evolution
evolvingthoughts | May 5, 2009Asks MSNBC's Chris Matthews of the GOP's Mike Pence. The latter dances around it, trying to avoid asserting what science knows to be true, but this raises an interesting problem: does one have to "believe" in evolution? I mean it's a physical process (the "fact" side) which has a number of explanatory models (the "theory" side). I don't believe in facts; I deal with them. And I don't believe in explanations; I am satisfied with them (or not, as the case may be). This is not about belief, which implies that acceptance of the satisfactory nature of evolutionary explanations is somehow…
grrlscientist | May 5, 2009tags: evolutionary biology, AMNH, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, mammals, biodiversity
Because I write for ScienceBlogs, I have been invited to a special sneak preview of the "Extreme Mammals" exhibit hosted by the American Museum of Natural History, where I was a postdoctoral fellow for two years. This exhibit features the biggest, smallest, most amazing and generally the weirdest mammals to ever swim, fly or walk the face of this earth. "Extreme Mammals" opens to the public on Saturday, 16 May, but my goal is to take a lot of photographs to share with you here on the…
laelaps | May 4, 2009By the 1920's the evolution of elephants (proboscideans) seemed all but resolved. Paleontologists had long been familiar with mammoths and mastodons, the great shaggy beasts that had so recently gone extinct, but in 1901 fitting candidates for the progenitors of all later elephants became known. Named Moeritherium and Palaeomastodon by British paleontologist C.W. Andrews, the two proboscideans from Eocene rock of the Fayum region of Egypt were the forms that could connect elephants to the rest of the mammal family tree.
Finally elephant evolution could be presented in a straight line. It had…
mikethemadbiologist | May 4, 2009Wendy Orent, having decided that Paul Ewald is the end-all and be-all of evolutionary epidemiology, is again repeating the mantra that pandemics will evolve to become less deadly. Never mind that, as ScienceBlogling Greg Laden reminds us, the first wave of the 1918 pandemic was far milder than the lethal second wave. Orent, in The LA Times:
As with any new outbreak, unraveling all of this flu's mysteries will take time. But, using the lens of Darwinian evolution, certain aspects are starting to come into focus. For one thing, it's clear that the virus, which originated in Mexico, is most…
grrlscientist | May 4, 2009tags: The Beagle Project, science, fund-raising, humor, streaming video
This strange and amusing streaming video features a self-described "fat, bearded chap with a Charles Darwin fixation" whom I know in real life, has an important purpose: Let's knock ourselves out to rebuild the HMS Beagle and use this vessel to follow Darwin's journey of discovery! [1:14]
The Beagle Project aims to celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday by building a sailing replica of the HMS Beagle and recreating the Voyage of the Beagle with an international crew of researchers, aspiring scientists and science…
grrlscientist | May 3, 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…
evolvingthoughts | May 2, 2009One of the things I don't like about the Darwin Awards is that it presumes the only way to gain one is to remove yourself from the gene pool directly by dying. But that would be a Wallace Award. Darwin knew, as do we, that there are many ways one can avoid contributing to the future gene pool, and it doesn't need to involve not having children. Being totally unfit to walk around without a leash is another, if it's heritable. Down the track, the "stupid gene" will get eliminated too, eventually.
So it's nice to see Michelle Bachmann get a prehumous, not a posthumous Darwin Award.
evolvingthoughts | May 1, 2009It is often stated in the literature that Linnaeus late in life turned to an evolutionary view based on hybridisation (e.g., Clausen, Keck and Hiesey 1939). I myself have repeated this, but as always it's worth looking at the actual text. Unfortunately I have so little Latin that I can't even use pig Latin, so it is great to find, yet again, that archive.org has it in an English edition published in 1783. I love archive.org. Deeply.
It's in the context of what he bases his system on, the "fructification" of the plants; i.e., the reproductive organs:
26. The PRINCIPLE of Fructification, the…
laelaps | April 30, 2009
The skull of Dorudon, photographed at the National Museum of Natural History.
There has been much ado about the new BioLogos website during the past week (see here and here), and most of it has focused on the site's aim of reconciling science and Christian theology. What irked me more, however, was the lazy way in which the creators of the site approached evolutionary science. The section on the fossil record provides a perfect example.
The evolution of whales has been a hot topic lately, and for good reason. After over a century of frustrating uncertainly we now have a very detailed (…
mikethemadbiologist | April 30, 2009...Oh my? The CDC is being very smart about this issue. As long time readers of this blog will know, the Mad Biologist is very concerned about the evolution of resistance to antibacterials (antibiotics) and antivirals. One such antiviral is Tamiflu which is used to treat influenza infections.
