evolution
pharyngula | January 21, 2009First, a warning: this is a link to a good science article, but it's hosted on the Suicide Girls site, which contains many pictures of young ladies with attitude and tattoos in a state of deshabille. You may discover you are blocked at work. But do persevere! It will be worth it even if you have no interest in naked women!
Anyway, one of the broad points of dissension in the discussion of the evolution of religion can be split along one general question: was religion directly adaptive in the evolution of humans, or was it more of a side-effect of other useful cognitive and social properties?…
evolvingthoughts | January 20, 2009From Evolution: Education and Outreach comes a nice introduction to the concept of homology.
Late note: OK, not so good. I saw only the cute pix, and presumed the author understood paraphyly. But as I didn't have an entirely functional computer at the time I leapt in too soon. See Malte Ebach's and David Williams' takedown here. Their point is that paraphyletic groups are formed by what hasn't evolved, and so they are fundamentally antievolutionary groupings.
laelaps | January 20, 2009A little more than halfway through the horror novel The Relic, a blood-spattered tale of a monster lurking in the bowels of the American Museum of Natural History, the scientist Greg Kawakita shows off his evolutionary extrapolation program to his colleague, Margo. It is a complex analysis system designed to take two DNA samples and spit out a hypothetical intermediate creature, essentially extrapolating what their common ancestor must have been like. In a test run, Greg has the computer scrutinize the DNA of a chimpanzee and a human;
Intermediate form morphological characteristics:
Gracile…
jwhitfield | January 19, 2009Mathematicians and physicists speak of a result 'falling out of the equations', implying that if you set things up properly, the rest takes care of itself. Chapter 4 of the Origin, 'Natural Selection', is where evolution falls out of the machinery that Darwin has spent the three previous chapters assembling.
And I hate to say it, but it's a bit of an anticlimax.
In retrospect, it's difficult to see how it could be otherwise. Darwin has manoeuvred us into position so carefully, showing the power of artificial selection, the mutability of species and nature's cutthroat struggle, that we're…
pharyngula | January 18, 2009You should mark your calendars now…oh, wait, you're all godless neodarwinist stooges, so you've already got Darwin Day colored in with circles and arrows and hearts. OK, so you should add an annotation if you live somewhere near Minneapolis, because the Bell Museum is sponsoring a special Darwin Day Cafe Scientifique, which will combine art and science to tell the story of evolution.
LIFE: A Journey Through Time
North American Premiere /Darwin Day Opening Event
Thursday, February 12, 2009, 7 to 9 p.m.
Bell Museum Auditorium
$10/ free to museum members and University students
Celebrate the…
edyong | January 17, 2009
Bee hives, with their regularly arranged honeycombs and permanently busy workers may seem like the picture of order. But look closer, and hives are often abuzz with secret codes, eavesdropping spies and deadly alliances.
African honeybees are victimised by the parasitic small hive beetle. The beetles move through beehives eating combs, stealing honey and generally making a mess. But at worst, they are a minor pest, for the bees have a way of dealing with them.
They imprison the intruders in the bowels of the hive and carefully remove any eggs they find. In turn, the beetle sometimes fools…
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2009Larry Moran points us to the following video on what science is and why pseudoscience is not to be taught or accepted without serious evidence (which makes it science). My only comment to add is that emotional appeals are information and evidence, but they are information and evidence about the speaker, and not about the things that are being spoken of.
There are a number of people trying to give short definitions of science on the blogs right now (see here). I have a one line definition that I think captures everything I want it to, and nothing else:
Science is the process of saying as much…
jwhitfield | January 16, 2009If, so far, you've been finding Mr Darwin's book tough going (it's OK, there's no shame in admitting it), here's what you should do: skip all that flannel about variation, and start here. This is where it gets serious.
Chapter 3 of the Origin, as its opening pages explain, faces in two directions. In chapters one and two, we've established the fact of variation, and the fluidity of living forms -- both in space, as shown by the blurry boundaries between species, and in time, as shown by the effect of artificial selection on domestic species. In the chapter to come, says Darwin, we'll be…
jlynch | January 15, 2009An interesting looking paper has just appeared online by John Beatty and Eric Cyr Desjardins that looks at the importance of history in determining form. The abstract reads:
In “Spandrels,” Gould and Lewontin criticized what they took to be an all-too-common conviction, namely, that adaptation to current environments determines organic form. They stressed instead the importance of history. In this paper, we elaborate upon their concerns by appealing to other writings in which those issues are treated in greater detail. Gould and Lewontin’s combined emphasis on history was three-fold. First,…
awild | January 15, 2009This weekend, Arizona State University is hosting a slate of myrmecologists to brainstorm on ant genomes. I'd link to the meeting information, but apparently the gathering is so informal that they've not given the event a web page. In any case, the topic is this: in the age of (relatively) cheap genomes, which ants should we sequence? And, what should we do with the assembled data?
I originally planned to attend, but life intervenes and I'm frozen to the tundra of central Illinois. Instead, I will register here a few suggestions about which species should considered, in addition to…
sa smith | January 15, 2009Gawd I love doing HIV-1 research. Stuff that takes big-stuff-biologists millions of years to watch, we can figure out in a few weeks. Case in point: PZs post yesterday on 'latent evolutionary potential'.
