolve in strikingly similar ways to genes and living things. Their words and grammars change and mutate over time, and new versions slowly rise to dominance while other face extinction.
In this evolutionary analogy, old texts like the Canterbury Tales are the English language's version of the fossil record. They preserve the existence of words that used to…
ddobbs | September 29, 2009At Gene Expression, Razib casts a skeptical eye on a study of the neuroanatomical variability of religiosity.
The brain areas identified in this and the parallel fMRI studies are
not unique to processing religion [the study states], but play major roles in social
cognition. This implies that religious beliefs and behavior emerged not as sui generis evolutionary adaptations, but as an extension (some would say "by product") of social cognition and behavior.
May
be something to that, Razib says -- but it would be nice "get in on the
game of normal human variation in religious orientation
(as…
emjohnson | September 28, 2009SUNY-Binghampton evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson currently has a response to my review "Survival of the Kindest" up at Seedmagazine.com. In his response he suggests that Dawkinsian critics such as Frans de Waal and Joan Roughgarden have adopted a group selection perspective in all but name:
Rejecting group selection was wrong.
The rejection of group selection as an important evolutionary force in the 1960s was one of the biggest blunders in the history of evolutionary thought. The extremely simple idea--I was just able to describe in just a few lines--was branded as so wrong that…
razib | September 27, 2009
Believe it or not, tigers are not the largest big cat. Ligers are (you might remember ligers from Napoleon Dynamite). Why? It has to do with the weirdness that occurs when you hybridize across two lineages which have been distinctive for millions of years, but not so long so as not to be able to produce viable offspring (in fact, many ligers are fertile as well). Here's the explanation:
Imprinted genes are under greater selective pressure than normal genes. This is because only one copy is active at a time. Any variations in that copy will be expressed. There is no "back-up copy" to mask its…
grrlscientist | September 27, 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…
grrlscientist | September 26, 2009tags: religion, Bible, humor, satire, Dara O'Briain, streaming video
Comedian Dara O'Briain provides a few comedic insights on on God and the Bible. Video clip taken from Live at the Theatre Royal 2006.
jrosenhouse | September 24, 2009The other day I sallied forth to the local Barnes and Noble to pick up my copy of Richard Dawkins's new book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. As I walked into the store I noticed a person stacking books on the main kiosk. She asked me if I was looking for something in particular.
Now, ordinarily I would have said something like, “No thanks, I'm good.” I spend so much time hanging out at Barnes and Noble, you see, that I'm pretty certain I know the layout of the store better than most of the people who work there. Besides, half the fun of browsing is all the must-…
laelaps | September 24, 2009
Scotland did not have much to offer 19-year-old Andrew Geddes Bain. Both his parents had died when he was a child, and even though he was educated his job prospects were few. When his uncle, Lieutenant Colonel William Geddes, left for South Africa in 1816 young Andrew decided to go with him to the British empire's southern frontier.
Once he arrived there, Bain found work where he could. He worked as a saddler, an explorer, an ivory trader, a soldier, and a road-builder, but in 1837 Bain read a book that would inspire him to look a little bit closer at the rugged landscape around him. That…
emjohnson | September 24, 2009Seed magazine has just posted my review of Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. I wanted to use this opportunity to thank Nikki, Evan, Bora and everyone else that helped in developing this piece. For posts on related topics please see Misunderstanding Dawkins, The Sacrifice of Admetus, Bonobos "Red in Tooth and Claw", The Evolution of Morality and Laboratory Evidence for the Breakdown of the Selfish Gene.
In a fitting metaphor, the most recent experiment with social darwinism resulted in mass extinction. Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling claimed he was…
emjohnson | September 23, 2009Author's Note: This piece is a continuation of my article "Survival of the Kindest" that appeared in Seed magazine.
As an undergraduate in biology and anthropology I read every one of Dawkins' books voraciously and would get into heated debates with my close friends about the Dawkins-Gould rivalry. He was one of the primary voices that taught me to love science and want to devote my life to the pursuit of natural knowledge. So before you read anything else, go out and read Dawkins' work. It's worth your time. This post will still be here when you come back.
The problem that I've found as…
pharyngula | September 23, 2009My wife and I saw Julie & Julia this weekend — and enjoyed it — but it's still a little weird to see Julia Child giving lessons on how to make primordial soup.
(via This Blog Contains Caffeine)
razib | September 21, 2009Two papers in PNAS this week.
Human origins: Out of Africa:
Our species, Homo sapiens, is highly autapomorphic (uniquely derived) among hominids in the structure of its skull and postcranial skeleton. It is also sharply distinguished from other organisms by its unique symbolic mode of cognition. The fossil and archaeological records combine to show fairly clearly that our physical and cognitive attributes both first appeared in Africa, but at different times. Essentially modern bony conformation was established in that continent by the 200-150 Ka range (a dating in good agreement with dates…
emjohnson | September 21, 2009Heracles battles Death for generosity's sake / Frederic Lord Leighton (1869-71)
Whereas great scientific theories stand the test of time when they accurately predict the natural world through repeated empirical trials, great literature transcends the ages when it speaks to universal qualities of human experience. Such inspirational works can also, without the authors realizing at the time, reveal the sublime beauty and tragedy of our evolutionary drama. Few classical authors have tapped into this zeitgeist of biological experience as the Greek tragedian Euripides. The conflict between…
grrlscientist | September 20, 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 | September 20, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
Imagine that one day, you make a pact with your brother or sister, vowing to never have children of your own and instead spend your life raising theirs. You'll agree to do the grocery shopping, cook for them, clean their rooms and bathe them, until you die.
That seems like a crazy plan, but it's one that some of the most successful animals in the world - the social insects - have adopted. It's called '…
edyong | September 18, 2009The two-toed sloth is a walking hotel. The animal is so inactive that its fur acts as an ecosystem in its own right, hosting a wide variety of algae and insects. But the sloth has another surprise passenger hitching a ride inside its body, one that has stayed with it for up to 55 million years - a virus.
In the Cretaceous period, the genes of the sloth's ancestor were infiltrated by a "foamy virus", one of a family that still infects humans, chimps and other mammals today. They are examples of retroviruses, which reproduce by converting an RNA genome into a DNA version and inserting that…
emjohnson | September 18, 2009
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the first of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker.
As expected, the apologists for unreason who promote Intelligent Design have jumped on the recent article in The New Yorker about bonobos. This inspired me to write at more length about the article since this is a species I've studied closely for the last two years. Denyse O'Leary at Uncommon Descent uses the article to proudly…