evolution
grrlscientist | June 14, 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…
gregladen | June 14, 2009Birdwatching might be a casual activity, a hobby, an avocation, or even a profession (often, perhaps, an obsession) depending on the bird watcher, but there is always a science to it, in at least two ways. First, there is the science of how to do it. In this sense, the term "science" means something vernacular. We as easily say "birdwatching is an art" as we could say "there is a science to it" and here we are using both terms( "art" and "science") in their older sense where science is how we approach things with our minds, and art is how we approach things with our hands.
Second,…
mikethemadbiologist | June 12, 2009It's never made much sense to me why the pathogenic bacteria Salmonella and Shigella (which is really E. coli) have lost the ability to use lactose (milk sugar). In Shigella, we know that when we restore some lost functions through genetic manipulation (e.g., cadaverine production), they actually prevent these altered Shigella from causing disease. But lactose seems to be a good sugar to be able to grow on--they're exposed to it from time to time (in infants).
The genus Salmonella contains two species: S. enteriditis, which causes disease* and can't use lactose as a carbon source, and S.…
edyong | June 11, 2009In the time since the words "swine flu" first dominated the headlines, a group of scientists from three continents have been working to understand the origins of the new virus and to chart its evolutionary course. Today, they have published their timely results just as the World Health Organisation finally moved to phase six in its six-tier system, confirming what most of us already suspected - the world is facing the first global flu pandemic of the 21st century.
The team, led by Gavin Smith at the University of Hong Kong, compared over 800 viral genomes representing a broad spectrum of…
laelaps | June 11, 2009The Telegraph has just released the trailer for the forthcoming film adaptation of the book Annie's Box, which focuses on Charles Darwin's personal struggle with science and religion. It is called Creation;
What do you think?
[Hat-tip to Michael Barton for sending this along.]
awild | June 11, 2009
I see that the TimeTree of Life project is now public. This collaborative project draws on the research of dozens of biologists to estimate the timing of past evolutionary divergences. The work is available as a book, but the online version has an interactive section that allows the user to name two organisms and get back the date the two last shared an ancestor.
For instance,
Ants vs. Bees: 163.5 million years ago
A word of caution, though. While the output is extremely precise (i.e., it gives exact dates with decimal places), precision is not necessarily accuracy. The given dates…
sa smith | June 11, 2009FUUUUUN!
TimeTree is a public knowledge-base for information on the evolutionary timescale of life. A search utility allows exploration of the thousands of divergence times among organisms in the published literature. A tree-based (hierarchical) system is used to identify all published molecular time estimates bearing on the divergence of two chosen taxa, such as species, compute summary statistics, and present the results.
You can type in some species names (or common names) and get an approximation of when those two species initially diverged!
For example:
Humans split from dogs ~97 mya.…
grrlscientist | June 11, 2009tags: TEDTalks, ornithology, dodo bird, Adam Savage, streaming video
A unique ecosystem of plants, birds and monkeys thrives in the treetops of the rainforest. Nalini Nadkarni explores these canopy worlds -- and shares her findings with the world below, through dance, art and bold partnerships [18:15]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on…
razib | June 10, 2009Seed interviews Richard Wrangham about his new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
grrlscientist | June 9, 2009tags: The Ant Whisperer, ants, hymenoptera, pheromones, EO Wilson, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, evolution, streaming video
Because I do not own a television, I was thrilled to find that Lord of the Ants, the Nova program that aired on PBS tonight, is freely available as a streaming video. This program describes some of EO Wilson's amazing discoveries about ant communication, behavioral ecology and evolution [52:23]
laelaps | June 9, 2009
A restoration of the skull of Thylacoleo. From The Ancient Life History of the Earth.
Without a doubt, the extinct marsupial predator Thylacoleo was one of the strangest carnivorous mammals ever to have evolved. This predator from ancient Australia did not have piercing canines but instead bit into prey with large, forward facing incisors, and it sheared flesh from its kills with huge, cleaver-like premolars. Even though it evolved from herbivorous ancestors, we now know that Thylacoleo was most certainly a carnivore.
The preferred diet of Thylacoleo has not always been so clear-cut,…
grrlscientist | June 9, 2009tags: The Ant Whisperer, ants, hymenoptera, pheromones, EO Wilson, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, evolution, streaming video
If I owned a television, you can bet I'd be watching this Nova program on PBS tonight: The Lord of the Ants. This program describes some of EO Wilson's amazing discoveries about ant communication, behavioral ecology and evolution [3:40]
razib | June 9, 2009
Domestication has a long history. It predates the invention of writing by thousands of years. In the history of biology the study of domestication is closely connected to the emergence of experimental and theoretical biology out of the shadow of natural history. Chapter I of The Origin of Species is preoccupied with animal breeding. The various modifiers of selection, artificial, natural and sexual, are to some extent human constructions. When the constraint of human preferences and needs are removed feral populations of dogs and pigs tend to shift back toward an ancient modal wild type. I…
laelaps | June 8, 2009 Is intelligent design science, or not? Think carefully before you answer. The modern intelligent design (ID) movement is motivated by theological concerns and trades in on religious authority to meet its aims, but stripped of this background, can ID be relegated to the "junk science" bin? While the answer to this latter question is "Yes", in a new paper ("The science question in intelligent design") Sahotra Sarkar argues that proclaiming ID to be non-science without careful consideration does little good.
As Sarkar notes, there is no easily definable demarcation criteria to deem ID science…
laelaps | June 8, 2009In case you haven't heard, the latest edition of the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach is almost entirely about transitional fossils. There's something for everyone, from synapsids to onychophorans, so make sure you check it out!
My only complaint, though, is that there is not a paper about early hominins or human evolution. Human evolution is often ignored or given short shrift when we talk about transitional fossils, yet the past several decades have seen an explosion in new types of extinct humans. I have no idea why such a paper does not appear in the collection (perhaps one was…
awild | June 7, 2009I saw this short video at a conference last year and was entranced. The clip shows how the ancestral arachnid body plan changed as it evolved through various descendant lineages.
grrlscientist | June 7, 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 | June 7, 2009What Darwin said - and was he right?:
In this Darwin year many popular accounts of 'Darwinism' have appeared, but these seldom make a clear distinction among the different components of Darwin's theory of evolution. Many popularisations are simplified to the point of caricature, and presented in an absurdly uncritical way. I yield to few in my admiration for Darwin, but I do not think his memory is best served by oversimplifying his ideas or pretending that he was always right.
So I will attempt to identify the key propositions of 'Darwinism', with an assessment of their current standing.…
awild | June 6, 2009
Pyramica (or is it Strumigenys?) rostrata, Illinois
I've been thinking today about the Wikipedia edits to the Pyramica page, and my curiosity about the controversy prodded me to attempt a quick phylogenetic analysis. Before I get to the analysis, though, here is some background.
The Ants. Forests in warmer regions around the world hold a great number of tiny, sluggish ants covered with bizarre hairs of unknown function. These oddly ornate little insects are predators of other arthropods. Mites, springtails, and the like. Because of their size, their preference for below-ground…
edyong | June 5, 2009For humans, sex is a simple matter of chromosomes: two Xs and we become female; one X and a Y and we develop into males. But things aren't so straightforward for many lizards - many studies have found that the temperature of the nest also has a say, even overriding the influence of the chromosomes. But the full story of how the lizard got its sex is even more complicated. For at least one species, the size of its egg also plays a role, with larger eggs producing females, and smaller ones yielding males.
The discovery comes from Richard Shine's group at the University of Sydney. In earlier…