Ah, the realization of latent evolutionary potential. Did you know that you have latent evolutionary potential? Sure. If we put you and your family and friends in a novel environment, and let the generations tick by, we'll discover that certain sets of traits will become more prominent as selection and drift take their toll. The phrase does not imply that there is a purposeful arrangement…
clock | January 15, 2009I get e-mails about such events, so I thought I'd share, so you can attend some of these talks if you want:
NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott will be speaking twice in North Carolina shortly.
First, at 7:00 p.m. on January 27, she will be speaking on "Darwin's Legacy in Science and Society" in the Wright Auditorium on the East Carolina University campus in Greenville. "Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 was an extraordinary milestone for science, but it also had profound effects on theology, philosophy, literature, and society in general. Nowhere is…
evolvingthoughts | January 14, 2009Chris Nedin at Ediacaran has a nice discussion of the metaphor of the adaptive landscape, "Climbing Pit Improbable". It should be noted that the genetic notion of adaptive peaks is exactly the same thing as the AI notion of gradient descent learning., which inverts the "landscape" the way Chris describes.
The philosopher responsible for initiating the "deep ecology" movement, Arne Naess, has died at the age of 96. Maybe there is something to this exercise thing.
John Whitfield, at Blogging the Origin, is, well, blogging his way through the Origin. Chapter 1 is here. Comments by various folk…
clock | January 13, 2009Evolution is the theme of the month for January at PLoS ONE, so we have picked , for your pleasure, some of our papers for the Top picks in Evolutionary Biology. In conjuction with this, I have also conducted an interview with our Evolution Section Editor Dr.Tom Tregenza.
Dr.Tom Tregenza studies sexual selection and sexual conflict in crickets, both in the lab and in the field, and we discuss some of his research in the interview. He is also involved in a collaborative study of the amazing mimic octopus - see the movie below - so I hope you go and check out the interview:
edyong | January 13, 2009As a species, our unflinching obsession with size is just as apparent in our dealings with other animals as it is in our personal lives. Fishermen prize the biggest catches and they're are obliged to throw the smallest specimens back in. Hunters also value the biggest kills; they provide the most food and make the flashiest trophies. This fixation isn't just a harmless one - by acting as a size-obsessed super-predator, humans are reshaping the bodies of the species we hunt, at a remarkable pace and to a dramatic degree.
Predators already put a lot of pressure on their prey to evolve new ways…
razib | January 12, 2009More ancient DNA, Hair Of Tasmanian Tiger Yields Genes Of Extinct Species:
All the genes that the exotic Tasmanian Tiger inherited only from its mother will be revealed by an international team of scientists in a research paper to be published on 13 January 2009 in the online edition of Genome Research. The research marks the first successful sequencing of genes from this carnivorous marsupial, which looked like a large tiger-striped dog and became extinct in 1936.
...
... "I want to learn as much as I can about why large mammals become extinct because all my friends are large mammals,"…
evolvingthoughts | January 12, 2009The website www.talkorigins.org is now back up, although links to the temporary archive www.toarchive.org/ still work for now. The story is roughly this - the company (joker.com) we bought the domain name from reassigned the IP number for the site as part of changing their data centre. They apparently sent an email notification to the administrator - Wesley Elsberry- but that went (you guessed it) to the email at the domain name. Since the domain no longer was active at the IP#, Wesley never got the email, and because we couldn't use the registered email address to contact joker.com, they…
edyong | January 12, 2009Beipaiosaurus was among the strangest of dinosaurs. It looked like a fusion of body parts taken from several other species and united in the unlikeliest of proportions. It had a stocky body, long arms adorned with massive claws, a long neck topped by an incongruously small head, and a beaked mouth. Bizarre as this cocktail of features is, it's the animal skin that has currently warrants attention.
Fossils of Beipaiosaurus include impressions of its skin and these clearly show long, broad filaments clumped around its head, neck, rump and tail. They are feathers, but most unusual ones. Traces…
oracknows | January 12, 2009Here's a cool idea. Take a newbie, who has never read Charles Darwins' On the Origin of Species, and have the newbie actually read the book. Then have him blog each chapter. That's exactly what John Whitfield, London-based freelance science writer, is doing, and ScienceBlogs has him over at Blogging the Origin. Check it out. John promises to have all the chapters of Darwin's seminal work blogged by the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth on February 12.
You know, come to think of it, I've never read all of Origin. I've read a couple of chapters of it, but I've never read the entire book.…
razib | January 12, 2009There is a new blog on ScienceBlogs, Blogging the Origin, which is going over The Origin of Species. Because this is the Darwin bicentenary there is going to be a lot of the reflection upon the legacy of the great man; e.g., Blog For Darwin. I have to admit that I haven't read The Origin of Species since I was a child, when I didn't understand evolution with any level of precision, so I plan to reread Darwin's oeuvre at some point this year for my own edification. I also recommend the In Our Time Darwin retrospective; just subscribe to "In Our Time" in iTunes and you can get the 4 programs…