The CDC has flown in experts on the evolution of antiviral resistance to advise them on when and how Tamiflu should be used, so as to limit the evolution of resistance to Tamiflu.
And the CDC seems to be listening. You might have noticed that there has been very little public discussion of Tamiflu--…
sb admin | April 29, 2009Today, Roche announced funding for over a dozen genomes of organisms associated with the agricultural attine ants and the fungus they cultivate. In honor of the occasion, here's a sampling of a few of the attine species and their gardens.
Acromyrmex sp. nr. crassispinus, Argentina.
The fungus of the texan species Mycetosoritis hartmanni is grown on a substrate of caterpillar frass. Not all the attines are leaf-cutters!
Acromyrmex lundii, Argentina.
Apterostigma auriculatum, Panama.
Atta texana, Texas.
Cyphomyrmex wheeleri, Arizona.
Trachymyrmex pomonae, Arizona.
The…
evolvingthoughts | April 29, 2009As I investigate the use of tree diagrams in the nineteenth century, I keep running across things that shouldn't be there. One of them was this book:
Herdman, William Abbott. 1885. A Phylogenetic Classification of Animals (For the Use of Students). London; Liverpool: Macmillan & Co.; Adam Holden.
It's on Archive.org, but they didn't properly scan the figure on the foldout (a real problem of the electronic versions of old books is that they don't scan the foldout figures. Imagine the Origin without the one figure). So I bought a copy. It's a real revelation - he correctly uses "…
razib | April 29, 2009New Geochronologic And Stratigraphic Evidence Confirms The Paleocene Age Of the Dinosaur-Bearing Ojo Alamo Sandstone And Animas Formation In The San Juan Basin, New Mexico and Colorado:
...An assemblage of 34 skeletal elements from a single hadrosaur, found in the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the southern San Juan Basin, provided conclusive evidence that this assemblage could not have been reworked from underlying Cretaceous strata. In addition, geochemical studies of 15 vertebrate bones from the Paleocene Ojo Alamo Sandstone and 15 bone samples from the underlying Kirtland Formation of Late…
edyong | April 28, 2009The courtship rituals of the spider Harpactea sadistica start innocently enough, with a dance and a hug. The male spider taps the female gently with his front legs and embraces her. But from that point onwards, things for the female go rapidly downhill. The male bites her and she becomes passive, allowing him to manoeuvre her into position. Like all spiders, his genitals are found next to his head, on a pair of appendages called the pedipalps. But unusually, his penis ends in a needle-sharp tip called an embolus.
The embolus sits at the end of a loop called the conductor. The male hooks one…
evolvingthoughts | April 28, 2009Wilkins is fragile and destablised
Intellectual tourist attacks local inhabitants
All happy bacteria are alike (or is that like each other?)
Australian current affairs gets vaccination right! [That's not a pun, it's an act of God] The original video is here.
Evolution does spreadsheets in origin of genetic code
Siris and Sandwalk go head to head on the Courtier's Reply. Neither of them are dressed.
Creationists misunderstand Deep Time. I'm shocked. I mean, it's only ten years since they were taken to task for it. Perhaps if they had millions of years to think it over...
mikethemadbiologist | April 28, 2009Since TEH SWINE FLU!!!11!!! is a hot topic, I thought this post about how infections could evolve increased virulence after switching animal hosts was relevant. From the Murky Depths of the Mad Biologist's Archives: There's no reason to think that an epidemic influenza strain won't become more deadly....
Several people have argued that if an influenza pandemic were to occur, it will rapidly evolve to become less virulent--that is less deadly. A recent paper explains why this might be wrong.
Basically, the flaw with the 'optimistic' argument is that it is assumes that the virus will be…
razib | April 27, 2009On the order of ~1 million years ago humans seem to have evolved dark skin. While light skin evolved several times, it looks like dark skin exhibits an "consensus sequence," so that all dark skinned peoples seem to have the same genetic architecture.
This chart (from Signatures of Positive Selection in Genes Associated with Human Skin Pigmentation as Revealed from Analyses of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) shows that when it comes to skin color related genes the populations of Bougainville Island (off the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea) and Sub-Saharan Africa are far closer than you…
grrlscientist | April 27, 2009tags: The Beagle Project, science, fund-raising, humor, streaming video
This strange and amusing streaming video features a self-described "fat, bearded chap with a Charles Darwin fixation" whom I know in real life, has an important purpose: Let's help build the HMS Beagle and follow Darwin's journey of discovery! [1:06]
The Beagle Project aims to celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday by building a sailing replica of the HMS Beagle and recreating the Voyage of the Beagle with an international crew of researchers, aspiring scientists and science communicators (perhaps, including me!). The…
grrlscientist | April 26, 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…